About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire by
Antiquities have been pawns in empire-building and global rivalries; power struggles; assertions of national and cultural identities; and cross-cultural exchanges, cooperation, abuses, and misunderstandings?all with the underlying element of financial gain. Indeed, ?who owns antiquity?? is a contentious question in many of today?s international conflicts. About Antiquities offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between archaeology and empire-building around the turn of the twentieth century. Starting at Istanbul and focusing on antiquities from the Ottoman territories, Zeynep Çelik examines the popular discourse surrounding claims to the past in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. She compares and contrasts the experiences of two museums?Istanbul?s Imperial Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art?that aspired to emulate European collections and gain the prestige and power of owning the material fragments of ancient history. Going beyond institutions, Çelik also unravels the complicated interactions among individuals?Westerners, Ottoman decision makers and officials, and local laborers?and their competing stakes in antiquities from such legendary sites as Ephesus, Pergamon, and Babylon. Recovering perspectives that have been lost in histories of archaeology, particularly those of the excavation laborers whose voices have never been heard, About Antiquities provides important historical context for current controversies surrounding nation-building and the ownership of the past.
Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know by
The destruction of ancient monuments and artworks by the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has shocked observers worldwide. Yet iconoclastic erasures of the past date back at least to the mid-1300s BCE, during the Amarna Period of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty. Farmore damage to the past has been inflicted by natural disasters, looters, and public works.Art historian Maxwell Anderson's Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to KnowRG analyzes continuing threats to our heritage, and offers a balanced account of treaties and laws governing the circulation of objects; the history of collecting antiquities; how forgeries are made and detected; how authenticworks are documented, stored, dispersed, and displayed; the politics of sending antiquities back to their countries of origin; and the outlook for an expanded legal market. Anderson provides a summary of challenges ahead, including the future of underwater archaeology, the use of drones, remotesensing, and how invisible markings on antiquities will allow them to be traced.Written in question-and-answer format, the book equips readers with a nuanced understanding of the legal, practical, and moral choices that face us all when confronting antiquities in a museum gallery, shop window, or for sale on the Internet.
Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century by
Islamic Art and the Museum provides a historical and conceptual analysis of Islamic art and documents the successes and failings of its presentation in museums worldwide. The contributors challenge existing notions on the research, methodology, and analysis of Islamic art and investigate the extent to which socio-historical and anthropological approaches result in new analytical perspectives. They also examine the difficulties that need to be overcome when presenting Islamic art to avoid reducing the objects merely to the visual and aesthetic. Museums covered in detail include Brooklyn Museum's Arts of the Islamic World Galleries and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario. Edited byBenoît Junod,Georges Khalil,Stefan Weber, andGerhard Wolf.
Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums - And Why They Should Stay There by
The fabulous collections housed in the world's most famous museums are trophies from an imperial age. Yet the huge crowds that each year visit the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, or the Metropolitan in New York have little idea that many of the objects on display were acquiredby coercion or theft.Now the countries from which these treasures came would like them back. The Greek demand for the return of the Elgin Marbles is the tip of an iceberg that includes claims for the Benin Bronzes from Nigeria, sculpture from Turkey, scrolls and porcelain taken from the Chinese Summer Palace, textilesfrom Peru, the bust of Nefertiti, Native American sacred objects, and Aboriginal human remains.In Keeping Their Marbles, Tiffany Jenkins tells the bloody story of how western museums came to acquire these objects. She investigates why repatriation claims have soared in recent decades and demonstrates how it is the guilt and insecurity of the museums themselves that have stoked the demands forreturn. Contrary to the arguments of campaigners, she shows that sending artefacts back will not achieve the desired social change nor repair the wounds of history.Instead, this ground-breaking book makes the case for museums as centres of knowledge, demonstrating that no object has a single home, and no one culture owns culture.
Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics by
In Latinx Art Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.
The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism by
This unique collection takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its center from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms. This new lens reveals the essential role of the Ottoman city and its patrons and artists in the dialogues that facilitated production, circulation, and consumption of British Orientalist cultures. In this volume, art works are conceptualized as traveling artifacts produced through localized interactions. World renowned scholars and curators analyze the diverse audiences for such art works and the range of differing contexts for their reception both in the 19th century and more recently. In this way, British art is put into a dynamic relationship with an historicized understanding of cultures of collecting and display during the formation of comparative modernities and also with the contemporary postcolonial creation of new national models of exhibition and education. Featuring stunning visuals, this book puts art history in the context of cultural, visual, and literary studies, challenging the orthodoxies of postcolonial theory with the materiality of multiple imperialisms and modernities to offer a new take on the collection, display, and consumption of Orientalist cultures.
The Return of Cultural Treasures, 3rd ed. by
In recent years controversial cases such as the so-called Elgin Marbles have prompted public debate on the return of cultural treasures to their homelands. In this fully revised and expanded third edition of her seminal work, first published in 2007, Jeanette Greenfield analyzes and discusses the historical, legal and political issues surrounding a wide cross-section of similar cases. Bringing the story up to date, this edition includes new chapters on wartime plunders, deliberately destroyed art and the return of ethnic art such as Australian aboriginal and Native American art. It also explores the palaeontological and marine archaeology issues at play and examines new approaches taken by museums when dealing with cultural objects and their return. Written in a highly accessible style with an interdisciplinary approach, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in cultural heritage, archaeology and anthropology, museums, art history and international law.
Scramble for the past : a story of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 by
Scramble for the Past explores the historiography of archaeology in the Ottoman domains between the founding of London’s British Museum in 1753 and that of İstanbul’s Evkaf Museum of Islamic art in 1914.
Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (Debates in Archaeology) by
The recent crisis in the world of antiquities collecting has prompted scholars and the general public to pay more attention than ever before to the archaeological findspots and collecting histories of ancient artworks. This new scrutiny is applied to works currently on the market as well as to those acquired since (and despite) the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which aimed to prevent the trafficking in cultural property. When it comes to famous works that have been in major museums for many generations, however, the matter of their origins is rarely considered. Canonical pieces like the Barberini Togatus or the Fonseca bust of a Flavian lady appear in many scholarly studies and virtually every textbook on Roman art. But we have no more certainty about these works' archaeological contexts than we do about those that surface on the market today. This book argues that the current legal and ethical debates over looting, ownership and cultural property have distracted us from the epistemological problems inherent in all (ostensibly) ancient artworks lacking a known findspot, problems that should be of great concern to those who seek to understand the past through its material remains.
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