Word: museum
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...Museum professionals have counterarguments. Some places--think of the Met, the Louvre or the National Gallery in London--are "universal museums," worth cherishing precisely because they permanently display the works of many cultures side by side. Neil MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, founded in 1753 as the first and now one of the greatest of those. "The idea," he says, "of having in one building things from the whole world, there for free, is just as important now as it was 250 years...
Dimitrios Pandermalis knows all about the idea of the universal museum. He doesn't think much of it. "A translation of the imperialism of the 19th century to the globalization of the 20th century" is what he calls the concept, and his view counts. Pandermalis is president of the organization behind the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, conceived as a standing rebuke to the British Museum's continued possession of the most passionately disputed cultural property of them all, the 5th century B.C. Elgin Marbles. Those are carvings taken from the Parthenon in the early 19th century at the direction...
...MacGregor, whose museum displays the marbles in galleries near its great collections of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Asian and African art, the division of the work between London and Athens is ideal. "The sculptures are part of two separate stories," he says. "One is the story of architecture and sculpture in Athens. The other is the story of sculpture in the world...
...Greeks, it's not so ideal. They want the marbles back, and the New Acropolis Museum is an ingenious part of their lengthy campaign to retrieve them. It will display the Greek portions of the Parthenon frieze side by side with pale plaster copies of the portions in London, like empty chairs at a banquet table. Meanwhile, the Greeks have also proposed that the British Museum might simply lend them the Elgin Marbles for the official opening of the museum later this year. There's just one problem. The British Museum insists that Greece must first recognize, formally, that...
...just source nations like Greece that have it in for the museums. So do archaeologists, who complain that simply by providing a commercial market for ancient objects, museums and private collectors encourage looters who vandalize archaeological digs, removing the artifacts from surroundings that hold clues about the culture that made them. To most people, a Mesopotamian cult figure or a Maya stela, before it's anything else, is a work of art. To an archaeologist, it's first a crucial piece of a much larger puzzle, the puzzle that is history itself. And theft breaks the puzzle into pieces that...