An Exchange with Hugh Eakin

Hugh Eakin has responded to my previous post with a comment that I thought deserved to be shared along with my response to it below.

Eakin writes:

Many thanks for your comments, but I wonder if you have read my piece. You mention none of the main substantive points I make, including factual revelations about the Getty and other institutions (drawing on pages of documents and extensive conversations with the carabinieri and other Italian officials over many years) that, by any stretch of the imagination, cannot qualify as a “defense” of museums. Regarding the deplorable looting of Iraq I suggest you read [“The Devastation of Iraq’s Past,”] (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/aug/14/the-devastation-of-iraqs-past/) an extended discussion of the satellite and eyewitness evidence of large-scale, organized plunder immediately before and after the 2003 invasion. (It appeared, by the way, in The New York Review of Books.) I know of few other discussions of this scope short of your own book. As for the two factual observations I make that seem to trouble you, you do not dispute their accuracy: you acknowledge that “evidence and argument” are not provided in the book for the point in question, and you agree that “archeologists have gained little” by restitution. This is precisely what I meant: viewers of the Nostoi exhibition may derive pleasure from viewing beautiful objects just as viewers in California or New York did, but that will not bring back the works’ archaeological context. Any other reading of those statements would be a fanciful departure from the facts. In view of your own laudable efforts to bring together archaeologists and collecting museums, I’m surprised that you seem now to favor puzzling generalizations about “museums and their apologists” over reporting that may complicate the assumed positions of both sides. 
Hugh

 My response:

Dear Hugh,

Just for the record, I want to say that there is no better reporter on these issues than you, and that, as is true of all your pieces, your article on the Getty does contain a lot of valuable information, information that adds to our understanding of what the Getty's mishandling of the True case cost it. You are also right to note, as I do not, that in your piece you present valuable new and substantive evidence about the bad behavior of museums more generally. Had I been writing a full description of your article I would have made that clear. I have enormous respect for you and your work.

But my post wasn't aiming to rehearse the facts presented in your review, nor was I trying to suggest that you were in any way inaccurate about the facts you did present.  Rather, I was taking issue with the rhetorical framing of your factual observations within what you call in the article an "interpretation". As any interpretation must, yours departs from the facts towards a claim about what the facts mean.  So, when you note that the authors provide "neither evidence nor argument" proving that far more knowledge is destroyed by looting than is preserved by the museum-collected artifact, you do so for a reason: you want to show that, as you say in the immediately preceding sentence, the book is wrongly "cynical" about "the notion that art museums might have some legitimate reason for collecting art from the ancient past." I do not think it is "fanciful" to conclude that you believe museums do have a legitimate reason for collecting art from the ancient past, legitimate because even if some knowledge may have been destroyed in the process, there is always going to be more to learn, and because art can bring the world alive regardless of what we know or don't know. As you put it in your final sentences:

Even now, scholars are trying to determine the identity of the cult statue after which the authors name their book (several think it is not Aphrodite); and archaeologists continue to seek the place where it was found. In the meantime, Italy can enjoy the same exquisite artworks of unknown origin that had previously graced American display cases: a victory less for archaeology, perhaps, than for the approach endorsed by collecting museums of showing beautiful objects that, even without knowledge of their discovery, may bring alive the ancient world to the modern public.

That's a very soothing interpretation, much more so than one that would have ended with something like "But that enjoyment will do nothing to bring back the works' irrecoverable archaeological context, or to ensure that what we think of as the living ancient world is more than just a fantasy", or simply with the truncated phrase "a victory less for archaeology, perhaps, than for the approach endorsed by collecting museums of showing beautiful objects." I wish I could be as sanguine as you are that it is just a matter of time before scholars determine the identity of the cult statue and determine where it was found, but there is a good possibility we may never get answers to those questions, or to a host of others related to untold thousands of artifacts whose findspots and identities would help us understand the meaning of this particular cult statue.

In any case, my point in quoting you here is simply to explain why I took you to be defending, at least indirectly, the deeper philosophical position that Keats is laying out in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in support of the priority of a museal aesthetics as "all ye need to know": beauty teases us out of thought, and a vision that seems to "bring alive the ancient world" can substitute for the missing truth about the world.

Keats did not confront the possibility we have to confront: that beauty might not just substitute for but kill truth, that the passion for the beautiful might be slaked at the expense of knowledge. (The Romantics were worried about murdering to dissect, not murdering to admire.) The public, as well as collectors and museums, all share the passion for the beautiful; we all also share – or should share – a passion for, or at least an equal respect for, the true. We should not settle for the situation we are still in now, even with museums adopting a clean-hands policy, in which archaeological sites continue to be destroyed for the sake of the beautiful. Museums, collectors, and governments ought to recognize that they do not need to settle for the beautiful alone, as is the case with restituted artifacts. Policies can be devised that would focus not on restitution alone but on paying for more guards. The Getty, for instance, could have been told it had to set up a fund for site protection -- or perhaps pay for permanent guards at Aidone, something Malcolm Bell could have used back in the 1970s! -- rather than simply give back the hot pots to Italy; more generally, sales of beautiful antiquities could be taxed and the proceeds used to help pay for guards and the like. But we can't even have that conversation if we don't care if we don't know.