Is a Museum Just a Trophy Case? (Update) | Freakonomics Radio

The world’s great museums are full of art and artifacts that were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm. Now there’s a push to return these works to their rightful owners. Sounds simple, right? It's not. (Part 2 of an updated series (https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/stealing-art-is-easy-giving-it-back-is-hard/) originally published in 2023.) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-a-museum-just-a-trophy-case-update/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://stephendubner.substack.com/subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. We are currently replaying a three-part series we made a few years ago called Stealing Art Is Easy, Giving It Back Is Hard. As part of this update, we have refreshed facts and figures as necessary. And in this episode, we've included some new material. This is part two of the series. Last week, we began with a simple question. How do the artworks and artifacts that you see in a museum wind up in a museum?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  For a long time, the entire art world didn't ask questions.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  The Met got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us.

• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Guess what? My kids know it's looted. But the museum world is changing. Museums are now returning dozens of objects every single year.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  It's like Olympic Games for restitution.

• 1:02Speaker 04

  Even though technically, we legally acquired these, the origins of the acquisition was illegal. So therefore, everything else was tainted as well.

• 1:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will explore one dramatic case that isn't settled yet.

• 1:19Speaker 05

  The disruption of the attack on the kingdom cannot be overemphasized.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum.

• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  They even took the bolts from the doors. It turns out that stealing art can be relatively easy, but giving it back? That's the hard part.

• 1:39Speaker 06

  The job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art. Yeah, put it in a pit. Melt it.

• 1:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  The second episode in our series about returning art starts right now.

• 2:00Speaker 07

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 2:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Matthew Bogdanos is a former Marine Colonel who now runs the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. We met him in our previous episode.

• 2:26Speaker 08

  We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures. If it's legal, great, we should keep it. But if it's illegal, then it should go back to the country of origin.

• 2:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  But how does that happen? If a museum or a private collector on Fifth Avenue has a 3,000-year-old treasure that is found to have been looted or otherwise stolen, the country of origin may not even exist anymore. So how does Bogdanos manage that?

• 2:55Speaker 08

  Every country treats these differently, but we have yet to have a country who hasn't just been over the top appreciative and extraordinarily gracious. We returned an antiquity to Iran. Wait a second. The US doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran. What do I care? I'm not a politician. We returned a piece to the Palestinian Authority. Now move the map to Southeast Asia. India, Thailand, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. For that area of the world, these antiquities are idols. They're worshiped. And the number of times I have gone into a temple in India, in southern India particularly, and it's

• 3:37Speaker 08

  empty. And they're still worshiping the empty pedestal. Or they have a photograph of an idol that was stolen, or they have a wax or wooden model. And now this goes in someone's Fifth Avenue apartment? Get the hell out of here. I mean, are you kidding me? So we never lose sight of the fact that at the other end of our entire process, the prosecution, recovery, and repatriation, there's a community on the other side.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bogdanos makes all this sound rather clear cut. And that makes sense. He is a prosecutor. He's guided by the law. And the law, while complicated, is also decisive. It declares a winner and a loser. Legal possession or illegal possession. But art is even more complicated than the law.

• 4:27Speaker 06

  Art is a place where our deepest spiritual values meet the marketplace. So that causes all kinds of questions. I mean, how do you put a price on art? People do. It's a vast marketplace. And strange things happen when you mix the most spiritual with the most commercial.

• 4:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2022, he published a piece called Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Luded Art?

• 4:56Speaker 06

  It's one thing when, you know, there's a war in Ukraine, and the Russian forces break into a museum in a Ukrainian city, and they take the artworks, and they put them in crates, and they take them back to Russia. And then the war ends five years later, and there's a peace treaty. That art, we know where it came from. It had a possessor. The possessors are still alive. They are institutions that still exist. And we can arrange for the art to come back from Russia to the museum in Ukraine from which it was taken. But when we're talking about lapses of 100, 200, 500 years, the whole concept of theft becomes kind of cracked. The second most famous Greek artwork in a European museum is the Pergamum altar in Berlin, which was unearthed by German archaeologists. Pergamum

• 5:37Speaker 06

  was a city on the west coast of what is now Turkey. The artists who made the work were Greek. The king who commanded the work was of mixed Greek and Macedonian origin. And the taxpayers who paid for it spoke all the mingled languages of what was then Asia Minor, Anatolia, and some of them were Semitic, and some of them were other Vanish groups. So who gets it? Turkey? Greece? Macedon? Syria? Because that's probably the place that is closest to the culture of the people who paid the taxes. I mean, it's gone. That world is gone. So there is no one to give it back to. It's just an illusion.

• 6:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  I went back to Matthew Bogdanos, the prosecutor, with David Frum's argument. Now, there are those who would say that your position is noble but naive in that you are putting a physical piece of property into the hands of someone who may be a generation or 10 generations removed from the origin, from either the creator or the owner. And there are a number of ways that could be problematic. Those pieces might be sold into the black market, wind up in the palace of some Gulf state prince, or a Chinese or American billionaire. So how do you think about those potential bad outcomes?

• 6:52Speaker 08

  Let's see. I've been in three wars, have had six combat tours. I'm a career homicide prosecutor. No one has ever actually called me naive before.

• 7:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're welcome.

• 7:02Speaker 08

  I've seen mass graves in Kosovo and Iraq. So no, I'm not naive. I recognize the world. And that's where I get to say to you, we're not the Acme Judgment Company. We don't get to pick and choose. We have a burglary in the Upper East Side. This person has 19 televisions, and 18 of them are stolen. When we catch the guy, do we get to say, mm, you have 19. You don't need them back. We're going to keep them, or we're going to give them to other people. That's not how that works, all right? And if our victim is a country whose political regime we don't particularly care for, tough. We actually have a very

• 7:44Speaker 08

  good relationship with the countries that we operate with on our level. So I'm talking about the Ministry of Culture, or the Ministry of Antiquities. We actually require that these countries sign a document at the repatriation ceremony, promising that they will maintain the antiquity that's being returned and, wait for it, publicly display it.

• 8:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  And is that document enforceable?

• 8:13Speaker 08

  Is it legally enforceable? Almost certainly not. But here's how it's enforceable. The next time you have an antiquity from that country that's looted, and you call me, am I really the person you want to piss off? Do you really want to say, I know we promised Colonel Bogdanos and the Manhattan DA's office that we're going to maintain this, and we're going to publicly display it. But you know what? Forget that. Oops. And the next time we have an Iranian antiquity, oh, Mr. Minister, I'm so sorry. Believe it or not, these countries really honor these requests. In India particularly, it's really heartwarming. They will send us videos of the community receiving their idol back. And I'm telling you, it's insane.

• 8:57Speaker 08

  Like, 50 people screaming and yelling and singing and chanting, and they're holding this, you know, 150-pound idol up over their heads as they march it into the temple. We've had these things in Cambodia. We see these ceremonies in Egypt. It's followed from the plane right to its resting place in the museum in Cairo or in Lebanon. We have ongoing relationships across the globe with all these countries. It's in their best interest to honor their agreement with us. So we are not returning stuff that is then getting put on the market or being put in storage rooms.

• 9:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you were looking for the single most interesting case of returning art, or restituting, or repatriating art, as various people call it, I would nominate the case of the Benin bronzes, although that name is a bit misleading. Some of the pieces are indeed made from bronze, but many are not. And while there is today an African country called Benin, just west of Nigeria, the bronzes came from the historic Kingdom of Benin in what is now Edo State in southern Nigeria. In any case, the Benin bronzes are a massive collection of art, artifacts, and religious objects that have been displayed for years in more than 160 museums around

• 10:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  the world, including the Smithsonian in the US, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, the Kelvin Grove in Glasgow, and especially the British Museum in London, which is the mother lode of Benin bronzes and which plays a starring role in our story. The British Museum is surely one of the world's great museums. Some people consider it the greatest, especially for antiquities. But others consider it, how shall we say this, a trophy case for the spoils of war. Here, putting it far better than I ever could, is the English comedian James Acaster.

• 11:02Speaker 09

  A long time ago, everyone in Britain got in a big old boat and we robbed, and this will sound farfetched, everyone in the world.

• 11:13Speaker 09

  And we got all the swag, didn't we? And we took it back to old Blighty and we hid it, this is the clever part, we hid it in a museum.

• 11:23Speaker 09

  Now, a few of you are sitting there, I can see your angry faces, like, so what? Fighters keepers, shut up. Hey, man, a while ago, a lot of your ancestors stole loads of stuff from my ancestors? Yeah. I'm here to take them home. Let's right this wrong. What do you say? I don't think so. We're still looking at it.

• 11:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  How true to history is James Acaster's version? Let's find out by doing what we usually do, which is calling up the academic experts.

• 11:53Speaker 10

  Hi, so my name is Professor Dan Hicks. I work at the University of Oxford as a curator at our anthropology museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum.

• 12:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so where does this story begin?

• 12:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, okay, so if we wind back to 1884, and Berlin, and the meeting of the European Nations in the Berlin Congress.

• 12:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is where they sit down with a map of Africans, say, you get this, I get that, that kind of thing?

• 12:21Speaker 10

  Exactly, exactly. And so what is now Nigeria was part of the pink area for the British, but not part of empire at that point, not turning them into colonies at that point. There are other entities. There are protectorates. There are areas controlled by the companies, in this case, the Royal Niger Company.

• 12:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Royal Niger Company was a trading firm that essentially served as an arm of the British government.

• 12:47Speaker 10

  So we have to imagine this as a corporate and militarist form of empire. And really, this is all about the palm oil. It's about the rubber industry.

• 12:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  In 1892, the Royal Niger Company signed a trade treaty with the Oba, or King of Benin. Within just a few years, it was decided that the Oba wasn't as cooperative as Britain would have liked, and they sent an expedition to Benin to work things out, headed up by one James Phillips. Things didn't work out at all. The group was attacked, and Phillips and most of his men were killed. The British response was what came to be known as a punitive expedition.

• 13:31Speaker 10

  And of course, it's one of so many other expeditions that happened in these late 1990s years.

• 13:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  This expedition to Benin involved 10 Royal Navy ships and 1,400 soldiers armed with the recently invented Maxim machine gun. The Benin defenders had machetes, pistols, and muskets. The British forces had no trouble taking the Kingdom of Benin. They massacred the population, burned the city. They captured the Oba and sent him into exile.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  The disruption of the attack on the Kingdom cannot be overemphasized.

• 14:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Victor Iheminor.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  I'm an artist and a writer from Nigeria.

• 14:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Iheminor is from Edo State, the historic location of the Kingdom of Benin. He is one of the artists who represented Nigeria's debut in the Venice Biennale in 2017.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  They kind of created a vacuum for us, you know, by removing an entire people's history. This is what we will consider our library, a visual library for that magta was completely razed down. And what they didn't burn, they looted.

• 14:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. What the British didn't burn, they looted thousands of objects from the ceremonial halls of the Oba. These included bronze and brass relief plaques that told the story of hundreds of years' worth of Benin history, commemorative brass heads that had adorned the shrines of royal ancestors. They took carved ivory tusks, coral beads, brass bells, figures, and gaming boards, even household items like flasks, cups, bowls, spoons, salt shakers.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  The Western colonizers were kleptomaniacs. They stole hairpins. They stole keys to the doors in the palace.

• 15:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And where did all this loot go?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  In the 19th and 20th century, there were four European countries accumulating African art. It was France, the UK, Belgium, and Germany.

• 15:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Benedikt Savoy, a French professor of art history at the Technical University in Berlin. As for the Benin plunder.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum, but the rest has been sold on the art market, and the art market around 1900. It's the best time for the art market. You know, Picasso is a very young guy. All these avant-gardes are interested in African art, and the art market in Europe made a lot of money with all these objects. And the richest museums at that time in Europe were the German museums, because German was a Reich now. And if you are a Reich, an empire, you need a museum. It was absolutely

• 16:28Speaker 03

  normal in Europe at that time to have huge museums in the capitals of empires, like British Museum, et cetera. So the Germans said, okay, we have only Cameroon, Tanzania, Togo, and Namibia right now, and let's buy things from Benin City, this very, very important, beautiful culture. And they bought a lot of bronzes, 600, only in Berlin.

• 16:57Speaker 10

  Within weeks of this attack, the bronzes were on display in London, Oxford, Berlin, and elsewhere. And they were displayed, if we go back to the British Museum, they were displayed in the Assyrian saloon alongside objects from ancient Egypt, objects from the Bronze Age, from the ancient Near East. So the narrative was absolutely obvious. We have blown your culture back into the Bronze Age. This is a dead culture.

• 17:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm not sure the narrative is as absolutely obvious as Dan Hicks says. Still, the British Museum has been, for a few centuries now, a physical archive of one nation's enthusiasm for conquest and empire building. That era, as you know, is long gone, and yet, the evidence, even the bloodiest evidence imaginable, like the Benin bronzes, is still proudly on display.

• 17:59Speaker 09

  This is the clever part. We hid it in a museum.

• 18:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, who is in favor of returning the Benin bronzes to Nigeria? And who is against it? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 18:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've been speaking with Dan Hicks, a professor at Oxford.

• 18:26Speaker 10

  So I think I'm the world's first, well, I am the world's first professor of contemporary archaeology.

• 18:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what is contemporary archaeology?

• 18:34Speaker 10

  I mean, it's tautological in some ways, but I think it underlines something really important about all archaeology. Archaeology in some ways is the inverse of history. So in this case, in terms of the thing that we're talking about, the idea that empire, you know, actually isn't over. It's here with us in the present. It's here with us in locations that include our museums.

• 18:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hicks, remember, is also a curator at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum.

• 19:02Speaker 10

  As a part of my work there, we are responsible for one of the larger collections of the Benin bronzes.

• 19:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  I know there was a tweet sent out in 2015 by a grassroots student movement. It said, "The Pitt Rivers Museum is one of the most violent spaces in Oxford." Tell me your response when you first saw that tweet.

• 19:22Speaker 10

  You know, I heard at that point, I'd simply never seen it that way. I mean, this is one of those, you know, marmalade dropping moments of your career, right? You're halfway through your breakfast and, oh, right, let's think this through. So for me, it's all about learning from a new generation. I mean, I'm now 50 years old and it's the people who are in their twenties, who are reading this material so differently and are showing us things that have been sitting in plain sight for so long.

• 19:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  As Hicks began to "think things through," as he puts it, his views shifted, and hard. Today, he has a zeal that may remind you of a religious convert. Consider the book he published in 2020. It's called "The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution." Here is a typical sentence. "The sacking of Benin City in February 1897 was an attack on human life, on culture, on belief, on art, and on sovereignty." In just a few years, Hicks had become a flag bearer for the movement to repatriate the Benin bronzes to Nigeria. Nigeria, by the way, had been trying to reclaim the bronzes since the 1930s.

• 20:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  They began asking more insistently after gaining independence from Britain in 1960, but not much happened. In 2010, a consortium of Western museums joined a few Nigerian institutions to form the Benin Dialogue Group. The idea was to establish a new museum in Benin City, Nigeria, that would display the bronzes once the Western museums decided to return them. But once again, not much happened, until, as it turns out, the year 2020. As David Frum wrote in his Atlantic article, "The George Floyd protests of 2020 jolted the group into hyperactivity."

• 21:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  It might seem strange that the murder of a black man by a white police officer in America would trigger a global sentiment to return art looted from Nigeria by Britain some 130 years earlier. Or maybe not. The parallels were, as Dan Hicks might say, hidden in plain sight. Here again is Benedikt Savoy.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Now, today, in the 21st century, France, the UK, Belgium, and Germany are, yes, like Olympic Games for restitution. They are fighting for, or they are struggling in order to be the first to restitute important collections.

• 22:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Savoy herself has played a significant role in this restitution drama. In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron visited several former French colonies in Africa. Like the British, French colonizers had sacked and looted their way through Sub-Saharan Africa and sent home thousands of treasures that are still on display in French museums. During a speech at a university in Burkina Faso, Macron said, "I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France." Savoy, who was already sympathetic to returning African art, wrote an article calling Macron's speech "a revolution."

• 22:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Macron promptly appointed Savoy, along with the Senegalese economist Felwyn Sarr, to push the revolution along. Savoy and Sarr visited museum directors and government officials in four African countries, and they wrote a nearly 200-page report that Macron apparently found so persuasive that he immediately promised to restitute thousands of objects to the country of Benin and to loan money to build a new museum there. But returning a massive collection of art and artifacts so weighted with history is not simple. Critics said the report was too ambitious and too academic to be realistic.

• 23:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Furthermore, French law prohibits the removal of artwork from public collections, at least for the time being. The British Parliament had similarly passed laws making it hard to de-accession works from their public museums, although recent legislation has given museum trustees more leeway. At the moment, several museums in several countries have at least begun the process of repatriating African art.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  And I think the most competitive tandem is between Germany and France right now.

• 24:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's in it for them? What do they gain by restituting?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  It's difficult to say, but it's obvious that the restitution has something to do with soft power, with soft diplomacy. You are speaking about art, about beauty, about emotions, but at the same time, you are doing something like, "I show you that I'm confident in your ability to protect your own cultural heritage." Or, "Let me build a museum for you with my money," or something like that. It's not only about moving objects from A to B or from B to C, et cetera. It's about a new art of relationship with these countries.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  And for France, France has a very, very bad reputation in the former colonies in Senegal, in Mali, in Burkina Faso, in Cameroon, et cetera. And I think Emmanuel Macron tried to do what he can in order to repair this very bad reputation.

• 25:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, okay, in the restitution Olympics, as you put it, France and Germany are fighting to be number one, which, knowing those two countries and their complicated histories and their current political situation, maybe doesn't surprise me so much. But the UK, well, I guess the UK is variegated. There's some restitution going on, but from what I can tell, the British Museum is not particularly interested in restituting and not even talking about restituting.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very strange because in the 70s and 80s, the UK was the motor of the discussion with Ghana, with Nigeria, and you had very important stakeholders in Oxford and Cambridge fighting for restitutions and also very normal people writing letters to The Times saying, "We need to have better relations to Ghana," for example. And now, I think you're right, the British Museum, the state museums in the UK are very reluctant to speak about these topics. They are observing the situation very carefully, like, you know, like an animal,

• 26:29Speaker 03

  observing a very difficult situation before he knows what to do. And I can understand it because, as you say, the British Museum is a trophy of war, like all museums. Museums have a golden face and a very dark face. And we are used to know only the shiny face, the sunny face. And I think for a museum like the British Museum, if they will tell the truth about the history of collections, it would be so disgusting that it would be the end of the British Museum. Not the end because it would be empty, but the end because it's so disgusting that nobody will be very comfortable with visiting such a museum.

• 27:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  The British Museum is a member of the Benin Dialogue Group, and they've given a few million dollars toward a proposed museum in Nigeria. But as for their plans to legally and/or physically return their Benin bronzes, that's hard to say. Oxford's Dan Hicks has become perhaps the loudest voice of those scolding the British Museum to change their ways. This position is possible in part because his museum, the Pitt Rivers, recently declared it will work to return the nearly 100 Benin objects in its collection. And how many Benin objects does the British Museum own? That, too, is hard to say.

• 28:01Speaker 10

  We still don't know how many objects are in the British Museum from 1897, and all these other institutions don't have inventories because of years of underfunding and lack of investment. So many of these are hidden away in the storerooms. This is a story about what's in the storerooms, not about what's on display.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  In Paris, we have 69,000 objects from Africa in the Musée du Québec-Holli, and only 1,000 on display. So 68,000 are invisible. That's a scandal. And the question is, why? Why? No museum in Europe is able to explain why it is so important to have all this accumulation of African art in their basement.

• 28:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  When we made this series in 2023, the British Museum declined our requests for an interview. The following year, the museum got a new director, Nicholas Cullinan, and he took a different approach, inviting me for an interview and a museum tour. You can hear that whole conversation in an episode we made called, "Can a Museum Be the Conscience of a Nation?", episode 635. And here's a portion of that conversation where I asked Cullinan about the ongoing debate around the Benin bronzes.

• 29:19Speaker 11

  The basic issue is, there's an Act of Parliament from 1963 that expressly forbids the British Museum from deaccessioning its collection. A lot of American museums, it's regular practice to deaccession from the collection. And there's an argument for being able to do that, I understand, which is to keep your collection manageable. In Britain, deaccessioning is basically forbidden. What that means is that often you end up with collections where they become very large. But there's a principle that these things have been acquired for the nation. They're owned by the people of Britain, and therefore it's not the museum's right to sell them.

• 29:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love that path that you're on with the British Museum. But the reason it's always been a frustrating argument to encounter is it just seemed like a ridiculous fig leaf to me. These are just laws passed by members of parliament. There's still a parliament which has the ability to pass new laws. I don't understand why that's clung to as if it's some natural, physical law.

• 30:16Speaker 11

  I'm not, I'm not clinging to it. It's important to state it because otherwise people might be under the misapprehension that it's our choice, or it's our decision, basically. It would take an Act of Parliament. There isn't a legal framework for us to just do this in a straightforward way. I could spend my entire directorship trying to fight this and get nowhere. You will have to also think really carefully about the ramifications. Thinking back to when the pandemic began, the big anxiety was that lots of small museums across the UK would be forced to sell, like, the one star painting they had. There was huge anxiety concern that this is going to trigger a wave of disposals. So I think a saner way around it is to begin collaborating now, which we already do, but to actually do even more of that.

• 31:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Dan Hicks to summarize the arguments he's always heard about why museums might not repatriate the Benin bronzes.

• 31:17Speaker 10

  It's the what-if. You know, it's the what-if. If you give back the Benin bronzes, they'll be sold on the open market. If you give back the Benin bronzes, there'll be a war, and they'll be damaged by bombs. If you give back the Benin bronzes, they're not going to care for these objects well enough. There won't be inventories done. In reality, all those things that those myths say might happen if they're given back, every one of them has happened to the Benin bronzes here in the UK. Even the British Museum has sold off objects that were taken in 1897. Okay, there might be a war one day in Nigeria.

• 31:56Speaker 10

  In the Second World War, Hull Museum and also Liverpool Museum were bombed in the Blitz, and there were Benin bronzes that were burst into fragments by Nazi bombs. So all those things that the civil servants invented might happen if you return them actually did happen, but they happened here in the UK.

• 32:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you listen to people like Dan Hicks and Benedikt Savoy, and earlier Matthew Bogdanos, you may get the sense that repatriating looted art is a fairly simple matter. Until, that is, you ask a couple of basic questions. Like, to whom exactly are these pieces being returned? And what exactly will become of them? Here again is David Frum, author of The Atlantic article, "Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Looted Art?"

• 32:52Speaker 06

  When this issue really erupted in 2020, I was caught off guard by some of the simplicities that were being propounded. And I went to Nigeria, a place I'd never visited, in order to do some reporting, to reveal some of the real complexities that people need to think about if they're going to think about this issue as a serious issue.

• 33:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Frum grew up in Toronto, where his parents were avid collectors of African art. Much of their collection is now in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  And I've spent a lot of my life in and around the collecting world, although I am myself not at all a collector.

• 33:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why does he think the repatriation of Benin bronzes is more complex than some people say?

• 33:34Speaker 06

  They say, well, give it back to Nigeria. And the problem is, what is Nigeria? Because what I document in the article is that there are at least three major claimants inside Nigeria to these artworks. There are some minor ones, too, but there are three big ones. And you can't toss it into the middle and say, okay, go scramble.

• 33:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Those major claimants are a proposed museum of West African art in Edo State, the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, and the current Oba of Benin City, Ewaré II, who is a descendant of the Oba who was exiled by the British in 1897.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  And so when you choose one of those three claimants, you are making a moral decision. You have to accept it, and you have to bear it. So the first claimant to the Nigerian pieces, and this is the idea that got the most excitement and really revived this in the West, was this proposal for a public-private partnership of state-of-the-art modern museum with integrity and an independent board that was proposed by the governor of the state, although he himself would not be directly involved. Really impressive people, Nigerian business leaders, some international people, and they would run the museum. It's had a variety of names, but it would be an independent museum of West African art in Edo State in what is now Benin City.

• 34:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is the future museum that European donors have been contributing to. It would be built on the historic site of the Kingdom of Benin.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  If you've been following the story and you've seen pictures in the papers, drawing of a beautiful-looking modern building, that's the project you've read about. It's going to be just what a museum should be. And one of the things I describe in the article is how that dream met Nigerian reality and was destroyed by Nigerian reality.

• 35:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  That reality, says Frum, is a conflict between Edo State and the current Oba of Benin.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  He doesn't have political power, but he has enormous spiritual and religious authority within his kingdom. And he says, "These pieces belong to my family, and I want them returned to me. And I have an idea for a royal museum, which I will own and control."

• 35:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Frum writes of a longstanding feud between the Oba and the current governor of Edo State. Their families are historic rivals dating back to around the time of the British punitive expedition. So Frum thinks the museum project is doomed to fail.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  I mean, I hope it does not fail, because I think it's a beautiful thing, and I really admire the people who are involved in it. But major projects like this that are associated with an individual governor in a Nigerian state tend not to outlast that governor. Governor Obasaki's time is limited, and there's no indication that a successor is going to be interested in this. And he also is fighting against the Oba of Benin. And everyone I spoke to, and I spoke to a wide variety of people from many different walks of life, in churches and political systems, agreed if there's a contest between the governor and the Oba, the Oba is going to win.

• 36:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Back in 2023, the Nigerian government announced that all artifacts must be delivered to the Oba of Benin. The project to build a museum of West African art in Edo State has stalled. The Benin bronzes that have been returned to Nigeria from other European art institutions instead made their way to the Benin City National Museum. Frum points to another complicating factor that the European proponents of repatriation don't talk about.

• 37:00Speaker 06

  The Benin art is not innocent. The Benin art is itself a monument to guilt. We call it the Benin bronzes, but they're not actually made of bronze in most cases. Almost all of them are made of brass. So the way they got the brass was they traded for it. What did they trade? Well, Benin grew a particular form of pepper that was very popular with Europeans in the 1400s and 1500s, and they made textiles. They exported some ivory. But they especially exported slaves that they had captured and that they used to build the wealth and power of their kingdom. They sold them to the Portuguese, who then trafficked these people to giant sugar plantations. The Benin kings were slave sellers. That's how they got the brass that they turned into art. So there's no innocence here.

• 37:42Speaker 06

  The story of humanity, until we reach the modern age, where we can substitute knowledge for human labor and can make wealth out of the air, is one of tremendous oppression of most people. And that's true for every power holder who had the wherewithal to command art. So we can't reinvent innocence. We all have to accept history as it is. And then we have to, starting now, make our moral decisions based on the choices that are actually available to us.

• 38:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Frum thinks that in their rush to undo the sins of the 19th century, today's repatriation advocates haven't thought through all the implications.

• 38:18Speaker 06

  Look, I think a lot of people want to do good. It's a very laudable and wonderful impulse. The danger is, as you do good, do you catch that little glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think, boy, I look good when I'm doing good? And the moment that thought enters your brain, the whole enterprise becomes a little different. That's what I worry about. Look, if you possess valuable artifacts, or if you control valuable artifacts, you have a form of power. And power can never be exercised with perfect innocence in this guilty world. So you must use your power responsibly, knowing everything has a tragic story.

• 38:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you were advising the British Museum on this issue, what would you say?

• 39:04Speaker 06

  I would advise them, this is not a great moment to make this decision. This may be a decision for your successor. When you have an object that is 500 years old, I think one of the questions you need to ask yourself is, why do I need to make a decision today? This object will be here 50 years, 100 years from now. If I don't see a good answer today, I can have confidence that my children or grandchildren, they may see a good answer tomorrow. So you don't choose a bad answer because you have to hurry, hurry, hurry to dispose of this 500-year-old object. Sometimes you say, let's just wait until there is a good answer.

• 39:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, to that argument, a counterargument could be, and I've heard this counterargument from pro repatriation people, is that so what? It doesn't matter. These are stolen goods, and the very least you can do is return them to someone related to or someone affiliated with the survivors of those from whom they were stolen.

• 39:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I hear that argument a lot, too. And it's associated with, above all, a curator named Daniel Hicks, who works at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England. So it doesn't matter, as you say. Just give it back. Who cares what happens to it? Well, then, why not burn it? If the job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art, put it in a pit. Melt it. Or why not sell it to a Russian oligarch and use the money to fund British schools or British healthcare services? If the goal is deaccession, there are a lot of ways of deaccessioning it. You cannot abdicate your response. You inherited this thing, whatever its provenance. Art lasts a long time. The great pieces of Benin are mostly made between about 1450 and 1650. They've outlived people, kingdoms, civilizations.

• 40:42Speaker 06

  And they come with their own obligations of continuity, with whoever happens to own them in any given particular moment.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  When the British took these works in 1897 and they brought them to Britain, I don't think they right away knew exactly what they were going to do.

• 41:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Victor Ihamunora again.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  This is 125 years of history that people want us to sort overnight. That was an entire British government at the time took an axe to a particular kingdom. Now that we are trying to rectify that history, I think there would be some, you know, airboeing and pushing. I don't particularly see that as a problem. I mean, corruption in government is not peculiar to Nigerian government. So I think that, yes, there have been like issues of where is the work going to go? Is it going to go to the palace? Is it going to go to government of Nigeria? You have to realize when this thing happened, there was no Nigeria. 1897, there was no Nigeria. It was just Benin Kingdom. There was no Edo state. It was just Benin Kingdom.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  I think that the world or whoever the critics are, need to give a little bit of room because we just started having these works back. We have been asking for works to be restituted over decades now. And suddenly they woke up, some of the institutions woke up, and they say, OK, we are ready. Let's go. Right? And yes, now that they have agreed that they are going to return this work, I think that people need to give us a little bit of space to decide how we want to structure these things on our own end.

• 42:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, what did Ihamunora think when he first saw the Benin bronzes in captivity in the British Museum? And we go see the bronzes ourselves, or at least try to. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  I would say I started making art quite early, as far back as I was like four years old.

• 42:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is the Nigerian artist Victor Ihamunora.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  I have good memory of drawing in sand and drawing on the walls in my grandfather's very expansive compound. Also, I grew up in a home that has one of the earliest photographers in that part of the country. My uncle, who is 90 years old, is a photographer that studied at the Institute of Photography in New York in the early 60s. I realized that for you to create images and have people reflect upon what they are seeing was quite powerful. So I never stopped.

• 43:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, Ihamunora splits his time between Lagos, Nigeria, and the Washington DC area.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  I still remember that day very clearly when I first visited the British Museum, which was in 2017. I was preparing for an exhibition, a solo exhibition in London, called In the Kingdom of This World. I got in there, you understand, now I was emotionally charged to see these works. It's not like I've not seen some of the bronze heads before, maybe in books and stuff like that.

• 43:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  The British Museum's Benin bronzes are situated in a basement wing along with the rest of the African collection. Many of the objects had a ceremonial or religious purpose, funerary masks, for instance.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  A funerary mask is supposed to be buried with somebody that is dead. Why are you having it in your museum? Why would I go and preserve it if that is what it was made for? Who told you it was supposed to be behind glasses and be treated? It's a funerary mask.

• 44:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are also brass plaques that once adorned the pillars of the Obaz Palace. Because Benin had no written language, the plaques were one of the chief repositories of the kingdom's history.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  They told stories, like storybooks. The way a graphic designer will illustrate a storybook is the way a Benin bronze maker would illustrate an entire story.

• 44:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Before the British raid, there were over 1,000 plaques spanning hundreds of years of history. The British Museum owns nearly 200 of them.

• 45:01Speaker 05

  So when you're looking at some of these plaques, they are disjointed because it's like taking William Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet. So you go to first act, you tear the page off. Then you go to the last act of Hamlet, and you tear it off. Then you paste it on the wall and call it William Shakespeare. So if somebody is reading it, yes, you can read one piece. I mean, the sentences are nice, the phrases are great. You can quote from them, but it's not the entire story. Until you put the entire Macbeth on the wall, then you will understand the story and the magnitude of what has been done to a book like Macbeth.

• 45:41Speaker 05

  And, you know, after a while, I just got really emotional about looking at them all strung up there just like being art for art's sake, which they were not. They have never been.

• 45:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  The plaques were also meant to memorialize how certain rituals were performed.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  So we had that documentation in our plaques on how things would be done in that same way. Then some foreigners came and completely just yanked that whole history book and all of those things off the walls, and then began to string them together like they are beads, you know, bought in a chip shop in Vegas.

• 46:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  A few years back, when we first produced this series, we thought it would be a good idea to check out the Benin bronzes for ourselves. Again, this was before the current director, Nicholas Cullinan, agreed to an interview and a tour. This time, we had no official invite, but we booked a flight for London, and Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums, agreed to meet us at the British Museum and give us a proper tour of the Benin bronzes.

• 46:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was a damp and chilly Sunday morning, and we queued up with Hicks to go inside. I told Hicks that we had tried many times to interview a British museum official about the controversy over the Benin bronzes and the many other pieces in their collection that are considered contested objects.

• 47:10Speaker 10

  It's absolutely one of the defining features of what the British Museum is in the eyes of the public these days. You know, it's the jokes that won't go away. Why do they call it the British Museum if everything in it is stolen from other countries? When are they going to give it all back? It's really affecting the British Museum as a brand. In any other sector, if your brand was being so dominated by one issue that you were failing to address, you would want to do something about it, other than just keep your head in the sand.

• 47:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That leads to, I guess, an obvious question. Why have they not?

• 47:44Speaker 10

  The playbook from 30 years ago is still very much the one being used by the press officers of our national museums. We're going to tough this one out. We're not going to feed the media on this issue. We'll keep quiet. We'll occasionally say very small things that changes the subject. We'll talk about the Parfum and Marbles every time someone talks about the Benin bronzes. We'll talk about Easter Island any time someone raises the Parfum and Marbles, and so on.

• 48:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  The queue moved quickly, and we got up near the entrance. As we were about to pass through the main gate, a security guard approached. He did not like the look of our microphones.

• 48:26Speaker 12

  Anything like this is an absolute flat no. So we really need to go through the press office, stuff like this.

• 48:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  We told him what we were doing, that we'd been trying for months to arrange a visit and/or an interview with the British Museum, but that we couldn't even get our calls returned. So instead, we brought this nice professor with us to give a tour.

• 48:45Speaker 12

  So you're recording me right now? Yes. Right. You didn't tell me that, sir. I'm going to ask you to stop, please. OK? All right, yeah. Why are you doing that?

• 48:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So our recording equipment was taken from us. We were allowed to enter the museum without it. We would just have to record Dan Hicks's tour of the Benin bronzes on a couple of iPhones.

• 49:07Speaker 10

  We're going to go down into the St. Louis galleries, into the basement, right? I mean, they are not being displayed in the same way as, let's say, objects we mentioned in Egypt are. These African objects that we're going to be seeing are really controversial, you know, hidden away in the basement.

• 49:28Speaker 10

  Oh my god, look at this. Gallery closed.

• 49:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm. They knew we were coming.

• 49:33Speaker 10

  They knew we were coming, didn't they?

• 49:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Room 25, Africa. All of Africa is down there, is it not?

• 49:39Speaker 10

  It is. It is.

• 49:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Closed today. But, to be fair, the museum apologizes for any inconvenience. We asked a guard why the African gallery was closed. He said he didn't know. There was a sign announcing that the tour of the gallery would be starting soon, led by a volunteer. So we waited outside the roped-off entrance. We got to chatting with a visitor from Scotland named Shirley Thompson, who had come to the British Museum with her husband Ian specifically to see the Benin bronzes.

• 50:14Speaker 13

  I came on Friday and it was closed.

• 50:16Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 13

  We came today and it's closed again.

• 50:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you came just to see the Benin bronzes? Why? I'm just curious.

• 50:22Speaker 13

  Because I'd never heard of them and I've just started doing an Open University course and then read about them. The fact, I think in Europe, we've got more in storage in Europe than the people have back. It blew my mind, didn't it?

• 50:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. Now, what do you think of it being returned?

• 50:36Speaker 13

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I didn't even know we had it.

• 50:43Speaker 13

  I didn't, honestly.

• 50:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  But even though we stole it. In case you didn't catch that, Ian said, "even though we stole it." As we were chatting with the Thompsons, the sign announcing the upcoming tour of the African gallery had been swapped out.

• 51:00Speaker 10

  It turns out that the tour is cancelled.

• 51:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  When did that get changed?

• 51:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, that was anticlimactic, wasn't it? We never were able to see the British Museum's massive collection of Benin bronzes. But next time on the show, we find another museum that's a bit more cooperative.

• 51:22Speaker 14

  Let's just hope there's nobody from our comms team spying on me.

• 51:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll also hear from the Secretary of the Smithsonian, which has already returned its Benin bronzes to Nigeria. And we still haven't given up on the British Museum. Hello. How do you do? Would love to go to Africa with you. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

• 51:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was originally produced by Morgan Levy and updated by Dalvin Abouaji. It was edited by Gabriel Roth and mixed by Jake Loomis. We had help in London from Rob Double and London Broadcast Studio and from Zach Lipinski. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Ilaria Montenacort, Jeremy Johnston, Pete Madden, and Tayo Jacobs. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 52:32Speaker 10

  I wonder if I could volunteer to lead the tour? Once you've done the exams...

• 52:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  We better get you credentialed. We only have 45 minutes for you to take the exam.

• 52:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, that's true.

• 52:48Speaker 07

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.