Who owns a cultural object? Who has the right to determine cultural values? And how can public institutions best exercise cultural responsibility?
It's a timely set of questions as we consider the implications of the National Gallery of Australia's return of ancient Indian sculptures. Or the British Museum's refusal to return Indigenous objects. Or American author Lionel Shriver's (pictured) rejection of minority cultural identities while hoping that the social rejection of cultural appropriation is a 'passing fad'. Each of these events unleashes complex, painful consequences that can undermine cultural value or cultural safety.
Like many museums around the world who constantly negotiate colonial appropriations and contemporary deceptions, the National Gallery of Australia has been troubled in recent years by the problem of provenance.
In 2014, the NGA's $5m Shiva Nataraja was found to have been stolen, and former director Ron Radford strenuously defended the institution's due diligence processes. Earlier this year, two further objects, Goddess Pratyangira and Worshippers of the Buddha, have been identified as part of a smuggling operation, their documentation falsified and the conditions of their creation disputed.
'This new evidence means the NGA cannot legally or ethically retain these works,' director of the National Gallery of Australia, Gerard Vaughan, told the ABC. 'Returning them to India is unquestionably the right thing to do.'
In each case, an object acquired on the basis of its cultural value has been found to have no such value. And while public institutions exist to uphold such values, determining those values is a complex matter — as is the right to determine them.
Vaughan's statement of a clear ethical position makes a stark contrast to the position taken by the most infamous of the world's public institutions in this regard: the British Museum. As Gary Foley reminded a full house at the Greek Centre last year, the British Museum still has many significant Australian Indigenous works and cultural objects, including the skull of Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy.
When Foley and the Dja Dja Wurrung evoked the right to repatriate rare works of Victorian Aboriginal bark art on loan to Melbourne Museum in 2003, the Victorian government changed the law, allowing the works to return to the British Museum.
"Telling stories that are not ours to tell denies people the platform, the voice and the right to tell their own stories. Exhibiting objects that are not ours to show denies people the possibility, the place and the right to present their own histories."
In addressing a Greek audience, Foley was keen to mobilise activism that would align the return of Aboriginal cultural objects with the most high-profile of the British Museum's questionable acquisitions: the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, named for the British Lord who sawed the artworks off the pediment of the Parthenon for his own personal collection, then subsequently sold them to the British government.
On the ethics of its ownership of such icons of Greek history, the position of the British Museum is unambiguous: the institution sees no challenge to its right to tell Greece's story. 'The Trustees are convinced that the current division allows different and complementary stories to be told about the surviving sculptures, highlighting their significance within world culture and affirming the place of Ancient Greece among the great cultures of the world.'
That statement on the Museum's website gives a British account of how Lord Elgin came to be in possession of the marbles, quotes no Greek sources, and then ends with a reading list which includes only British works published by Oxford University Press or by the British Museum themselves.
Nor does the British Museum's historical account acknowledge its own impacts on other nations as crucial to the story of cultural acquisition: reducing the destructive impact of invasion, looting and colonisation to 'Europe's complex history' is unacceptable in 2016.
The British Museum has been obliged to become 'the most generous lender in the world', as they describe themselves, precisely because they refuse to acknowledge the right to cultural ownership. 'The Trustees are convinced' because they need only convince themselves.
That right, of course, is a complex proposition: the ownership of a cultural object may remain in dispute, while in practice the object remains in the possession of that problematic institution. What about cultural values themselves? Who has the right to stake a claim on cultural identity?
In recent weeks, Australian audiences have been disappointed and offended by American writer Lionel Shriver's appearance at two writers festivals. In Melbourne, she rejected the right of LGBTQIA people to see their gender as cultural identity, asserting that gender was a matter of biology alone. In Brisbane, she rejected the ethics of only telling the stories you have the right to tell, and hoped that 'the concept of "cultural appropriation'" is a passing fad'.
In response to the Brisbane Writers Festival talk, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who walked out of it, wrote: 'Cultural appropriation is a 'thing', because of our histories. The history of colonisation, where everything was taken from a people, the world over. Land, wealth, dignity… and now identity is to be taken as well? In making light of the need to hold onto any vestige of identity, Shriver completely disregards not only history, but current reality.' On the impacts of that reality, this reproof of Maxine Beneba Clarke to Shriver reads like a punch to the gut.
There is a great deal at stake in these questions of cultural ownership and cultural authority. Telling stories that are not ours to tell denies people the platform, the voice and the right to tell their own stories. Exhibiting objects that are not ours to show denies people the possibility, the place and the right to present their own histories.
When Vaughan expresses what is 'unquestionably the right thing to do', he acknowledges his cultural responsibility. To remain in possession of objects acquired unethically would undermine both the authority of his institution, and the integrity of an Australian culture that respects cultural ownership. It's an ethics that both the British Museum and Shriver would do well to observe.
Writer and curator Esther Anatolitis is director of Regional Arts Victoria and an advocate for the arts. She tweets @_esther