#we've discussed this in tha group chat but i truly feel like this is an excellent spot for this anecdote to go lol.#like. the museum's interests actually REQUIRE it to be aligned with the interests of donors.#whether or not continuing to own those bronzes was legal i think it's pretty inarguably unethical. shrug!#the violence of the catalogue
Pulling this out of the tags because I think something people keep either flinching from or excusing is funding related bias in museums.
A museum is expensive to found and expensive to maintain. The foundation - of any museum but ESPECIALLY the big name European (and American) museums - is explicity done as a show of power and legitimacy for colonial governments. Their power to obtain the items, the prestige of displaying them, the legitimacy granted by holding the evidence, the knowledge, the artifact, etc.
A museum provides a public service of access to knowledge and mental enrichment for visitors, but implicitly part of the public service it provides is also that of prestige. Of being the lucky civilised public who are civilized because you have access to things like museums. Of class signaling within the public to other parts of the public by what degree of access you have to the museum: private events, opening nights, your name on a plaque, your name on a wing...
To the extent that a museum recieves government funding, that funding pays for the museum as a public service to the extent that its existence as a public service is a point of prestige and legitimacy to the government.
To the extent that a museum relies of private funding - which is often heavily - that funding is often paid for in prestige to the funders, which means the museum must maintain itself as an institution that funders vie for the acknowledgement of - not just an institution that provides a service they feel charitably is valueable, but an institution that they feel uplifts their value in circles of the wealthy and influential. In order to continue existing, the museum must trade in the currency of prestige.
Depending on the tastes of your local billionaires, this might afford more or less leeway. Depending also on the social fashions of the time for self-effacing or virtue signalling of various sorts among the rich, and the current direness of the government funding situation.
Many people who work in museums have a LOT to say about the role of museums, some of which is quite interesting, and in some circumstances they are allowed to say it and to put it out there through the museum and its curation and displays.
But the museum, for its survival, always reserves the right to pivot away from saying anything difficult or complicated like that. It maintains a practice of always thanking donors lavishly, and always naming the private collectors who allow their property to be displayed for public view. And not commenting on the notion of private ownership or the nature of the aquisition or anything of that sort. Not even on objects that have come fully into the ownership of the museum. Because it jeapordizes too much to open that topic overtly within the display.
There is a strong disjunct between what happens in museum scholarship and what makes it to the display. And I understand it's a triumph sometimes to get certain things across that gap, and I don't disvalue that. So I understand a certain amount of vocational frustration from people who are trying to get things across that gap, who know in excruciating detail what the museum could be.
But if the fundamental value of the function of the museum is what is displayed. What is offered to the visitor, to the public. Then you have to admit how much of the museum display is composed of prestige-investment. And how hampered the ability of the museum is to communicate anything else it could communicate, by the fundamental inability to threaten its own prestige.
