{"id":4043,"date":"2010-09-21T22:22:10","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T02:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=4043"},"modified":"2010-09-21T22:22:55","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T02:22:55","slug":"museums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/museums\/","title":{"rendered":"Late Thoughts on the BM and Ownership"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve tried to keep my eyes and mind open in London, and I think in a lot of ways, I\u2019ve succeeded. There have been a lot of experiences that wouldn\u2019t have necessarily been my first choice, but afterwards I was glad I got involved in. Now that that\u2019s out of the way, my inner fourth grader would like to make the following announcement: I don\u2019t like museums. Never have. It would be pointless to try to present an argument justifying this, but I start out with it so the reader can understand the glasses through which I\u2019ve viewed museums over the last four weeks.
\n——
\nThe most striking feature of the British Museum has been the totally unearned and insane sense of ownership of foreign objects, particularly Elgin\u2019s Marbles. When you go into the main exhibit containing the Marbles, here\u2019s the first thing you see:<\/p>\n

\"\"

personal photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Here\u2019s an answer key, I can save you five minutes that would have otherwise been spent reading that absurd leaflet.
\nBecause the British Museum stole them!
\nLord Elgin stole them and then ran out of money and sold them to the BM!
\nIn England!
\nThe Parthenon sculptures back, because you stole them!<\/p>\n

Actually, that\u2019s the second most striking feature of the BM. Despite my previously whiny comments about museums, I couldn\u2019t help but be totally blown away by some of the objects. Within ten minutes, you could see arguably the most famous object in history (the Rosetta Stone) and the most famous human body in history (the Lindow Man). Unbelievable.<\/p>\n

Back to the question of ownership, though. One of the prompts for this blog entry is \u201cWhat does it tell you about Britain?\u201d Every time that I\u2019ve seen something that seemed out of the ordinary, I\u2019ve tried to remember to ask myself \u201cIs that different because it\u2019s British, or is it different for a totally separate reason?\u201d With the Elgin Marbles, I instantly attributed the hubris of that situation to Britishness. But the same exact problem exists in a Berlin museum<\/a> (you have to go to the second page of that story), among others. And I guess if I learned from museums that I can\u2019t automatically blame the Brits for being Brits, then I learned a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve tried to keep my eyes and mind open in London, and I think in a lot of ways, I\u2019ve succeeded. There have been a lot of experiences that wouldn\u2019t have necessarily been my first choice, but afterwards I was glad I got involved in. Now that that\u2019s out of the way, my inner fourth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6697],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-dennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}