Parthenon marbles: Greece's claim is nationalist rhetoric that deserves to fail
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Version 0 of 1. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. It’s the same with the relationships between museums and the treasures they hold. Works of art in museums all belong to a single category of disinterested universal value, until someone asks for them back. Then suddenly their history is scrutinised, and each time that history is unique, tangled, painful. Greece’s demand for the return of the Parthenon sculptures, popularly known as the Elgin marbles, from the British Museum is one such story. It has just entered a new phase, with the Greek government’s decision not to persist with legal action to get the 5th-century BC masterpieces back. I predict this is the start of a slow retreat, a gradual acceptance by Greece that it will never be able to reverse the history that began when Lord Elgin shipped these sculptures from Athens in the early 19th century. As the British Museum has proved with its terrific current exhibition of Greek art, it can and does display these works as part of humanity’s heritage, a global property, and therefore no one’s. Related: Greece drops option of legal action in British Museum Parthenon marbles row But there are many other cases where the humanist neutrality of the museum runs up against specific, unique relationships between a culture or nation and particular works of art. Both of the British Museum’s major exhibitions right now raise restitution issues. Many Indigenous Australians will never accept that their culture’s artefacts should be locked away in a museum. These works embody dreams that connect a people with landscape and history in an unbreakable spiritual bond: how can they be coldly kept in Bloomsbury as objects of curiosity? Both cases are completely different. Indigenous Australians question the very idea of isolating their creations as works of “art” in a universal western sense. Art in traditional Australia is much bigger than that: it’s a cosmic language and the stuff of history. Greece, by contrast, completely shares the orthodox European definition of art and its value. It simply claims to be the rightful heir of the ancient Greeks who built the Parthenon. It makes a purely nationalist claim to have a closer relationship with Hellenic civilisation than anyone else. Walk on the Acropolis in Athens and it’s hard not to feel the same way Greeks do – surely the sculptures of the Parthenon belong in this setting, in this sunlight. But that argument potentially applies to every artwork ever made. If Italy ever became nationalist about Renaissance paintings in the same way Greece is nationalist about the Parthenon sculptures, the disputes would be spectacular. Why not return Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ to the church it was painted for? No one is demanding that, because Italy does not take that nationalist approach to its heritage. Even more tellingly, no one is demanding the return of the Pergamon altar, an ancient Greek masterpiece as massive and stunning as the Elgin marbles, from Berlin where it is held, to Turkey where it was taken from. That is because Turkey has no nationalist investment in ancient Greek art. Greece itself shows no national anger about the sculptures that were taken from the temple of Aphaia on Aegina to Germany in the same age that the Elgin marbles came to Britain. Why not? These inconsistencies lead me to conclude that, for all the romantic power of the Greek case against Elgin, it is in the end a piece of nationalist rhetoric that deserves no more respect than a Ukip manifesto. The indigenous Australian case is a lot stronger. The British Museum can claim lofty humanist ideals on its side, and a mission to make art visible to all. But who’s to say the experience of seeing art in a museum is more important than its original human context? I was once in an art gallery in Moscow looking at icons. I was shocked and scandalised, as a believer in art for art’s sake, to see a man pray before a painting by Andrei Rublev. But he was doing what you are supposed to do in front of an icon. For a moment, it became a religious vessel rather than a work of art. That tension between neutral aesthetic values and human usage takes many forms around the world – and we can never say for sure that the modern habit of visiting museums is better than other, older ways of seeing and possessing. |