Set art free | 10 March 2012

Let’s not waste more millions ‘saving’ Old Masters

Last week the National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland proudly announced that they had jointly raised £45 million to buy Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ from the Duke of Sutherland, thereby ‘saving it for the nation’. A few days before, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that it would be blocking export licences for various exhibits due to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Turks said they would not release the artifacts until items in UK and US museums excavated in Anatolia during the 19th century were returned to the Turkish state.

What links these two apparently unrelated events is a single, highly questionable principle: cultural nationalism. Nations and institutions will go to enormous lengths to prevent the ‘loss’ of art and artifacts overseas — and to recover those that have been exported in the past.