From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Let the Market Preserve Art
What were all those antiquities doing in Iraq anyway?
The world weeps over the wanton destruction of the treasures of the ill-guarded National Museum of Iraq and the burning of Baghdad's unique Islamic library.
The media have devoted much time and space to this tragedy. However, mentioning one aspect of it seems to be taboo: the grave danger of having too large a part of a culture's art gathered in just one place on earth. The preachments of the archaeological community notwithstanding, the retentionist program they advocate is a prescription for future catastrophes.
The history of our time offers a record of cultural destruction both from the forces of nature and the uncaring actions of man. (A partial list appears nearby.) The major lesson to be learned from the Iraq disaster is the desirability of dispersing widely the art of past civilizations. As folk wisdom has it, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
In the case of Iraq, fortunately there are major holdings of the earliest Mesopotamian art in Philadelphia. In the 1920s, the University of Pennsylvania conducted the great excavations of the Royal Tombs at Ur, the Ur of Chaldeans whence came Abraham. As a result, the university's museum received half the objects found. In addition, there are major holdings of Babylonian art in museums in London, Paris, Berlin and New York.
Contrary to what some believe, trade in ancient objects is not the enemy of preservation. The great contribution the art market makes to this cause is to endow works of art with value. When objects have no value they are inevitably at grave risk of destruction because preserving them is a costly enterprise. Storing, safeguarding, heating and air conditioning, and conserving art can only be done for a relatively few things. In practice, there is a constant triage which saves a few treasured objects while consigning the remainder to destruction through benign neglect.
Recognition of the usefulness of the art market in reclaiming as much as possible of the Iraq museum's looted objects came with a proposal by Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and others to offer amnesty and a stipend to anyone turning any in. As for the larger world market outside of Iraq, no responsible art dealer or antiquarian will touch any Mesopotamian object unless there is positive proof of provenance, or ownership history, dating prior to the second Iraqi war.
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One curious point in this debate is that the present-day population of so many archaeologically well-endowed regions consists of the descendants of the invaders who destroyed the very cultures whose remnants their modern governments now so jealously claim as exclusively theirs. Turkey's Adriatic coast is rich in ancient Greek art--but in the 1920s, the remnant of its Greek population was expelled in an early instance of ethnic cleansing. Most modern Latin Americans are descendants of the Spanish Conquistadors who destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires and all their works within reach. Do these descendants have a better moral claim to the buried artifacts of earlier civilizations than the rest of humanity?
A case must also be made for American exceptionalism. We are a country of immigrants, coming from countries all over the world, and surely have a moral claim to reasonable access to the buried treasures of our common ancestors. It should also be remembered that as American museums and collectors have purchased a part of this international cultural heritage, American scholarship has more than repaid any debt connected with such acquisitions. For example in the field of pre-Columbian art alone, well over half the existing scholarly literature has been produced in the U.S., along with such feats as the recent successful deciphering of Maya writing by American archaeologists.
As a practical matter, the objects yielded by excavating tombs are generally quite repetitive within each culture. Even the inventive ancient Greeks developed only 32 different forms of ceramic offertory vases and cups. As a result, the storerooms of museums in ancient regions are overflowing with duplicates. Any American scholar who has visited the backrooms even in major centers such as Rome, Athens, Cairo, Mexico City, or Lima can testify to this. Objects are often poorly taken care of, suffering from all the vagaries of works currently of little value.
An obvious solution would be to deaccession the masses of such repetitive minor objects now stored in deplorable conditions. At present it is politically dangerous for local officials to grant export permits even for the most redundant of objects. What would be invaluable and instructive additions to the collections of many of the world's museums are left unseen and endangered in premises supposedly dedicated to their preservation.
There is a constructive way a country could deal with this matter similar to the one Great Britain uses to retain pre-eminent examples of its cultural heritage. Its national museum would issue export permits for all but the most valuable objects subject to a 20% or 25% export tax to be levied on their value, and with the museum retaining the right of pre-emption. The revenue thus raised could be used to purchase one in five or one in four of the objects presented for export or go toward the care of the country's museums and safeguarding its archaeological sites.
As for the exporters, the tax would be roughly equivalent to the cost of the object were it illegally sent out of the country. Yet it would make that object available to all the world's markets and museums.
So far this has not been tried. But perhaps Philippe de Montebello's proposal points the way.
Mr. Emmerich writes from a perspective of 50 years of dealing in Classical, pre-Columbian and contemporary art.
