I have to admit that when you think of Indiana Jones as a thief, it sort of changes the whole mood of those movies. One of the lines he always says to his rival archeologists—most of whom seem to wind up siding with the bad guys—is “That belongs in a museum!” as if where something ends up somehow validates it being taken from a South American temple. But in reality, that was pretty much the real-life attitude of museum curators throughout the Western world as recently as the 1970s.
“My collecting style was pure piracy,” said Thomas Hoving, the outspoken Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977. In his memoir, Hoving bragged that his little black book of “dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers,” was bigger than anyone else’s. Those days, however, have passed. As a headline in the New York Times put it last December, “For US museums with looted art, the Indiana Jones era is over.”
Elizabeth Marlowe is the Director of the Museum Studies program at Colgate University. She explains that lots of today’s museum directors and curators were trained under very different ethical norms than their predecessors. Such people are now in a situation in which they must continually consider the ethics of what they’re doing and what role their institution plays in safeguarding art and culture around the world.
It was action by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization more than 50 years ago that really began the transformation. The 1970 UNESCO “Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property” was one of the last steps to closing the door on the whole global chapter of imperialism and colonialism and its lingering effects and attitudes.
To date, the convention has been signed by 143 nations and it charges cultural institutions around the world, like museums, libraries, and archives to guarantee that their collections are assembled in accordance with “universally recognized moral principles.” (The US Senate ratified the convention in 1972 but it didn’t take in effect in the United States until ten years later when Congress passed a law allowing its implementation.) So, when countries like Turkey or Greece or Benin or Iraq suspect that part of their cultural patrimony was, at some point in the past, removed from the country without the proper authorization, they have justification to think that the international community will help get it back.
