Museums are purging their collections of looted treasures. Can they also get something in return? And what does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century? (Part 3 of “Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard.”)

I mean, I'm quite famous for not doing what I'm told.

Well, it's very convenient for our purposes, I have to say.

Well, we can just keep a weather eye on those 3.

Especially the man with the big fuzzy microphone.

That is me with Patricia Allen in the Kelvin Grove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland.

Allen is the curator of world cultures for the 11 institutions that make up the Glasgow Museums.

This makes her responsible for all non-European objects in their collections.

We have come to the Kelvin Grove to see a group of objects known as Benin bronzes, artworks and artifacts looted by Britain from the historic Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria.

The last time I tried to see some Benin bronzes in a museum at the British Museum in London, our microphones were confiscated and then, as it turned out, all the Africa galleries were closed that day.

Today, In Glasgow, we're having better luck.

So all of these heads were made by ancestors.

A newly crowned oba would make the head of the preceding oba.

They're placed on altars along with other offerings, including things like a bell, there's an Ebon sword, maybe some of the ivory.

That's a ceremonial sword carried by the Oba.

So we have 2 of these heads, this head and another 1 that used to be on display at St.

Glasgow Museums bought them in auction in 1898.

A year afterwards, meaning after the bloody 1897 expedition in which British soldiers burned Benin City, killed much of the population, expelled the Oba, and took home everything from the palace that wasn't bolted down.

Actually, as we heard in our previous episode, they took some of the bolted down stuff too.

They even took the bolts from the doors, these ivory bolts.

The Western colonizers were kleptomaniacs.

They stole keys to the doors in the palace.

The British shipped thousands of objects from everyday tools to religious and historical objects, back to England.

Many of the best pieces went straight into the British Museum.

Others were auctioned off to museums throughout Europe.

For the British Empire, plunder was an important economic activity.

In recent decades, Nigeria has repeatedly asked for the return of the stolen artifacts from Benin.

The British Museum has thus far refused, But many other institutions, including the Glasgow Museums, have begun to repatriate their Benin pieces.

Today, on Freakonomics Radio, the third and final episode in our series on the economics, politics and ethics of returning stolen art.

We have already learned how easily stolen art can still get into even the most prominent museums.

Let's talk about the gold coffin, the $4 million gold coffin.

We've learned how quickly public sentiment has changed.

If they will tell the truth, it would be so disgusting that would be the end of the British Museum.

And today on the show, what does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century?

Well, I always think that people go to the worst case scenario.

Reporting from museums in Glasgow, London, Washington, D.C., and more, beginning right now.

Okay, let's get back to Patricia Allen, curator of world cultures at the Glasgow museums.

My role isn't so much front of house curating exhibitions at the moment.

At the time of lockdown, I took it upon myself to focus quite heavily on repatriation and restitution.

I feel like I've read in your biography that you came to curation via perhaps archaeology and maybe even biology.

I started as a microbiologist and then I moved into archaeology and then ultimately into museum curation.

So my amateur unscientific brain, if it's looking for the most obvious connection between what you did perhaps as an archaeologist and what you do now as a museum curator of world culture, the linchpin that my brain puts in the middle is looting.

I have not made that connection before, but looting is big in both professions.

I have been on archaeological sites in South America where you go off for the night and then come back and find that people have got in to the site and have dug everything out.

But also the reason I felt that this was important is that I'm not myself British.

And when I got the job as curator, I was surrounded by my own heritage and I wondered how it got there and whether actually the British had a right to be storing it and hoarding it.

A mole not in the animal sense, in the spy sense.

A mole in the animal sense is more like an archaeologist, but this is a mole in the sense that I sort of got in there as 1 of the colonized, and I was really the only 1 at the time.

I've been doing this for 20 years now, and everybody else is very much British or European if you're lucky.

Well, I was born in Brazil, so that's where part of my family's from.

My mother is Singapore, Eurasian, and my father, I suppose he was French, but you know, he was raised in colonial Africa.

And so, yeah, from lots of non-British places.

It's interesting you got involved in a field where most of the curators and people on the museum side it sounds like were to be brutally reductive on the colonizing side and you're coming from the colonized side.

And I just, from the very beginning, the previous curator was showing some individuals, some Chinese dolls.

And so she was telling the others what the dolls were for, and I was standing there as a recent recruit, and I thought, actually, that's wrong.

Everything she said was wrong and I tried to interrupt, but all I could say was, no, it's wrong.

I had dolls like that and everybody looked at me and there was silence.

But it immediately made me question, you know, what on earth was going on?

Because very little of this collection is appreciated, or it's not given the same status as European art.

A very small amount is on display, a very small percentage.

And there are big diaspora communities here now, and they don't get to see their own culture, but yet we were keeping it.

If you don't like it, just give it back, is my feeling.

When someone like me, an American, comes to Scotland where we are now or England where we were just previous and we go to your wonderful and beautiful old museums.

I have to say the more I've learned about this topic, the more those museums feel less like, you know, curated collections of the world's great treasures and the more they feel like trophy cases, I guess.

No, I think you've got part of the story there.

Now they're sort of harbingers of doom, particularly as we slide down the economic scale.

I think of them as big sort of almost like warehouses of loot.

They are part of the history and for a long time in my early years as a curator here, I could only display this material in terms of the British sensibility with another way of interpreting Britain's place in the world.

And now we are back in the gallery at the Kelvingrove Museum where Alan was showing us around earlier.

She leads me to the display case we came here to see of the Benin bronzes.

So the Benin palaces were decorated with these bronze plaques and we have a fragment of a plaque.

The British Museum in London is thought to possess nearly 200 of the Benin plaques, which portray centuries' worth of Benin history.

The Glasgow Museum's 1 fragment shows a man standing, his head in profile, with long straight hair and finely patterned sleeves.

It was made by a known artist, the master of the circle cross, and would represent a Portuguese soldier or sailor who traded with Benin and Western Africa extensively from the 14th century onwards and a lot of the copper that was the basis of these pieces came from Europe.

There's a huge amount of trade from maybe the 10th century onward with West Africa, the Malian Empire, you know, highly sophisticated travel, great trade routes and networks throughout Africa.

So when someone says that these African countries wouldn't have been able to care for and preserve their art were it not for the British, they'd done it for hundreds of years already.

I mean, the earliest record of iron smelting is within Sub-Saharan Africa.

In the spring of 2022, Glasgow Museums publicly committed to returning the Benin objects from its collection to the federal government of Nigeria.

Glasgow Museums is currently holding 19 pieces that we have identified as coming from Benin, probably taken during the punitive expedition of 1897 by Britain.

But the ownership has effectively been transferred to Nigeria.

The Glasgow Museums have also announced the return of 7 antiquities to India and more than 2 dozen artifacts to the Lakota tribe of Native Americans.

What led to the decision to repatriate all these pieces?

Well, I was approached to discuss this and I had already earmarked various pieces that I felt we should not have because I feel that as a museum service We really shouldn't be fencing stolen goods.

I'd identified them through research because most of them had come with quite extensive notes and 1 was a confession of theft that ran for 4 pages.

Why would 1 put down in writing a confession of theft?

Because they thought it was more of a confession of entitlement.

Consider this yet another reminder that many artifacts in the world's great museums were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm.

I would say that the standards of excavation have been completely reversed.

That is Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director for Collections and Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

We also heard from her in the first episode of this series describing how only recently the Met paid $4 million for a gold coffin that turned out to have been looted from Egypt about a decade ago.

We asked a certain number of questions, but we did not ask nearly enough questions about it.

The Met was founded toward the end of the 19th century.

Its first director was an Italian-American soldier and amateur archaeologist.

There is no 1 in the museum field today that would follow the path that our first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, would have followed, in which he was able to excavate and remove thousands of objects from Cyprus, which he then was able to sell.

That is a paradigm that no 1 would follow now.

Still, the Met has recently had dozens of looted artifacts seized from its collections and returned to their countries of origin.

Just last week, the Met announced a new research unit to help weed out looted or stolen acquisitions.

But even when a museum does uncover an ill-gotten object, repatriation is not a foregone conclusion.

The Glasgow Museums, for instance, repatriated their first Lakota object in 1998.

Around the same time, they received a request from Nigeria to repatriate a Benin object.

They felt that there were issues with Nigeria, where the objects would go, whether they'd end up, there was a certain amount of judgment.

What do you mean by there were certain judgments or issues there with Nigeria?

Well I found a letter once from our then director saying that, you know, would they be so quick to refuse a similar request if it had been from Native Americans?

There was a certain level of sympathy towards, because the Scottish love a bit of the Wild West.

And I'd find this letter when I was researching and writing a paper, but it was from our then director posing that question and thinking that maybe they should have something more objective.

To be fair, the repatriation of the Benin objects is complicated by the fact that there are several potential claimants, including the Nigerian government and the current Benin Oba.

He is a direct descendant of the Oba who was exiled by the British in the 19th century.

Just recently, things got even more complicated.

The outgoing Nigerian president declared that any repatriated Benin artifacts must be handed over to the Oba.

He is a descendant of the man from whom the objects were stolen in the first place.

But from the perspective of a European museum, this means the repatriated Benin bronzes are less likely to remain accessible to the public.

Still, The issue of repatriating art is much broader than this 1 set of artifacts.

To that end, the Glasgow museums have created a set of criteria to help guide the process, something more objective, in Patricia Allen's words.

There used to be 5 criteria on this list.

The current criteria are 1, the status of those making the request, which is their right to represent the descendants of the community to whom the artifact originally belonged.

The second 1 is the continuity between the community that created the objects and the current community on whose behalf the request is being made.

So there has to be a connection, a continuity there.

The third 1 is the cultural, historical and or religious importance of the objects to the descendant community.

And the fourth, which is not necessarily that important anymore, is how the objects were acquired by the museum.

But that's really to put the onus on the museum to prove that these objects are genuine.

The fifth was the fate of the object if returned.

In that case, you were supposed to have a museum or return the objects to another museum, it made it very difficult for indigenous communities in particular to put in a claim because many don't have those facilities and those resources.

By taking that criterion away and acknowledging that what you're returning is ill-gotten gains, if you like, loot and material, that we are effectively either facilitating robbery by sort of laundering this material or actually directly doing it ourselves, that as thieves we don't really have a right, perhaps, to set conditions on the return of stolen property.

At this point, you may find yourself wondering, if museums are full of objects that were essentially stolen, And if museums are starting to return those objects, will they have anything left to show?

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In early 2022, Nigeria put in a formal request on behalf of the Oba of Benin to repatriate the stolen Benin objects that are in the collection of the Glasgow Museums.

The request was made to the Glasgow City Administration Committee, which controls the museums, and the city agreed to the return.

Does this mean the Benin objects will be leaving Scotland and heading to Nigeria?

We haven't established the full details, but it's possible that we'll hold them for a while.

We'll either transfer their ownership officially on paper so that they become theirs that we have on loan.

They're quite keen on that approach because they have had so many offers from across the world.

Germany is giving everything back and that's hundreds of objects.

The Smithsonian is giving back also Pitt Rivers, Oxford, Cambridge, the Horniman Museum.

Aberdeen gave their sole opus head back last year.

So you're saying that there's a glut of Benin bronzes returning to Nigeria now?

Well, I don't think they describe it as a glut.

It's just they haven't quite got the infrastructure in place.

And so in the case of the Glasgow museums, it sounds as though the Nigerian government or the parties that represent the government there that you're dealing with would prefer that you keep them here on loan and on display, perhaps?

Yes, I think that is certainly 1 option because the museum in Ido State doesn't have storage, so they're building something within Lagos where the security is better.

They had to change the indemnity because the cultural sector did not have sufficient indemnity.

Gradually, their storage facilities will be developed and then gradually take everything else back.

The Glasgow Museum's plan may be complicated by the recent announcement that the Nigerian government will hand over repatriated pieces to the Oba himself.

But remember, Nigeria has been asking for the Benin bronzes for decades.

I asked Alan why the Glasgow Museums finally acquiesced.

As a result of Black Lives Matter, what sparked an interest, a revisiting of the whole subject of cultural repatriation and restitution of objects is an awareness that maybe we did sort of bad things.

And it came out of Black Lives Matter, the connection with that and atonement for transatlantic slavery.

Well, the murder of George Floyd and all the challenges that that brought with it really were crucially important and meaningful to me as a historian of Black America, as a historian of violence in America.

But also part of my job as a historian was to contextualize this, to say that this is not new, unfortunately.

And the challenge really is to understand that the struggle for fairness in America is a perpetual struggle and that you never get to the promised land of equality, you only aspire to get there.

And so it was really important for me to see that museums, especially the Smithsonian, play a role when a nation was in crisis.

Bunch is the secretary of the Smithsonian, based in Washington, D.C.

Sometimes called the nation's attic, the Smithsonian is a collection of 21 museums, 21 libraries, a variety of research and education centers, and the National Zoo.

Bunch has worked on and off at the Smithsonian since 1978.

Before that, he was founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY AND

CULTURE We started with no staff, no collections, no site, and no money.

And how do you build a museum collection from scratch?

We knew we wanted to tell stories around the Civil War.

We knew we wanted to tell important stories about women in work, and we wanted to talk about the impact of culture.

And then what we did is we went around the country in an antique roadshow way and asked people to bring out their stuff.

It was really to preserve, to help them preserve Grandma's old shawl, that 90th century photograph.

And then if people wanted to give things to us, the first thing we did was say, give it to local museums.

So we wanted people to benefit in local museums from the Smithsonian's coming to town.

But if it was extremely significant, obviously it came back to Washington.

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543. How to Return Stolen Art