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Out of Harm's Way: The case for keeping Art above Politics

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http://www.weeklystandard.com/out-of-har...le/2002663

EXCERPT: In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the British and French armies sacked the Chinese Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), looting it of what the Chinese government today estimates to have been 150 million objects. [...] the Chinese empress’s Pekingese dog was cruelly abducted and given as spoils to Queen Victoria. The dog's portrait—which Tiffany Jenkins includes here—was painted by Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl in 1861. As the painting's title reflects, the poor dog had been renamed: Looty.

"Keeping Their Marbles" is a full-throated argument against the repatriation of arguably stolen art and artifacts. To say that it is controversial is a severe understatement. Yet, as the anecdote of Looty the Pekingese suggests, Jenkins makes no attempt to sugarcoat the past. Despite her insistence that we not judge the past by present-day ethics and customs, she reveals the fact that, for instance, Victor Hugo was fiercely critical of the "[t]wo robbers" (meaning England and France) "breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures."

[...] Jenkins delivers a colorful history of the origin and development of museums, which we owe to the daring of explorers, the curiosity of naturalists and archaeologists, the passion of eccentric collectors, and the generosity of their patrons. [...] Today's calls for repatriation, Jenkins insists, reflect a dramatically shifting view of who should control history and of what museums should seek to accomplish. [...] Jenkins is unconvinced that museums have any real power either to atone for past sins or to address social ills....
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