Art and Ownership: How do we approach the issue of restoring art to its rightful owners?
Cultural repatriation is one of the most contentious issues pervading the museum world today. Conversations about colonialism and its present-day ramifications have led many to call traditional museum practices into question. Take for example, the ngadji drum; in 1902 it was stolen from the Kenyan Pokomos by a British missionary. The drum is sacred to the Pokomo and a profound source of power in their community, yet it is currently in storage at the British Museum. While the ngadji is in the British Museum it is effectively stripped of its cultural context and in possession of an institution that is profoundly unappreciative of its heritage. It is a modern exercise of imperialism - Britain still manages to exert control through wrongful ownership of sacred objects. With objects like the ngadji that mean everything to those who have lost it and very little to the possessors, it seems quite clear that stolen objects should be repatriated.
On a more general scale, works of art from the non-Western world have been put in ethnographic museums or anthropological collections which both reduces and misconstrues their original meaning. Many artists studied the art and used it as a source of inspiration but in the context of it being fetishistic and primitive. They believed that African art was mysterious and somehow closer to nature. These conceptions and their subsequent representations in art were extremely damaging to a number of people because their culture was understood to be less developed than Western culture and this furthered racist ideals. Surely those who steal art, misunderstand it, and label it as primitive should not continue to own that art?
Unfortunately, repatriation is not simple for numerous reasons. Firstly, there is a lack of legal ramifications for stolen objects which means that there is no infrastructure in place to facilitate their return. The discussion exists mainly on a moral basis so even those who wish to return objects to their rightful owners are blocked by tariffs. In 2014, The Denver Museum of Nature and Science attempted to return around 400 wooden vigango statues back to Kenya but upon arrival they were subjected to a $60,000 tariff. The vigango are now in limbo at the airport because no one is paying the duty fee. In cases like these, is the government responsible for mitigating the crisis? Whose responsibility is it to shoulder these legal burdens when it comes to heritage? Other arguments are concerned with a plausible stopping point for repatriation. If the British Museum was to begin sending back stolen items it would have to nearly empty its collection, which is likely why it has remained largely silent on the issue. How far back in time do we have to go in repatriation? When dealing with ancient art we must consider how to return it to a country when it was crafted before state borders even existed.
Another aspect of the conversation is preservation - does art remain with the museum that will preserve it best? This often comes up in the discussion of the Elgin marbles. It is fundamentally condescending to assume that certain nations are intrinsically better at caring for art than others, especially when it is a question of rightful ownership. Ideally sources of cultural pride are best suited to their culture of origin. However, some nations simply do not have the resources to house vast collections - Tanzania has claimed not to have space for the return of its art from Belgium. There have also been cases of restituted art ending up on the black market, as with 144 pieces that Belgium restored to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The debate of restitution is fundamentally complicated but well worth considering. We must continue to consider questions of what it means to be part of a culture and how profoundly art can impact people. Art should, by all means, be appreciated and shared with the world, but not on these terms.
Sources
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/1997/12/18/unplundering-art
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/arts/design/denver-museum-to-return-totems-to-kenyan-museum.html