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.

What Went Wrong With "What Went Wrong at the Getty" by Hugh Eakin | The New York Review of Books

What Went Wrong at the Getty by Hugh Eakin | The New York Review of Books

Hugh Eakin reviews the already-much-reviewed expose of the inner workings of the Getty, in a piece that, like most other discussions of antiquities looting in the New York Review of Books, bends over backward to defend art museums against charges that the museums, in the words of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite, "have fueled the destruction of far more knowledge than they have preserved." As Eakin points out, that claim is not backed up in the book by either evidence or argument. Eakin's implication is that this is poppycock.

But just because evidence and argument are not provided does not mean there is none. True, it is difficult to imagine how one could specify precisely how much knowledge has been destroyed by looters ransacking archaeological sites, since by definition this would be knowledge that will have to remain forever an unknown unknown (to paraphrase the poet of unknowingness, Don Rumsfeld); what the metrics would be for measuring how much knowledge has been preserved by museums would be difficult enough, though conceivable at least. But we do know, for example, that the area looted in Iraq alone since 2003 is several times the size of all the archaeological sites dug there licitly from 1923 to 2003; all that knowledge is gone forever. And we also know that the Mesopotamian areas most devastated correspond to categories of antiquities that are most in demand by high-end collectors who either donate to or serve on the boards of major museums.  The book's claim may be hyperbolic, but the link between museum acquisitions and the lobotomizing of our collective memory by antiquities looters is impossible to deny.

The extent to which Eakin prefers not to acknowledge what antiquities looting means becomes clear when he points out that the return of looted artifacts from the Getty to Italian museums is "a victory less for archaeology, perhaps, than for the approach endorsed by collecting museums of showing beautiful objects". He is correct that archaeologists have gained little: restitution followed by agreements to loan objects does nothing much to stop looting (Egypt and other nations ought to be demanding not just objects back but more financial help to pay for site guards etc.). But Eakin is wrong to think that the approach of showing beautiful objects, "even without knowledge of their discovery, may bring alive the ancient world to the modern public".

That's the same aesthetic attitude that, as Meyer Shapiro famously showed, enabled Heidegger, looking at van Gogh's beautiful painting of a pair of the painter's old shoes, to misinterpret these as the shoes of a German peasant woman -- a far from innocent move in the Germany of the 1930s, and even less innocent when one learns that Heidegger originally delivered this speech bringing the world of the peasant woman to light before an audience of Nazi women. Shapiro's lesson was that while a work of art may seem to bring to life a world to a viewer who is ignorant of and indifferent to knowledge, what it may in fact be doing is serving as a screen on which the viewer projects his or her fantasies on the world.  Luckily van Gogh's letters were not destroyed, so Shapiro was able to do the art historian's work to show what world van Gogh's painting really brings alive. We have much more difficulty with objects that might bring the ancient world to life, since so much has already been lost: there are no letters extant from the sculptor of the Getty "Aphrodite". The equivalent to van Gogh's letters would be whatever information archaeologists might have learned by properly excavating that statue and others.

Beauty is not truth. And we need truth, not just beauty. Museums and their apologists should recognize this.

What the Italians in the Marion True Case Should Have Been Seeking from Museums

Hugh Eakin interviewed Marion True last month in the New Yorker, clearly on her side in the "ordeal", noting that the defense never made its case (it never presented its case, true enough, but surely there was a case to be made based on the massive amount of circumstantial evidence offered in Watson and Tedeschini's Medici Conspiracy).

True does deserve some sympathy as a pawn in a bigger game, but the stakes of that game are not made clear in the article. A comment by "Anderson" on Eakin's interview offers what is probably the consensus view of the case's relationship to the broader issues it is enmeshed with, those of the black market trade in looted -- not merely illicit -- antiquities and the impact museums have and could have on that market:

I have been following this case and what a black joke it all is. The international traffic in pillaged art is a huge and hugely depressing problem for anybody with an ounce of humanity and love of art, history and culture. But. It has to be said that Italy is a train wreck of a country, politically (I love Italy in every other way), with a president that has spent the last decade or so urinating on the rule of law there, where the garbage can't even be collected reliably, and where they cannot even begin to stop organized crime from the ongoing looting of their cultural heritage, very often even the heritage in their museums, much less what is buried in the ground in Puglia or Sicily or wherever. Much of the rest of the world with a significant archaeological history is in much worse shape. So the Italians prosecute a woman, not even the museum she worked for, to send a message to museums, which aren't even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of the problem, and have actually been really trying to help as best they can over the last couple of decades, as one would expect, dedicated as they are to the love of history, art and culture. I bet there are a lot of lawyers out there who are really happy though.

No doubt Italy has its problems, including finding adequate resources to protect its vast holdings, as we see from the collapse of the gladiatorial building in Pompeii and the plastering of advertisements on palazzi in Venice. And no doubt museums -- even museums as wealthy as the Getty -- buy only a tiny fraction of what is looted. But it would be wrong to conclude that what museums do makes no difference or that museums have been helping as best they can. Museums have a vested interest in bringing artifacts that are out of the ground into their collections, not in protecting those not yet excavated. Adopting a clean-hands policy is the least, not the best, museums could do. The best would be to forcefully urge their collector-donor-board members to support measures to clean up the antiquities trade (by legal changes making it much more difficult to traffic inadequately provenanced antiquities, reversing the burden of proof, etc.), and to urge those same wealthy collectors to voluntary donate and/or ask the government to impose taxes on antiquities sales to raise money that would be dedicate to the hiring of more site guards, satellite monitoring, or any one of dozens of ways in which looting of sites could be reduced. The shame of this prosecution is that it did not send that message to museums.