Another visit by another Greek premier to London, another bout of speculation about the future of the Parthenon marbles, another poll showing that the British people are happy to see them shipped off to Athens, another slew of liberal commentators expressing with characteristic superficiality the view that the marbles “belong” in Greece, another failure by almost everyone to ask what might be lost if that were to happen.
Not that it constitutes much of an argument, but in fact the level of public support for the restitution of the marbles seems to have dropped by over 20% in the last decade, from 77% to 53%. It may be that this has something to do with the issue becoming yet another front in the culture wars, with Reform and its media boosters coupling the metopes in the British Museum with the fate of the Chagos islands. One result is a double irony in which the Right wants to charge people to see the marbles and the Left advocates free entry not to see them.
A question of belonging?
The case for return doesn’t change much. In 2022 The Times, whose recent editors have had an uncomplicated relationship with the arts, changed its previous view and made a limp call for the marbles to go back. “The sculptures belong in Athens” said the anonymous leader writer, “they should now return”.
But why do they “belong in Athens”? It’s obvious that the question of belonging can’t solely rely on where something was made or originally used or displayed. For example if you want to study British art then (when it reopens again next year) you’ll need to travel to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. The Center holds 2000 paintings, 20,000 drawings and watercolours, 31,000 prints and 200 sculptures, including works by Blake, Turner, Gainsborough, Constable, Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Stanley Spencer, Gwen John and Walter Sickert. The website is here:
https://britishart.yale.edu
No one as far as I know has ever argued that this collection belongs in Britain by virtue of being by British artists and (mostly) having been made in these islands. Most Britons simply have no idea it even exists.
Perhaps the “wanting” is partly the point. The sense I got from the Times editorial was simply that the Greeks seemed to care about owning the marbles far more than the British did, so what harm could be done by indulging this desire? As I will argue, the answer is “quite a lot”, but I’ll come to that later, because we have to dispose of some embedded myths first.