When I was a kid, the public library in my hometown of Minneapolis had a real Egyptian mummy, a 2,000-year-old woman. Displayed in a glass case, partially unwrapped, she was small (about my ten-year-old size), shriveled, and dark brown. A card said her elaborately decorated coffin revealed that she was Lady Teshat; she’d died as a teenager and, as part of the mummification process, her brains had been pulled out through her nose. I was mesmerized. Out of time and place, her eternal rest horribly violated (even by my gaze), she seemed to me to be an emissary from an amazing and previously unimaginable culture.
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According to Cuno, any current state’s claim to ownership of ancient cultural objects is false. Antiquity belongs to humanity, he says, and cultural artifacts belong in big, “encyclopedic” museums—even if that means moving them from poorer to richer countries. Though he makes this argument from his vested-interest vantage point atop one of the world’s richest cultural treasure troves, he locates its origins in his first encounter with a museum—the Louvre, no less—where, at age 19, he was amazed to find “the world under one roof.”
Published last week, Cuno’s book traces the history of cultural property rights over the last half century, from a conference in the 1950s to UNESCO’s 1970 convention prohibiting “illicit” antiquities exports. The U.S. didn’t sign onto that convention until 1983, he notes, and only gave it teeth in 2001, by applying the Stolen Property Act to antiquities prosecutions. But Cuno wants to move away from the question of whether a particular import—say the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles, excised from the Parthenon 200 years ago—is legal and toward the deeper one of whether any nation should be able to lay claim to any cultural object.
In the last couple weeks Cuno’s landed a major profile and a positive review in the New York Times (which wondered if he’d been talking to the Metropolitan Museum about its soon-to-be-available top spot). A reviewer for the Wall Street Journal pointed out “surprising errors” in the book’s account of Islamic history, but nevertheless pronounced it “excellent.” Cuno got a drubbing, however, from Arts Journal blogger Lee Rosenbaum, who noted that “source countries” view “partage as a polite word for pillage” and characterized the book as “an intemperate screed” that should eliminate Cuno from consideration at the Met. Blogging under the headline “James Cuno’s Illogic,” Larry Rothfield, faculty director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, charged that Cuno mistakenly blames retentionist policy for the destruction of artifacts in the Kabul and Iraqi museums. “The lesson here is not that retentionism is a better policy than internationalism,” Rothfield wrote. “It is, rather, that the fate of cultural heritage depends less on a country’s legal framework… than on its power to enforce whatever laws it has and its will to protect… its cultural policy.”
