How to Return Stolen Art (Update)

12:42Andrea Bayer:Well, I was approached to discuss this and I had already earmarked various pieces that I felt we should not have because I feel that as a museum service, we really shouldn't be fencing stolen goods. I'd identified them through research because most of them had come with quite extensive notes, and one was a confession of theft that ran for four pages. Wow.

13:05Lonnie G. Bunch III:Why would one put down in writing a confession of theft?

13:08Andrea Bayer:Because they thought it was more of a confession of entitlement.

13:14Lonnie G. Bunch III:A confession of entitlement. Consider this yet another reminder that many artifacts in the world's great museums were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm.

13:26Patty Gerstenblith:I would say that the standards of excavation have been completely reversed.

13:31Lonnie G. Bunch III:That is Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director for Collections and Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We also heard from her in the first episode of this series describing how the Met paid$4 million for a gold coffin that turned out to have been looted from Egypt about a decade ago. Bayer admitted the Met's failure.

13:51Patty Gerstenblith:We asked a certain number of questions, but we did not ask nearly enough questions about it.

13:58Lonnie G. Bunch III:The Met was founded toward the end of the 19th century. Its first director was an Italian-American soldier and amateur archaeologist.

14:06Patty Gerstenblith:There is no one in the museum field today that would follow the path that our first director, Luigi Palma di Ceznola would have followed, in which he was able to excavate and remove thousands of objects from Cyprus, which he then was able to sell. That is a paradigm that no one would follow now.

14:28Lonnie G. Bunch III:Still, the Met has recently had dozens of looted artifacts seized from its collections and returned to their countries of origin. This past June, the Met announced that it had surrendered almost$100 million worth of looted artifacts over the last few years under a joint partnership with the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit. But even when a museum does uncover an ill-gotten object, repatriation is not a foregone conclusion. The Glasgow Museums, for instance, repatriated their first Lakota object in 1998. Around the same time, they received a request from Nigeria to repatriate a Benin object.

15:09Lonnie G. Bunch III:Patricia Allen again.

15:10Andrea Bayer:They turned that down straight away.

15:13Lonnie G. Bunch III:Why was that one turned down?

15:15Andrea Bayer:They felt that there were issues with Nigeria, where the objects would go, where they'd end up. There was a certain amount of judgment.

15:22Lonnie G. Bunch III:What do you mean by there were certain judgments or issues there with Nigeria?

15:26Andrea Bayer:Well, I found a letter once from our then director saying that, you know, would they be so quick to refuse a similar request if it had been from Native Americans? There was a certain level of sympathy towards, because the Scottish love a bit of the Wild West.

15:41Lonnie G. Bunch III:But Nigeria, not so much?

15:43Andrea Bayer:It would seem that way. And I'd find this letter when I was researching and writing a paper, but it was from our then director posing that question and thinking that maybe they should have something more objective.

15:54Lonnie G. Bunch III:To be fair, the repatriation of the Benin objects is complicated by the fact that there are several potential claimants, including the Nigerian government and the current Benin Oba. He is a direct descendant of the Oba who was exiled by the British in the 19th century. Recently, things got even more complicated. The outgoing Nigerian president declared that any repatriated Benin artifacts must be handed over to the Oba. On the one hand, this makes sense. He is a descendant of the man from whom the objects were stolen in the first place. But from the perspective of a European museum, this means the repatriated Benin bronzes are less likely to remain accessible to the public.

16:38Lonnie G. Bunch III:Still, the issue of repatriating art is much broader than this one set of artifacts. To that end, the Glasgow museums have created a set of criteria to help guide the process, something more objective, in Patricia Allen's words. There used to be five criteria on this list. Now there are four.

16:59Andrea Bayer:The current criteria are, one, the status of those making the request, which is their right to represent the descendants of the community to whom the artifact originally belonged. The second one is the continuity between the community that created the objects and the current community on whose behalf the request is being made. So there has to be a connection, a continuity there. The third one is the cultural, historical and or religious importance of the objects to the descendant community. And the fourth, which is not necessarily that important anymore, is how the objects were acquired by the museum.

17:40Andrea Bayer:But that's really to put the onus on the museum to prove that these objects are genuine. And what is the old fifth criteria? The fifth was the fate of the object if returned. In that case, you were supposed to have a museum or return the objects to another museum. It made it very difficult for Indigenous communities in particular to put in a claim because many don't have those facilities and those resources. By taking that criterion away and acknowledging that what you're returning is ill-gotten gains, if you like, looted material, that we are effectively either facilitating robbery by sort of laundering this material or actually directly doing it ourselves.

18:22Andrea Bayer:That as thieves, we don't really have a right, perhaps, to set conditions on the return of stolen property.

18:31Lonnie G. Bunch III:At this point, you may find yourself wondering if museums are full of objects that were essentially stolen and if museums are starting to return those objects, will they have anything left to show? You know, I never go to the extreme because that's not an answer. So what is the answer? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

19:26Lonnie G. Bunch III:Thank you. fitness programs, vitamin deficiencies, heart function, or overall wellness. Your results are always backed by science, easy to understand, and from a lab the doctors trust. To get started, visit ondemand.labcor.com slash freak and use code freak to save up to 15 % on selected tests. That's ondemand.labcor.com slash freak and use code freak. Know yourself.

20:02Lonnie G. Bunch III:Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Square, the business platform that helps sellers become neighborhood favorites. No matter if you're selling 3D printed art or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. Square works for all types of businesses like one location shops, pop ups, mobile service businesses and multi location franchises. They support every major payment method, including tap to pay and offer instant access to your earnings through Square checking. Take payments at a kiosk, counter, website or with your phone all synced in real time.

20:36Lonnie G. Bunch III:Plus, Square has built in tools like loyalty and marketing to help you connect with customers and reward them for showing up again. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash Freakonomics. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash Freakonomics. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today.

21:09Lonnie G. Bunch III:Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 milligrams, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.

21:43Lonnie G. Bunch III:in early 2022 nigeria put in a formal request on behalf of the oba of benin to repatriate the stolen benin objects that are in the collection of the glasgow museums the request was made to the Glasgow City Administration Committee, which controls the museums, and the city agreed to the return. Does this mean the Benin object will be leaving Scotland and heading to Nigeria? Not necessarily. Here again is curator Patricia Allen.

22:15Andrea Bayer:We haven't established the full details, but it's possible that we'll hold them for a while. We'll either transfer their ownership officially on paper so that they become theirs that we have on loan. They're quite keen on that approach because they have had so many offers from across the world. Germany is giving everything back, and that's hundreds of objects. The Smithsonian? The Smithsonian is giving back also the Pitt Rivers, Oxford, Cambridge, the Horniman Museum. Aberdeen gave their sole obus head back last year.

22:50Lonnie G. Bunch III:So you're saying that there's a glut of Benin bronzes returning to Nigeria now?

22:54Andrea Bayer:Well, I don't think they describe it as a glut. But it's just they haven't quite got the infrastructure in place.

22:59Lonnie G. Bunch III:And so in the case of the Glasgow museums, it sounds as though the Nigerian government or the parties that represent the government there that you're dealing with would prefer that you keep them here on loan and on display, perhaps?

23:12Andrea Bayer:Yes, I think that is certainly one option because the museum in Ido State, it doesn't have storage. So they're building something within Lagos where the security is better. They had to change the indemnity because the cultural sector did not have sufficient indemnity. So it's now government indemnity.

23:30Lonnie G. Bunch III:Indemnity, we mean insurance, yes?

23:33Andrea Bayer:This is art. This is high art. Gradually, their storage facilities will be developed and then gradually take everything else back.

23:43Lonnie G. Bunch III:The Glasgow Museum's plan may be complicated by the recent announcement that the Nigerian government will hand over repatriated pieces to the Oba himself. But remember, Nigeria has been asking for the Benin bronzes for decades. I asked Alan why the Glasgow Museums finally acquiesced.

24:02Andrea Bayer:As a result of Black Lives Matter, what sparked an interest, our revisiting of the whole subject of cultural repatriation and restitution of objects, is an awareness that maybe we did sort of bad things. And it came out of Black Lives Matter, the connection with that, an atonement for transatlantic slavery. And so Benin was first in line, really.

24:29Patricia Allan:Well, the murder of George Floyd and all the challenges that that brought with it really were crucially important and meaningful to me as a historian of Black America, as a historian of violence in America. Those moments really transformed me. That is Lonnie G. Bunch III.

25:19Patricia Allan:play a role when a nation was in crisis.

25:22Lonnie G. Bunch III:Bunch is the secretary of the Smithsonian based in Washington, D.C. Sometimes called the nation's attic, the Smithsonian is a collection of 21 museums, 21 libraries, a variety of research and education centers, and the National Zoo. Bunch has worked on and off at the Smithsonian since 1978. He became secretary in 2019. Before that, he was founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

25:53Patricia Allan:We started with no staff, no collections, no site, and no money. And how do you build a museum collection from scratch? We knew we wanted to tell stories around the Civil War. We knew we wanted to tell important stories about women in work. And we wanted to talk about the impact of culture. And then what we did is we went around the country in an antique roadshow way and asked people to bring out their stuff. It was really to preserve, to help them preserve grandma's old shawl, that 90s-century photograph. And then if people wanted to give things to us, the first thing we did was say, give it to local museums.

26:30Patricia Allan:We wanted people to benefit in local museums from the Smithsonian's coming to town. But if it was extremely significant, obviously it came back to Washington. In the end, they collected a lot. 40 ,000 artifacts, of which 70 % came out of the basements, trunks, and attics of people's homes.

26:49Lonnie G. Bunch III:This was an entirely different approach than how the first director of the Metropolitan Museum looted artifacts from archaeological sites, or how the British Museum stocked itself with plunder from Britain's empire building.

27:03Patricia Allan:The British Museum in some ways is a colonial creation. That so much of what it collected initially were things that would help them celebrate British identity. Some from internal, others from, you know, India, Africa, other places where the British colonized. The difference with the African-American Museum is, first of all, this was going to be a museum that shared authority and was shaped by community. Not only did we collect material, but in essence, we collected people's stories. The goal was that the artifacts were really the way to give people a sense of ownership. By doing artifacts that sometimes seem common, like an old 19th century iron or a wash pot.

27:50Patricia Allan:Suddenly people could see that they were shaped by this history and they could tell the stories of their own parents or grandparents.

27:58Lonnie G. Bunch III:This experience of creating a museum from scratch led Lonnie Bunch to think more broadly about how any museum builds its collection. And this led to a new institution-wide collections policy at the Smithsonian.

28:13Patricia Allan:I asked a group of curators in 2021 to think about an ethical returns policy, to really think about what should we do with material that is problematic. But I didn't want it simply to be, how do you deal with a problem? What I wanted it to be is to say that as important as scholarship, as provenance, as resources to acquire these collections, equally important is the ethical considerations of how we got them. And so what I wanted to do was to basically add that equation into the mix so that, therefore, no matter what we did, ethical considerations could, in some ways, trump scholarship and other issues.

28:58Patricia Allan:I just wanted to make sure that ethical considerations were as important as anything else in determining what you acquire and what you maintain.

29:06Lonnie G. Bunch III:Based on this new policy, the Smithsonian might deaccession a piece from its collection and return it to the rightful owner, or it might enter into a shared stewardship arrangement with communities or descendants who have made claims to the objects.

29:22Patricia Allan:For example, there are several Native communities who, instead of saying they want material repatriated, they said, you're better at preserving it than we are. Let you keep it as long as we know it's there. So I think it really was a process that would allow us to either return, to negotiate and work effectively with community or with the owners. And then if the choice is made, these materials can stay with us.

29:47Lonnie G. Bunch III:Among the museums that Bunch oversees, in addition to the new Museum of African American History, is the Museum of African Art. This museum had over the years accumulated many artifacts that had been looted from Benin by the British in their 1897 punitive expedition. Brass plaques, ceremonial heads, jewelry, and more. They had come to the Smithsonian primarily by donation from wealthy collectors like Joseph Hirshhorn and from institutions like the Walt Disney Company, which had bought Benin art from the collectors Paul and Ruth Tishman. Under the Smithsonian's new collections policy, Lonnie Bunch committed to repatriating these pieces to Nigeria.

30:32Lonnie G. Bunch III:For some guidance, he turned to an institution that had much larger holdings of Benin bronzes.

30:39Patricia Allan:I had conversations with the British Museum just to understand where they were with this whole process.

30:45Lonnie G. Bunch III:The British Museum, remember, has thus far decided against repatriating their Benin bronzes, although that could change at any moment.

30:54Patricia Allan:And then I had conversations with people from the Nigerian museum community to understand their thinking. In essence, it was a period of negotiations because I wanted to make sure that ultimately we were going to return ownership, no doubt about that. But I also wanted to see if there were a way at least the percentage of this could remain in the country for the people to see.

31:17Lonnie G. Bunch III:Here's what the negotiation led to. The Smithsonian sent 20 of their Benin objects back to Nigeria, while nine more will stay at the Smithsonian on a long-term loan.

31:28Patricia Allan:We had a formal ceremony where representatives of the Nigerian government and I signed a transfer document that gave ownership back, and then ultimately a document that would agree to the long-term loans. We like the idea of being able to have some material on long-term loan that would allow us to both talk about the beauty and creativity of the Benin bronzes, but also about the process.

31:56Lonnie G. Bunch III:So what do we think about this kind of arrangement, where a museum returns a portion of its contested collection and works out a long-term loan for the rest?

32:05Victor Ehikhamenor:I'm kind of excited about this. It actually is a place where really efficient outcomes are going on. That is Tom Wilkening.

32:12Lonnie G. Bunch III:As you can probably tell by his praise of efficient outcomes, Wilkening is an economist at the University of Melbourne. His specialty is called market design.

32:23Victor Ehikhamenor:And market design is the branch of economics that's interested in designing the rules for markets, auctions, and economic institutions.

32:31Lonnie G. Bunch III:Wilkening, along with the University of Chicago economist Michael Kramer, analyzed the market for antiquities.

32:38Victor Ehikhamenor:The Antiquities Project started with discussions with Suzanne Blier and Michael Kramer about 15 years ago. Suzanne is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and she was really interested in whether economics could offer ways to reduce the size of the black market in antiquities and help protect African art in general.

32:58Lonnie G. Bunch III:Most countries already have laws to protect the export of their cultural antiquities.

33:03Victor Ehikhamenor:I would say export bans are partially effective in the sense that they make it more difficult for people to illicitly dig up objects and move them abroad. But they're obviously imperfect.

33:15Lonnie G. Bunch III:Wilkening and Kramer eventually wrote a paper called Protecting Antiquities, a Role for Long-Term Leases.

33:23Victor Ehikhamenor:So the main argument of our paper is that we're asking whether we can complement export bans with fixed-duration long-term leases. Our view is that they can strengthen incentives for maintaining and identifying antiquities and antiquity sites. But because we're going to be restricting things to leases, our view is that that's going to allow countries to preserve their cultural patrimony for the future or in the long run. Let's say 10 years from now, Nigeria is able to recover all the Benin bronzes that were looted in 1897. They're going to have the same issue that museums have all over the world, which is that they'll have more objects than they can actually put in their museum at one time.

34:01Victor Ehikhamenor:Now, there are two ways to deal with that. One, you can create giant storage, and you can store everything and keep it at home. And the issue there is that's still costly. You still have to maintain and protect that storage system. An alternative would be to allow at least a subset of those things to be leased abroad as a way of basically generating either revenue or in-kind transfers for protecting museums or sites.

34:24Lonnie G. Bunch III:This is essentially the arrangement that the Smithsonian has worked out with Nigeria. This idea is not new, by the way.

34:31Victor Ehikhamenor:I would view the King Tut exhibit as a very good template for how to do traveling exhibits.

34:38Lonnie G. Bunch III:The tomb of King Tut, or Tutankhamun, the boy king, was excavated in Egypt by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. It included a stunning gold funerary mask and a variety of other objects.

34:52Victor Ehikhamenor:If you look at Egypt, their King Tut exhibit that has gone all over the U.S., that's essentially a lease system where they've leased off parts of King Tut objects to a third party. That third party has shown that all around the world, and the revenues have gone back to the Cairo Museum. That sort of thing is a way for governments to turn something that right now is something of a cost into something that would be a resource. And it also solves a little bit of this problem of, you know, there is a value for keeping things at home. There's also a value for people in the rest of the world being able to see them.

35:21Lonnie G. Bunch III:So that's one established method of leasing antiquities. Wilkening and Kramer have some other ideas. One is for objects that haven't yet been excavated. In these cases, the right to lease could be granted in exchange for performing the excavation. The British Museum, for instance, could fund and operate an excavation in Syria. The museum would have the rights to exhibit the objects that are found while the objects would officially still belong to Syria. The researchers have a third idea, too.

35:54Victor Ehikhamenor:So the third scenario is probably the most controversial one, which would be offering leases to individuals who reveal objects that are already out of the country.

36:02Lonnie G. Bunch III:In other words, amnesty, essentially, to individuals or institutions who possess objects that were originally looted. In this case, the country of origin would say, yes, those things belong to us. But if you, the illegitimate owner, acknowledge that we are the legitimate owner, you can hang on to them under the terms of a lease. So is this third path of repatriation the best way forward? We'll find out in a minute. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

37:08Lonnie G. Bunch III:Thank you. connect to your tools like meeting notes and calendars, and then draft a reconciliation summary deck. The scheduled tasks feature even lets you automate work in ChatGPT by asking it to do something once, repeat it on a fixed schedule, or monitor changes over time. And the whole time you control what moves forward and what gets approved. ChatGPT work is for when you don't just need an answer, you need help getting the work done. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans.

37:52Lonnie G. Bunch III:Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Figure. Did you know that 40 % of homeowners own their home outright? If that's you, don't let your equity sit idle. Tap it with a home equity line of credit. Figure, the number one non-bank HELOC lender in the U.S., Helps tap equity you've built in your home so you can do things like tackle a renovation or pay down debt. HELOC is a line of credit secured by your home. You can draw what you need, repay, and draw again. Figure offers a 100 % online application. Get approved in five minutes and funding in as few as five days. It's faster than a bank loan and cheaper than a personal loan.

38:27Lonnie G. Bunch III:Check your rate today without impacting your credit at figure.com slash Freakonomics. This post is sponsored by Figure, NMLS ID 1717824. Figure is an equal housing lender. For more information about their licensing, visit NMLSConsumerAccess.org. Figure's HELOC is subject to credit approval and terms apply. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Strawberry.me. Here's an interesting question. Why do some people with average talent outperform people who are objectively smarter? It usually isn't because they work harder and it isn't because they got lucky. More often, it's because they make better decisions and they have someone who gives them better feedback.

39:10Lonnie G. Bunch III:That's why career coaching with strawberry.me can be so valuable. A good coach helps you gain clarity on where you want to go, build a strategy to get there and stay accountable as you execute it. Whether you are pursuing a promotion, exploring a career change or trying to land a new job. Instead of relying on guesswork or waiting for the right time, you will work with a professional coach to identify what's holding you back, create a practical career plan, and move forward with confidence. Go to strawberry.me slash Freakonomics and get 50 % off your first coaching session. That's strawberry.me slash Freakonomics.

39:47Lonnie G. Bunch III:It's like therapy for your career.

40:00Lonnie G. Bunch III:In 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced an agreement with Greece regarding a large collection of antiquities that had been acquired over the years by the American billionaire Leonard Stern. Here again is Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director of Administration and Collections at the Met. Mr.

40:20Patty Gerstenblith:Stern owned approximately 160 important Cycladic objects. He got us into a discussion with the Greek government and with the Cycladic Museum in Athens about this somewhat complicated but logical path forward.

40:40Lonnie G. Bunch III:The Cycladic objects are primarily marble figures and vessels carved thousands of years ago in the Cyclades, a group of islands off the Greek coast. The complicated but logical agreement that Bayer mentioned has put Leonard Stern's personal collection on display at the Met for 25 years. You can go see them there right now. But the objects ultimately belong to Greece.

41:04Patty Gerstenblith:And then at the end of 25 years, there will be a further discussion to see whether some or all of them remain for an additional 25 years, and then they will go back to Greece. At the same time, we're also in an agreement with the Greek museums to do some fundamental research projects with them to publish these objects.

41:25Lonnie G. Bunch III:Even before the Met exhibition opened, some of these pieces were put on display in Greece. And after 10 years at the Met, some of the collection will travel to Greece in exchange for other cycladic works to be displayed at the Met. Why such a complicated arrangement?

41:43Patty Gerstenblith:Because we are convinced that given the complexity of the world we find ourselves in, these kind of situations are going to arise. And we want to help find solutions that are satisfying to all partners.

41:59Lonnie G. Bunch III:It's worth noting that Leonard Stern did not donate his collection directly to Greece. He donated it to a Delaware-based nonprofit called the Hellenic Ancient Culture Institute, whose board members have close ties to the Greek culture ministry. Here is the legal scholar Patti Gerstenblith, whose specialty is cultural heritage.

42:20Patty Gerstenblith:It has gotten a lot of disapproval amongst Greek heritage professionals. I find it very problematic because what we have is an agreement between a private museum and a U.S. corporation in which the collector gets his tax benefit. The objects, most of them or many of them, stay in the United States. And this museum in Greece gets a benefit.

42:44Lonnie G. Bunch III:Gerstenbliff is concerned that Greece doesn't have control over the collection, even though they have been given ownership on paper. She thinks the Smithsonian's arrangement with Nigeria over the Benin bronzes is a better model. But the economist Tom Wilkening is more sympathetic toward the Greek arrangement.

43:03Victor Ehikhamenor:It's not a place where I'm an expert, but most of that collection looks like it has very strong provenance.

43:09Lonnie G. Bunch III:What Wilkening means is that the Leonard Stern collection isn't obviously full of looted or stolen objects.

43:16Victor Ehikhamenor:And so it wouldn't have been something that Greece would have gotten back without some sort of an agreement. And it's something where all parties essentially have won, right? In the short run, those things are shown at the Met. That was the place where Leonard Stern wanted to donate his collection in the first place. In the long run, Greece gets all of its objects back and can control its cultural patrimony. And so that looks like maybe a nice blueprint for a number of these cases of trying to either return objects or get collections back into the hands of the country of origin.

43:45Lonnie G. Bunch III:So this approach of pairing repatriation with a lease agreement has helped resolve some of the thorniest disputes around contested artifacts. Maybe it will eventually provide a solution for one of the longest running and most controversial disputes of this type, the British Museum's ownership of the Parthenon marbles. That's the set of sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens by the British diplomat Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. Greece has long argued that they were taken illegally and should be returned. Over the past several years, the British Museum and the Greek government have been in discussions about the fate of the marbles, but no concrete plan has yet been made.

44:29Lonnie G. Bunch III:Here again is Andrea Bayer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

44:33Patty Gerstenblith:The only thing I can mention about the Parthenon marbles is that every time I read one thing, I almost immediately read its opposite the following day. So I know that they're in deep, deep and difficult discussions back and forth, but I don't have the crystal ball that tells you how it comes out.

44:53Lonnie G. Bunch III:The British Museum is famous for not saying much publicly about their various controversial holdings, including their Benin bronzes. We discovered this firsthand during our months of reporting for this series, when we couldn't even get a museum spokesperson to engage with us, to say nothing of a more senior official. And then, as I mentioned earlier, we went to London to see the Benin Bronzes for ourselves, accompanied by the Oxford professor and author Dan Hicks. But the Africa galleries happened to be closed that day. And even before we got into the museum, security guards asked us to surrender our recording equipment.

45:36Andrea Bayer:Anything like this is an absolute flat no. What happens is we get a lot of trouble with protesters with a view to discredit the museum. So this is why we took such a hard line on Estes.

45:45Lonnie G. Bunch III:In case you missed that, the guard said the museum takes a hard line because they get in a lot of trouble with protesters. Not long ago, for instance, there was a large demonstration against one of the museum's big sponsors, BP, the giant oil and gas company that's headquartered in London.

46:03Patty Gerstenblith:The sun is setting on BP, make BP history. The museum is essentially displaying stolen artifacts that are ironically taken from spaces where indigenous people are affected by BP's extraction.

46:19Lonnie G. Bunch III:After our visit to Glasgow, where the curator Patricia Allen showed us the Benin bronzes that the Kelvin Grove Museum plans to return to Nigeria, we went back to London and I tried once more to see the much larger collection of Benin bronzes at the British Museum. No professional recording equipment, just an iPhone. So you'll have to excuse the audio quality. Okay, proceeding in. Front door. I've been through security. Heading toward the Sainsbury Gallery, which means going through the big rotunda. Okay, here we go. Toward Africa. I think it's open. There it is. Okay. Okay. And the sign says there is indeed a tour, and I think I see her coming, perhaps.

47:13Hello. How do you do?

47:16Lonnie G. Bunch III:Would love to go to Africa with you. Thank you. I'm Stephen. What's your name? Anne. Nice to meet you. Anne is a volunteer who's been giving tours at the British Museum for years. She's originally from southern Germany. Several German museums, by the way, have been repatriating their Benin bronzes to Nigeria. Anne leads us downstairs into the underground Africa galleries. It's a small tour group, just me and a family from Ireland. Nearby, some school groups are also touring, so it's pretty noisy. Anne notes that some of the objects we'll see were acquired by bloodshed.

47:56Patty Gerstenblith:Some objects have come into the museum as a direct result of military intervention. and many relate to the European colonization of large parts of Africa.

48:09Lonnie G. Bunch III:She shows us some contemporary works, some ceramic pots, and finally we make our way to the Benin bronzes. The main attraction is a grid of the famous wall plaques that had been stripped from the Benin palace, some of them 500 years old. each plaque representing a key moment in the history of the kingdom. The Nigerian artist Victor Ihamenor told us earlier what it was like for him to first see how these plaques are displayed at the British Museum.

48:43Patricia Allan:They are disjointed because it's like taking William Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet. You go to first act, you tear the page off. Then you go to the last act and you tear it off. then you paste it on the wall and call it William Shakespeare. I mean, the sentences are nice. The phrases are great.

49:04Lonnie G. Bunch III:You can quote from them, but it's not the entire story. There are many other Benin objects here besides the wall plaques. There is a large cast head of an oba or a Benin king. As we learned earlier, each new oba would commission a sculpture of his predecessor to be mounted on an altar. There is an impressive sword with a cross motif made of iron and brass, a large and beautiful cockerel cast in brass. The wall labels describe not just the objects themselves, but who gave them to the British Museum. The most frequent donor, from what I can tell, is the UK Foreign Office, the British equivalent of the U.S.

49:45Lonnie G. Bunch III:State Department. In most museums, this might stand out. But here, where many of the treasures are the physical emblem of conquest, of empire building, of punitive expeditions like the one that happened in Benin in 1897, I guess it makes sense that the foreign office is such a major donor. And our tour guide does mention the punitive expedition that brought the Benin bronzes to the museum. And then a woman in our tour group speaks up.

50:19Patty Gerstenblith:It was a bit of a massacre, wasn't it?

50:21Lonnie G. Bunch III:Yes, Anne agrees. It was a bit of a massacre. She says the British Museum acknowledges this, and she adds that there have been talks lately with the Nigerian government.

50:31Patty Gerstenblith:I think there's a lot of compassion involved. I think other museums have handed sales back. Germany has handed theirs back. That's right, yes. But I can only say for myself, maybe that is possibly not the right course just now. But this is personal, personal. And there's such a lot of controversy about it, of course.

50:55Lonnie G. Bunch III:It's a little hard to hear Anne, but she says, I can only say for myself that repatriating the bronzes is possibly not the right course just now. When the tour was over and Anne had gone back upstairs, I asked the woman from our tour group, her name was Nula, what she thought about the British Museum's position on the Benin Bronzes.

51:18Patty Gerstenblith:The British Museum is holding out, regardless of what they're talking about. Now, she may have a point, maybe, if this museum isn't ready. I don't know. I hadn't heard that part of it. There is a big campaign going on. But it's also like that they have loads of these pieces, half of which aren't even being exhibited. That's the other thing. in the archives. Like, they're all in the archives. So that's the other part of it that seems a bit off-like, you know. It's not like they're displaying them all here anyway.

51:47Lonnie G. Bunch III:Were you surprised by her opinion?

51:50Patty Gerstenblith:It's what I'd expect. Well, just in the sense that, you know, she's working here.

51:54Lonnie G. Bunch III:But I thought from a volunteer it might be a little different.

51:57Patty Gerstenblith:She probably gets the museum perspective on it as what she hears. So I don't know. That's why I just, you know, given that she was German, I was wondering what she'd say about Germany. and he'd have a different take on it.

52:17Lonnie G. Bunch III:My visit to the British Museum made me want to go back to Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian director, for some perspective.

52:27Lonnie G. Bunch III:I recognize you're an historian and not a psychotherapist, but when we think about the British Museum and what it represents to Great Britain, I wonder if one of the challenges is that the museum, to some degree, does represent the empire that is essentially gone. But in addition to that, their current democracy is fragile. And in a way, the museum itself represents a fragile national psyche. Do you think that is perhaps complicating this issue for them?

53:02Patricia Allan:And it's crucially important to recognize that cultural institutions like the Smithsonian, like the British Museum, are part of the glue that holds a country together through the way it shapes our identity. One of the things that you see in the UK, really even going back to the commemoration of the Bicentennial, the end of the slave trade, is you begin to see this grappling with what does it mean to be British? And how does there room for everybody not to just be part of the empire, but to show how that has shaped profoundly who the UK is? And I just think that's a fascinating dilemma and challenge.

53:43Lonnie G. Bunch III:I'd like you to talk about the role of a museum in the modern era, especially older museums. And when people object to the return of works that are in museums, one argument is that if you pull this thread, the whole thing comes undone.

54:01Patricia Allan:Well, I always think that people go to the worst case scenario. When we began to do repatriation of native materials, the notion was everything would be gone. That's not true. But what is true is that museums can no longer simply be what they once were. They can no longer simply be collections of material that really tells old stories, not new stories. Museums have to recognize that they have an obligation to make their community better, whether that is raising issues of social justice, whether it's raising environmental issues.

54:40Lonnie G. Bunch III:Now, when I walk in one of the entrances to the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian, I'm greeted by this lovely Maui stone figure from Easter Island. I'm just curious about a fellow like him. How was he acquired? Is something like that potentially liable to reclamation? It could be.

55:03Patricia Allan:I don't know the specifics of that at all. The goal is to basically recognize that if these issues get raised, you've got a process to move forward to handle them, rather than either being ad hoc or rather to be under the whim of a particular director or curator.

55:19Lonnie G. Bunch III:Let me ask you about a potentially different objection for a modern museum audience. At the main entrance of the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian, there's this amazing wild African elephant that we are told by the tag was killed by a big game hunter in Angola in 1955. Would the museum accept that elephant today?

55:43Patricia Allan:You know, I don't know. I think that we would really look at it from different points of view, that's for sure. And then, you know, depending upon the educational value, depending upon how we've received it, there would be questions to be asked. What I love about it is we get to ask those questions.

56:05Lonnie G. Bunch III:You have a hard job, I have to say. I don't mean just you. It's not just you. But these are hard questions, aren't they?

56:09Patricia Allan:You know, I think that the job of good scholars, the job of the Smithsonian, is to tackle the hard questions, not the easy ones. And that, yeah, there are days I'd love to have an easy month, but the reality is museums matter. They matter because they have to have a contemporary resonance. This is something you need to grapple with. And I think the question really is, are you institutions that look back or institutions that look ahead?

56:45Lonnie G. Bunch III:Thanks to Lonnie G. Bunch III and all the museum curators and directors who spoke with us for this series. Thanks to the scholars and researchers and prosecutors. A huge thanks to producer Morgan Levy. And thanks especially to you for listening. That is the end of this updated series. We will be back next week with a brand new episode of Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.

57:26Lonnie G. Bunch III:This episode and the entire series was originally produced by Morgan Levy and updated by Dalvin Abouaji. It was edited by Gabriel Roth and mixed by Jake Loomis. We had additional help in London and Glasgow from Zach Lipinski, also in London from Rob Double and London Broadcast Studios, and in Glasgow from Josh Nixon and Upload Studios. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Elaria Montenacourt, Jeremy Johnston, Pete Madden, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.

58:03Lonnie G. Bunch III:As always, thanks for listening. Ah!

58:08Andrea Bayer:I don't know what that was.

58:10Lonnie G. Bunch III:Whoops, were you done?

58:11Andrea Bayer:Yeah, I think that was my ankle, but it's fine. I don't need that. Oh, no, I'm sorry about that.

58:14Lonnie G. Bunch III:That's okay.

58:15Andrea Bayer:I'm just a limp.

58:20Patty Gerstenblith:The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.

58:27Patty Gerstenblith:Hey, friends. Ted Danson here. And I want to let you know about my new podcast. It's called Where Everybody Knows Your Name. with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrelson, sometimes. Doing this podcast is a chance for me and my good bud Woody to reconnect after Cheers wrapped 30 years ago. Plus, we're introducing each other to the friends we've met since, like Jane Fonda, Conan O 'Brien, Eric Andre, Mary Steenburgen, my wife, and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And trust me, it's always a great hang when Woody's there. So why wait? Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name wherever you get your podcasts.

59:08Patty Gerstenblith:3 o 'clock, kids are home. Your to-do list isn't done. New Kraft Mac & Cheese Power Mac was made for days like this. Kraft Mac & Cheese Power Mac packs the same irresistible, creamy, cheesy flavor you love, now with 17 grams of protein and 6 grams of fiber. Fuels you up, keeps you going. Because your day doesn't stop. Kraft Mac & Cheese Power Mac. Find it at your favorite retailer. The best thing ever keeps getting better.

1:00:03Victor Ehikhamenor:www.fibob.com slash financial decoder.