Britain and Greece should stop arguing about the Elgin marbles and share them. It wouldn’t be the first time a cultural war ended in a truce Last month, Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, home to the Parthenon marbles for the past 200 years, gave an interview to the Greek newspaper Ta Nea. He exlained why, in his view, the marbles should not be given back to Greece and made the – let’s call it rather unreflected – statement that taking objects from their original place into a museum in another part of the world can be a creative act. Others quickly paraphrased this as “looting art is creative” – and a perfect media storm began. Worldwide, in dozens of articles taking up Hartwig’s statement, one could find all the pros and cons for keeping or returning the marbles. These are arguments that have been developed since the antique treasures were taken away from the Acropolis at the beginning of the 19th century: that a world-class museum would be diminished if the marbles were given back; that they are part of Greece’s heritage, as argued by the culture minister in the 1980s, Melina Mercouri; the assumption that the marbles wouldn’t have survived in Greek hands; the need for the most iconic pieces of ancient Greece to be shown and seen at their place of origin; the legality of their transfer to England; the illegality of their transfer to England. And so on. Even the Greek gods would have had difficulty in deciding whether the marbles should be kept or returned Continue reading...
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