Losing your marbles & sundry other reliquaries, only to want them "back".

international | history and heritage | opinion/analysis

Wednesday July 01, 2009 11:00

by iosaf

Greece opens her Acropolis museum "fit" to display the Elgin marbles.

Europeans were mostly responsible for the museum industry as much as the grand symphonic orchestras, opera and zoos. They used these things at first not out of any wish to educate nor illuminate in the laudable manner of contemporary interpretative centres but to solve three important 19th century bourgois problems.

1) how to gainfully employ people who really smellt bad but are now represented as Indiano Jones.
2) how to reclaim supposedly civilised history from the church of Rome.
3) how to offer vandals like Lord Elgin bequest options and subsequent relief from death taxes.

well it's not exactly guarding Stargate but they do have a job.

Anachronism is the word which really ought be writ in bronze embossed palimpsests over the pillars which welcome our children and the kind of flirts who can't do facebook into the halls of labelled antiquity which are "our museums".

Theodor Adorno, who on a good day could be quite rigorously engaging in a paratactic prosaic way once wrote "museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art they testify to the neutralisation of culture" . Which is exactly why we all really enjoy the story of Elgin's marbles because if anything it is not neutral. England gave to Greece her Byron and in latter days her civil war and only expected the best sculpted bits of the Acropolis in return nothing more than a few statues which we've all seen a zillion times over the porticos of our banks. John Berger who is less lefty than Theodor Adorno but still alive and earning money, wrote "The majority take it as axiomatic that museums are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery that excludes them: the mystery of unaccountable wealth" I'm quoting those geezers coz I concur with their tuppence hal'penny.

O yes, so it is & it is so - that every exhibited lump of our supposed civilisation from frozen bog men and arrow heads to stuffed pharoahs and impovrished ladys' sewing machines are quite off the ledger, suspended in that ephemeral zone of worth and value which we aptly term "priceless".

It is my considered opinion that the Greek composer Vangelis, he of the popular ditty sound track to the costume drama "Chariots of Fire" movie is quite right when he resists the demolition order which has been placed on him by the Greek authorities because his villa blocks the view from the new Acropolis Museum in Athens whither the modern day Hellenics hope to see their marbles returned.

& I feel ironically tickled to the synapse to quote his words at the compromise of simply demolishing an adjacent building's facade instead so as to widen the view :-

“architectural terrorism”

On which note I would urge readers to join me in letter writing and twitter activity to lobby the United Nations to adopt a resolution that the Elgin marbles and every other priceless bit of kitsch not only be declared the "patrimony of humanity" but brought on a permanent tour of all nations starting with the poorest, so that they too will see the wisdom of investing in museums and offering gainful employment.

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Losing your marbles & sundry other reliquaries, only to want them "back".