Kwame Anthony Appiah: evaluation

Transcript context

…So, the British Museum — should they send back what they have? I think what the British Museum should do is what they are doing, which is to be part of the leadership of a movement in the world of museums to say, “The key questions about the great objects are access questions, not ownership questions. If we fuss about ownership, we’ll never make any progress. Let’s agree that the challenge is to make a world in which everybody in the world is, from time to time, close to a significant body of seriously interesting objects.” That means that the British Museum should be sharing, as it does, but it should be doing it more. I think sending back, of course, is exactly the wrong solution because sending back means you send all the Malian stuff to Mali. But the trouble with Mali is not that it doesn’t have Malian stuff. It’s that it doesn’t have Italian Renaissance stuff. It doesn’t have Chinese pottery. It doesn’t have tapestries woven by the Aztecs. It doesn’t have lots of the world’s great treasures. Better to think about the task as being a task of collectively curating the world’s collection for everybody and figuring out how to share more of it in places where it’ll be accessible, more closely accessible to some of the people in the world who don’t have access to anything now. That would be my ambition. But more Dogon artworks in Mali would be a good start, right? There could be a museum with 200 of them. Maybe they wouldn’t be taken care of as well, but isn’t that up to people in Mali, to decide what’s the risk-return tradeoff, and they simply ought to be sent back? They were probably purchased under duress, in some cases taken?…

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