This month’s announcement that Lina Ghotmeh, the young French-Lebanese rising star of modern architecture, has been declared the winner of the first phase of the competition to redesign the Western Range of the British Museum should not surprise. After all, she seems to tick all the right boxes: a young woman from a formerly colonised country with the ambition and vision to do it all differently. Her bold approach to the makeover pleased the entire panel and appears to be aligned with director Cullinan’s desire for the project to be “as much an intellectual transformation as an architectural one”.
Not everyone is celebrating though. In May last year, the competition launch called for a design that was both “a contemporary vision” and “remains sympathetic to the original
Smirke building”. From the few renderings and the maquette that have been shared with the public, you can definitely see the contemporary: in the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote wrote of a feel of “a building in a desert”, its design inspired by “some kind of filmic desire to recreate the conditions of a Middle Eastern archaeological setting”. One can hardly see how the post-neoclassical spirit of Sir Robert Smirke’s regency masterpiece in the hearth of Bloomsbury may be in conversation with the sort of oriental antiquities mart envisaged by Gothmeh.
But what surprised most was not the Mediterranean luminosity of the renderings, or the rugged and sandy finish of the walls depicted in them, but the conspicuous absence of any of the museum’s most “discussed” artifacts. You know what I am talking about: Rosetta Stone, Benin Bronzes, Hoa Hakananaia, and — above all — the Elgin Marbles. This apparent refusal to engage with the “hot potato” of museological debate fuelled much speculation: are the objects not there because of a conscious choice to maintain a low profile at this stage, or are they really not going to be there anymore? Is the “intellectual transformation” envisaged by Osborne and Cullinan going to reach such vertiginous heights?
The truth is that when it comes to repatriation and the British Museum, nobody knows what’s really going on, due to the rigid closed-doors approach taken by the museum on this most contentious of subjects. What we do know is that museums are changing, and that repatriation of objects whose circumstances of acquisition are no longer in agreement with our modern sensibility is ever more frequent on our news feeds. Sometimes, the restitution of archaeological material is just an act of compliance with international legislation on the illicit trafficking of artworks, and it follows a careful internal work of provenance research by cultural institutions. But increasingly often, alongside this first stream of objects heading out of our museums, we observe the ideologically-motivated addition of cultural items donated by western museums to institutions based in the original birthplace of the material.
One recent case is the unconditional donation, announced by the Dutch Government last month, of 119 bronzes from Benin, most of which were part — until just a few days ago — of the Dutch State Collections. The act is being openly advertised as “righting a historical injustice,” saying that the objects, which came from the sacking of Benin City after the British punitive expedition of 1897, “should never have ended up in the Netherlands.” Despite being hailed as the most significant return of antiquities to date, this gesture follows a path already walked by museums in the UK, among others. Jesus College in Oxford and the University of Aberdeen transferred legal ownership of objects to Nigeria in 2021; the Horniman Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Glasgow Life Museum, and the Museum of Archaeology of Cambridge University did the same one year later. Sometimes, the objects leave the museum forever, but often the transfer of legal title is followed by a loan agreement that keeps the objects exactly where they are. Maybe we should start calling it RINO: repatriation in name only.
This wave of repatriation “on moral grounds”, while depriving (or not) museums of valuable objects, is meant to clean up the institution’s reputation. It leaves behind the stigma associated with being the holder of “stolen goods” while giving the museum kudos for “doing the right thing”. Directors and trustees up and down the country seem little concerned that the objects repatriated sometimes are not preserved according to the same standards of care offered by their own establishments, when they are not lost to the public domain altogether. If this was the case, the donations would not be proudly advertised as being unconditional, and strict protocols would have to accompany the donation, attracting to the donor an even more significant stigma for exercising a paternalistic control over the cultural institution of former colonies. Much better to just give away the damned things and be done with them.
But even more concerning is that these virtue-signalling acts are at odds with the scientific vocation these institutions were created for and should be living by. The new definition of museum published by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) last year emphasises the role of museums as providers of “enjoyment” and as being “accessible and inclusive” spaces that “foster diversity and sustainability”. If it sounds woke to you it’s because it is. The original raison d’être of museums, to be places where the material manifestations of the human spirit can be researched, studied, and communicated to the highest standards of scientific knowledge, is still somehow hinted at in this new definition, but does no longer seem central. So it must not take us by surprise that directors and curators are more and more concerned with what the public feels about them and the collections under their care, rather than to affirm the truth as it comes out from painstaking study, scientific method, and authentic scholarship.
One glaring example of this contradiction is provided by the Benin Bronzes themselves. The wave of restitutions to Nigeria was kicked off also — though not exclusively — by the publication in 2020 of the volume The Brutish Museum by Oxford professor Dan Hicks. The general thesis of the book, which was a global sensation, was that museums are a colonial construct built by white supremacists to display their loot and assert their superiority. The only reasonable thing to do, Hicks affirmed, is to “decolonise” them by returning as much material as possible, and if they remain empty in doing so, so be it.
But to do “the right thing” you need the “right” justification, and that is why Hicks devised an expedient narrative, using the historical evidence in a way that props up his theory. This extremely dubious way of building a scientific argument was already denounced on these pages by another Oxford scholar, Prof. Nigel Biggar, who openly advised museum directors: “whatever [you] decide to do with objects acquired during the colonial period, [you] should not base it on the history told in this book”. The advice was clearly disregarded.
The question is whether … there will be a space for the world that created the British Museum in the first place
Hicks’ “ongoing work of dismantling outdated white supremacist displays of racist institutional structures, which is our unfinished public duty” came again under fire a couple of months ago, when Swedish archaeologist Staffan Lunden published an academic study at the end of last year openly accusing Hicks of distorting history to argue for restitution, and demonstrating how his claims of mass atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the British in Benin are not “substantiated by the documentary evidence”. Steffen in his analysis goes straight at the core of the issue: he states that “an incomplete understanding of the past impairs efforts to repair past wrongs”. The same can be said of the Elgin Marbles restitution debate, with the Greek demands at odds with the historical reality of an entirely legitimate permission given to Lord Elgin by the internationally recognised authority over Athens at the time. And what should we say about the Egyptian calls for the restitution of the Rosetta Stone in the presence of an international treaty ceding it to the British?
If museum directors genuinely want to engage in morally inspired acts of “restitution,” they should at least try to base their actions on an accurate understanding of the facts they so arrogantly wish to correct.
This brings us back to the British Museum renovation, an enterprise which, one way or another, will shape the future of museums in the decades to come, given the British Museum’s leading role in the global museological scene. Let’s hope that while the architectural transformation will not be entirely divorced from the original neoclassical building, the intellectual one will keep the museum firmly anchored to its tradition of solid scholarship and the choices made with regards to any of the 8 million items it cares for will be based not on how people “feel” but on what people should “know”, as established by the best research available. Museums are inevitably bound to reflect a view of the world based in Western scholarship, and moulded by a Western perspective, not only because it is in the West that museums were first conceived and conceptualised, but also because — however global a museum can be in its scope — it will always have Western scholarship as the scientific foundation of any of the knowledge it shares with the world.
In conclusion, I have nothing against Lina Ghotmeh and her idea of the British Museum as “a place of connections for the world and of the world” and I’m sure her design will evolve. The question is whether, in her vision, there will be a space for the world that created the British Museum in the first place and the spectacular objects that make it what it is.
