A great collection of art book images over at BibliOdyssey is inspiring. Pulled from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, the archive is searchable by medium, binding, or category. The example below is a Wizard of Oz pop up book. I never did do the pop up book I had wanted to, but some of the books in this collection are reviving that desire.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Robert Sabuda
Q: When is it legal to take an ancient and valuable cultural object out of its country of origin without the consent of the inhabitants?
A: Before 1970, the UNESCO cut-off date for pieces without provenance (often smuggled). Especially in the colonial empires of the 19th century, archeologists from England and France and Germany would race to get the best plunder for their home museums. If the book I’m reading now is correct, this has not changed so much as gone under the table.
The Euphronios Krater
I just got to the chapter ‘Tomb Raiders on Fifth Avenue’ in Loot, a book by Sharon Wexman describing the battle over stolen antiquities. Until last January, she describes how a red and black pot sat alone in its glass vitrine in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, labeled “Terra cotta calyx-krater. Greek, Attic 315 BC. Lent by the Republic of Italy.” This deceptively understated label did not mention that this was the Euphronious Krater, an exceptionally rare and fine vase.
Of course, it also did not mention it was raided from tombs nearby Rome as late 1971 when pieces of unclear provenance should not have been bought by museums. It turns out the curators were aware that it was stolen and did not care. Italy was immediately suspicious but could not prove that the items were indeed stolen until January of last year. The Euphronios krater was returned to a victorious Italy, where it symbolized the war against illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony.
The Lydian Hoard
The Euphronios Krater is by no means the only questionable antiquity under the Met’s roof. In 1993, after much press and pressure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to give back the Lydian Hoard, a collection of coins and jewelry looted from Usak, Turkey in the 1960s. Turkey similarly celebrated the return of this excellent collection, and housed it in the town where it had originally been discovered. The tomb robbers who sold it came back to see it in its new home. All was well. Then in 2006, the masterpiece of the collection–a golden hippocampus–was discovered stolen. It had been replaced with a fake. Still unsolved, many suspect the museum director, a respected local archaeologist.
However, he is hardly the only person who might have done it given the museum’s lack of security. There was one guard who was also in charge of tickets, one small lock on the glass case holding the hippocampus, security cameras that didn’t work, and no visitors to witness anything–the museum estimates to have had 769 visitors in the first five years it opened to exhibit the collection. This state of underfunded disorganization is hardly limited to the museum in Usak. Theft is a problem in museums throughout Turkey.
As the Euphornios Krater and the Lydian Hoard suggest, the tide is beginning to flow the other way in the battle for restitution. You might have noticed with the recent opening of the Acropolis museum and renewed demands for the Elgin marbles. On one hand, antiquities belong in the land where they are discovered as part of the cultural heritage there. The blatant recent thefts are shocking and greedy. On the other, developing countries like Turkey or Egypt often have a richer cultural heritage than government budgets allow them to care for, causing problems of maintenance and security. ‘Universal’ museums such as the Met and the Louvre have the laudable purpose of giving their millions of visitors a round-the-world knowledge of civilization. Very little of the Met’s universal art collection would remain were we to begin returning things to their ancient homelands. How much restitution is enough?
The following piece on Denis Dutton’s new book The Art Instinct, originally published yesterday in Blogcritics Magazine, is a case of ‘ask and ye shall receive.’ I wrote the review of a book lecture around a question: does a Darwinistic basis for art mean we can judge art’s merits by its popularity? Then the author answered my question!
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The heady realms of aesthetic theory floated during a recent Friday afternoon when I attended a lecture at NYU’s School of Philosophy. It was not so heady as it might have been given that lecturer, Denis Dutton, rebels against the jargon of much aesthetic criticism. He was promoting his new book, The Art Instinct, which argues for a Darwinian basis to art and aesthetic tastes in man.
Note that this Darwinism contradicts the common assumption of art as a cultural construct. It also implies that art has helped humans survive in some way. Yet nobody knew how, including Dutton, for certainly art seems to be a useless, weird, and inexplicable impulse.
Dutton, inspired by how “weird” our aesthetic tastes are, investigated the human reason for creating and valuing art. He believes that strong roots in Darwinism complement our understanding of why art is important and what, in fact, art is. It’s a contentious argument for an ambitious book. Dutton starts by defining art.
For all the audacity, Dutton made some interesting points. For instance, why is it that humans have developed from their sense of hearing the tonal music of Beethoven that so delights us instead of using their sense of smell to create nose symphonies? Smell is just as useful as hearing. Yet very few people pick out the notes of a perfume the way they do out of a symphony, nor are perfumes created out of a structured set of notes.
Dutton also commented that humans, unlike other animals, constantly seek out imaginative representations of reality rather than true, real things. That is, they seek out lies rather than truth. Think of all the time that is spent watching TV shows, reading stories, or looking at pictures. How have lies proven a more useful trait, in an evolutionary sense? By extension, how has art?
A different question bothers me, and I wished I had asked Dutton for his opinion. His theory considers art a natural need and that we are uniquely configured as a species to appreciate it. A Darwinian basis for art suggests a set of universal aesthetics that people everywhere use to appreciate and judge art. If aesthetics are universal, are artworks that appeal to the most number of people better?
I don’t know if Dutton would agree. In fact I doubt it, despite the fact that he ridiculed the academics who congratulate themselves on being sophisticates for understanding modern and contemporary art in comparison to a “bourgeois” majority.
One could argue that Darwinism provides a biological basis for elitism. In fact, Dutton’s theories are more useful for enticing one to form arguments than they are at answering questions. Often enough I’m satisfied with discussions with no answers, yet this particular question fascinates me. While I’m no philosopher, my art instinct suggests that popular art equals better art.
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Dutton’s response to the original article here (scroll to the bottom of the page).
