‘Culture knows no political borders’

Tiffany Jenkins talks to James Cuno about looting, exporting and owning antiquities

James Cuno is a busy man. I pin him down between two projects: promoting the new Modern Art Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, opening next year, where he is president and director, and the launch of his new book Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton University Press, £14.95), which is provoking controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was prompted to write it, he tells me, ‘as an intervention into the war, or should I say “discussion”, between museums, archaeologists and nation states, about who can acquire antiquities’.

The work is a strident critique of the cultural property laws that prevent artefacts from antiquity (defined as an object over 150 years old) being exported out of the state within which they are excavated. Cuno is concerned that these laws, designed to prevent the looting of archaeological sites, are at best ineffective: ‘The number of antiquities acquired by museums has slowed to a trickle, but looting has increased. So where’s it going?’ he asks. ‘Worst of all,’ he argues, ‘these laws…advance nationalism and identity politics, which obscures the true meanings of objects and closes down our understanding of them.’

Cultural property laws, according to Cuno, promote a spurious link between antiquities and present-day governments which they use for their own ideological purposes. ‘Those in power in nation states, in whose jurisdiction antiquities lie, want a kind of legitimisation of their political position,’ he says. ‘They use the laws to perpetuate a sense of legitimacy, that the modern nation state is descended from antiquity, which it simply isn’t!’ he exclaims.