Can a Museum Be the Conscience of a Nation?

Nicholas Cullinan, the new director of the British Museum, seems to think so.

A couple years ago, we published a series called “Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard.” We looked at how museums around the world have been returning art and antiquities to their places of origin, especially if they had been taken by force. The British Museum, with eight million items in its collection, stands at the center of this complicated issue. For years, the Greek government has been asking the British Museum to return a collection of pieces known as the Parthenon sculptures, also called the Elgin Marbles. Nigeria, meanwhile, wants the British Museum to return a collection known as the Benin Bronzes, which were seized by British troops in a 19th-century raid.

When we were reporting that series, we couldn’t get anyone from the British Museum to speak with us, and when we visited the museum with an outside expert, who was going to give us a tour of the Benin Bronzes, we had our recording equipment confiscated by museum security. Soon after that series was published, there was even more controversy at the museum: a senior curator in the Greek and Roman department was found to have been stealing coins and other artifacts and selling them on eBay. That led to the resignation of the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer.

But now there is a new director in town; he has fresh goals for the museum and a fresh way of dealing with the old problems:

I’m not really a big fan of binary thinking — right/wrong, yes/no, yours/mine, win/ lose — I don’t think that gets you very far. I’m not afraid of the past. The collection of the British Museum, it’s a story of many things — people doing wonderful things and terrible things to each other — but it’s definitely a story around Britain as well.

Many British people feel that the story of their country has become a mess. There’s the Brexit hangover, the shaky public finances, the arguments over immigration — and over what it means to be British. Could it be that the British Museum, of all places, is taking the lead in rewriting that story? Find out on this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Can a Museum Be the Conscience of a Nation?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

People I (Mostly) Admire: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Manifesto for a Gift Economy

She’s a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the author of the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass. In her new book she criticizes the market economy — but she and Steve find a surprising amount of common ground.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Airplane Food

Everyone loves to complain about it — but preparing a meal that tastes good at 35,000 feet is harder than you might think. Zachary Crockett will have the fish.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript