The Cheeky Scholar
Listen as smart – and cheeky – scholars share their knowledge about culture, art, and history... and bust a whole lot of myths along the way.
The Cheeky Scholar
Are Museums Lying About Their Antiquities?
Are museums lying about their antiquities? Is the Gladiator film an accurate depiction of life in ancient Rome? Strap in for a wild ride with Liz Marlowe, archaeologist and whistleblower, as she uncovers the dirty truth behind the global trade of Roman antiquities, and describes what Hollywood gets wrong about ancient Rome.
Elizabeth Marlowe, Chair of the Department of Art and Professor at Colgate University, nominates brussel sprout ice cream as the worst flavor, kick-starting our episode with a laugh. But we quickly move to more pressing matters: the shadows cast over Roman antiquities and the ethical dilemmas museums face. Elizabeth shares eye-opening insights from her 2022 article, "When Will Museums Tell the Whole Truth About their Antiquities?" and we navigate the murky waters of artifact provenance and institutional responsibility.
Through Liz's investigative lens, we expose how many US museums have been less than transparent about the looted origins of their Roman collections. From photographing gallery labels to sparking legal actions that lead to the repatriation of artifacts to Turkey, this episode reveals the often-concealed truths behind those ancient treasures. We also dissect the broader implications of these practices, questioning how the illicit trade continues and what changing attitudes could mean for the future of artifact acquisition.
For the first time on a general media outlet, Liz shares the story of one of the most influential antiquities dealers in U.S. history – Jerome Eisenberg, who teamed up with an insurance salesman to market ancient artworks with promises of financial returns. We discuss the fallout that ensued when ethical norms about antiquities shifted between the 1980s and 2000s.
Finally, we turn our attention from the allure of artifacts as investments to Hollywood’s portrayal of ancient Rome. Liz critiques Hollywood's romanticized yet historically flawed depictions of ancient Rome and we discuss how these portrayals feed into modern ideologies, sometimes with negative consequences. This episode promises to challenge your understanding of cultural heritage and the ethics of preserving our past. Don't miss it!
Elizabeth Marlowe in Hyperallergic
“When Will Museums Tell the Whole Truth About Their Antiquities?”
https://hyperallergic.com/760120/when-will-museums-tell-the-whole-truth-about-their-antiquities/
“A Cleveland Museum’s Bad Bet on a Looted Roman Statue”
https://hyperallergic.com/862516/cleveland-museum-bad-bet-looted-roman-statue/
Jale İnan, Turkish archaeologist - Biography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jale_İnan
Liz’s email contact:
emarlowe@colgate.edu
Liz on X:
https://x.com/ElizMarlowe
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Hello everyone, welcome to the Cheeky Scholar. This is the podcast where smart and cheeky scholars share their knowledge about history, art and culture and bust a whole lot of myths along the way. I'm your host, dr Lara Ayad. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before, welcome back. Okay. Well, I am very excited to have Elizabeth Marlowe on the show, on the Cheeky Scholar podcast show on the Cheeky Scholar podcast. And before we get into our conversation talking about antiquities, museums, ancient Roman pop culture, before I introduce you and get into your bio, what is the worst ice cream flavor that you could ever concoct for your worst enemy? I've been sort of pulling different ideas from my guests and seeing we've already got a few things on the menu Smoked salmon, blueberry and sardines. What's something really terrible that you could come up with?
Elizabeth Marlowe:I think that the contribution I can make to that list is the one vegetable I've never outgrown my distaste for, and that would be Brussels sprouts. So the idea of Brussels sprout ice and that would be Brussels sprouts. So the idea of, yeah, brussels sprout ice cream just would be torture to me.
Lara Ayad:That would be torture. That would be torture. Yeah, you'd give it to somebody, you'd like excite them about it and then give it to them and be like this is matcha ice cream, but actually it's Brussels sprout ice cream.
Elizabeth Marlowe:That would be cruel.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah, that would be cruel. But before we get into that, I wanted to just introduce Elizabeth Marlowe to the show. So Elizabeth Marlowe is chair of the Department of Art at Colgate University in Hamilton, new York. She's also professor of art history and director of the Museum Studies Program at Colgate University in Hamilton, new York. She's also professor of art history and director of the museum studies program at Colgate, and Liz loves going to museums, hanging out with her kids and taking walks with her recently adopted puppy. So I understand that you recently adopted a puppy.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, very adorable little Bernadoodle. So a cross between a poodle and a Bernice mountain dog oh my god, that sounds amazing.
Lara Ayad:You know, I had to look up pictures of what a Bernadoodle was when you told me about it and I was like it looks like a little teddy bear, it's like it's the cutest thing in the world insanely acute and we got it from a rescue.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So, like, able to do like the virtuous thing, but also adore like, yeah, have this thing that really does look like a teddy bear.
Lara Ayad:Oh my God. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing pictures of this little puppy. Did you, did you give it a name?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Banjo.
Lara Ayad:Banjo that's such a great name for a dog.
Elizabeth Marlowe:She walks around and she's like like all, oh my God.
Lara Ayad:Oh my God, that's so great. Well, we've got a lot of dog lovers on the show, because the first guest I brought on is also like she. She actually does like this, this thing where she fosters dogs that are going to be adopted out and she's been doing it for years. So we've got tons of dog lovers on the show, so yeah, so I'm really looking forward to seeing pictures of Banjo.
Elizabeth Marlowe:I'm full of admiration for people who can do that. I feel like I would just get so attached. I would end up like just keeping all the dogs.
Lara Ayad:So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it does happen occasionally. It does happen occasionally, but okay. So we're going to talk about really cool things, but maybe less cuddly and cute. So, liz, you've written a number of books and articles about ancient Roman art, including how museums have handled Roman antiquities in some rather unsavory ways, and I'll put a few of your written pieces in the show notes so that people could go check them out. I'll include links, you know if it's on Amazon. But I wanted to start off our conversation talking about one particular article that you wrote back in 2022 for the art magazine Hyperallergic, and I love the title of this. It's called when Will Museums Tell the Whole Truth About their Antiquities. So can you tell us what are you arguing in this article and what motivated you to write it to begin with?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, and what motivated you to write it to begin with? Yeah, so what I was interested in was this bind that museums are in. You know, museums are often vague in their labels about where their pieces came from, and that can be sometimes for innocent reasons. Sometimes they genuinely don't know, because the person they acquired it from didn't know and they decided it was worth acquiring anyway, even though they didn't have that key information. But sometimes they do know and they just don't reveal it in their labels because if they were to identify the country that the object came from, that opens the door for that country to ask for it back if that country has any reason to think that the piece was looted.
Lara Ayad:Right, because apparently what a lot of some people don't know that you can't just take antiquities or art from another country without actually being legally authorized to do so. Is that right?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Right, yeah, a lot of countries. In fact most countries have one form of national ownership law or another. These can take many different forms, but basically most countries say that objects of important cultural patrimony belong to the nation and they can't be exported without getting permission from the government to do that. And the government very rarely says yes to that. So most of the time if there's an important ancient artifact that shows up on the market, if it doesn't have proof that it was legally exported, if it doesn't have that kind of government document, it's a safe assumption that it was looted, right that as in illegally exported from that country.
Lara Ayad:Right, and how many museums? Sorry, so how many museums have? I mean, do a lot of museums have a lot of looted artworks in them? Because you could go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can go to the Cleveland Museum I mean you see antiquities or the Walters Art Museum in Maryland. How much of this was brought over legally and how much of it was not? I mean the tricky question.
Elizabeth Marlowe:I mean the short answer to your question is yes, all museums have huge numbers of looted objects, have huge numbers of looted objects. Where it gets more complicated than that is that we only consider objects to be looted if we know that they left their country of origin after that country passed its national ownership laws. So that means we have to have two pieces of information we have to know which specific country it came from and we have to know the date when it left that country, right? If we don't know one of those two, if we don't know both of those things, there's no way to say whether a piece is looted or not.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So so it's it's a very gray area right.
Lara Ayad:It's not a question of you know. Like you know, it's not a black and white question. It's a question that is a function of how much we know about the piece. That's just incredible so.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So when you wrote this article for hyper allergic, was there a particular museum that you had in mind or that kind of triggered you to write this?
Elizabeth Marlowe:So the interesting thing and let me take one step back the thing that makes this really complicated, especially if you work on artworks from the Roman period, which is my area of expertise the problem with the Roman Empire and I think about it every day the problem with the Roman Empire is that it encompasses more than 40 modern countries.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So if you have a portrait statue of a Roman, there's no way to know just from looking at it which of those 40 countries it came from. So if a museum is acquiring it and nobody said, oh, this came from Tunisia, this came from Switzerland, this came from Turkey, if nobody tells them which country it came from, it's fine for the museum to acquire it, even if it has no paperwork whatsoever. So it was clearly illegally exported from somewhere. But if we don't know where it was illegally exported from, then there's no identifiable victim and the museum will keep it until somebody comes along and says oh, look at this, I have a photograph of that exact statue in Italy in 1952 or you know so so sometimes with with subsequent information we can prove that a piece is looted.
Elizabeth Marlowe:But most of the pieces that surface on the art market don't have a known fine spot right because that information has been carefully suppressed so that it can be bought and sold.
Lara Ayad:And a fine spot is essentially a place where the antiquity was actually originally found, not where it moved to, not a collector's collection, not a museum, not, yeah Right right.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So I was really interested in this kind of epistemological question, right? A question that gets to do that has to do with how we knowistemological question, right, a question that has to do with how we know what we know, right? What kind of evidence do we use to understand things about the past? So the information about where an ancient object came from is an essential data point for our understanding of what a piece is. So what I was really focusing on in that article I chose as just a useful case study for this question there was a group of bronze life-size nude statues of men, right so like life-size naked men in bronze um there sounds like the name of like a really bad gentleman's club or something.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, or a lady's club, however you want to put it, most of which were missing their heads too, which so oh my goodness, life-size without their heads yes, yes, uh. So a whole trove of these were found by accident in a remote village that had been the site of a small town in during the time of the ancient roman empire. These were found in this small village in southern Turkey, southwestern Turkey, at a site called Bubon in the 1960s and there was a huge number of them, like at least a dozen.
Elizabeth Marlowe:We actually don't know how many, because they were found one at a time and they were secreted out of the village and then sold to a middleman, who sold them to a middleman and eventually they all surface on the art market. Bronzes are extremely rare life-size bronzes from the ancient world, but this whole group of them show up on the market more or less all at the same time, more or less all the same size. They all have kind of the same stylistic characteristics and a Turkish archaeologist like within a decade of this happening, a Turkish archaeologist has kind of uncovered the whole story. She's spoken to the original looters, she's re -excavated the site where these were coming out of the ground, she found the pedestals that the statues were originally on, and she publishes it in a couple of different scholarly articles.
Lara Ayad:And that's Jale Inan. I think that's how you pronounce her name.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Right.
Lara Ayad:She was kind of an early whistleblower, a whistleblower in this whole process, right.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Absolutely, and she is like a total hero of mine. She was an amazing person. I really wish I could have met her. She was the first woman to hold a professorship in archaeology in Turkey. She studied in Germany. She's studying while bombs were falling. Her biography is an amazing story, that's incredible.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah. So she uncovers this whole story, she publishes it in scholarly journals. So scholars are aware of all of this. But meanwhile these bronzes are circulating on the art market. Like you know, there's no smoking gun. There were no pictures that were taken at the time when the pieces were coming out of the ground that would allow us to definitively tie these pieces on the market to this act of looting. But the circumstantial evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the fact that this group must have come from this site, mainly because it would be so like it would be such an extraordinary coincidence to have this like known episode, where a bunch of sculptures of this type were found and then a bunch of sculptures of this type and have it not be matching right, so, anyway.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So everybody in the field basically knows that this group of statues came from this site. Many of the statues have found their way into American museums. What I was really interested in is what these American museums are saying about these statues in their labels. Are they acknowledging that this was part of a large group of other statues that are now in museums all over the place, that they were found at a shrine, at a religious sanctuary where the Roman emperors were worshipped as gods? Are they acknowledging that the whole reason we know that this headless, naked man is an image of a Roman emperor. Are they acknowledging that? We know that because of the fine spot, right? Because it was found at a shrine for the worship of the Roman emperors? Are they acknowledging that it comes from the city of Bubon, right? So what I was really interested in was how much of this historical information?
Lara Ayad:are they giving in their labels, right, and how much are they not giving? And how much are they not giving?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, right, if they say they know this is a Roman emperor, do they explain how they know that? So these are the kinds of questions I was interested in. They know that you know. So these are the kinds of questions I was interested in. So, starting in the 20-teens, I was slowly making my way around all the US museums that had these pieces on display and taking pictures of the gallery labels just to see, like, how do they talk about this?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Right, all these museums have the same problem because these pieces all came from the same corpus, but you can use it as a kind of litmus test to get a sense, like, how committed to the truth are these various institutions? How much are they giving away in the label? How much are they pretending not to know? Article that came out in Hyperallergic in 2022. And, spoiler alert, I will say all the you know the museums were all being extremely cagey. They were all kind of pretending that they were able to identify these pieces as Roman emperors just based on their, like, deep knowledge of the style, and they would say things like you know, the style is consistent with the kind of sculptures that were found in Southern Turkey, you know what it's like? No, no, no, you know that because you know the fine spot because of the looting that was published, right, but they were never, they were never admitting it, right.
Lara Ayad:They were just sort of pretending that this was information that they had deduced using their connoisseurship and expertise just kind of like give us information on a label because that's the truth, right, and what you're showing us, Liz, is that actually museums are not being so honest with us or very transparent with audiences and visitors about where exactly pieces come from. And it also kind of we can get into this a little bit later about like perceptions of ancient Rome, but it also kind of masks over the fact that ancient Rome spans over many parts of what's now like the Middle East and parts of Asia and parts of Africa and parts of Europe. That it was a very like multi-ethnic, multicultural, massive empire, right.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, yeah, all of all of that is true, all of that is true.
Lara Ayad:Yeah.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, yeah.
Lara Ayad:So you, so you can't. You were taking pictures of these labels, kind of sleuthing your way through museums. What was, I meann, what happened afte you published this article and kind of shared some of your findings and saying you know something isn't right here.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Like you know, my contribution to scholarship is just this question of how you know how the museums are writing the labels. But the story of the looting, you know that was not my original research. That had all been done in the 1970s by this Turkish archaeologist. She's really the one who put the whole story together. What I hadn't quite thought through was that this article that I published in Hyperallergic was the first time that the story of the looting at Bubon had been told in the digital age and had been told in a format that was open access, and I included hyperlinks to all the museums where the pieces are on display now, so that information was available, you know, to people who are reading through scholarly journals right, and people have access to, like interlibrary loan and people who can read German, you know. But in fact, there had been a lot of barriers to, you know, to a wider audience for this story, whereas my hyperallergic article was making the story available for the first time to a much wider audience.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Suddenly a lot of people were paying attention to Bubon, including cultural officials in Turkey who had expressed some interest in some of the pieces from Bubon in 2012, when there was a moment of kind of an aggressive push for repatriation for some high profile pieces. But this article kind of, I think, got them interested in the looting at Bubon as a whole and they expressed their desire to have all of those pieces repatriated. And it was coming at a moment when there was a very proactive Manhattan District Attorney who is still the Assistant District Attorney, matthew Bogdanos, who's still very much committed to pursuing these kinds of cases. So the stars aligned and this article had this consequence that, yeah, very active investigation was undertaken and since I've published it a whole number of those pieces have gone back to Turkey. Now Many of them are back in Turkey.
Lara Ayad:That's incredible. I mean, it's like it's like you're, you're kind of you're sleuthing. Work as a scholar has essentially helped to get some of this what's sometimes called cultural heritage or cultural patrimony back to the country of origin. And you know it's. It's interesting because when you're describing this, liz, it sounds like you know all those. Those 12 or dozen or so bronze statues went on the market almost at the same time. It's coming from bubon, turkey. You're talking about people digging things up or looting, people sort of acting as the middlemen, if I understood correct, and then you have a lot of like collectors and different individuals, or even sometimes, institutions and museums who get their hands on these artworks. This sounds like a huge international operation. I mean, how big exactly is this illegal or illicit trade in antiquities? Not just I mean, I'm sure it's not just coming from Rome, I know they're even from antiquities coming from Mali and West Africa, antiquities coming from many different parts of the world that have been circulating for decades now. So how big is this?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, there's two parts to your question that I would untangle. I think one question is how much looting is still going on today and how many pieces are still circulating on the market today that were looted maybe 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, that are still considered the cultural property of those countries? Right 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago is still after those countries passed their own cultural patrimony laws. I think I don't know, and scholars don't know. It's an interesting question whether the shift in public opinion and the fact that museums today are exercising more caution around acquiring pieces that don't have good paperwork, good documentation that they were exported legally from their country of origin, Museums are much more cautious about acquiring those today. Is that having a trickle-down effect? Does that mean that collectors are less willing to pay?
Lara Ayad:for them.
Elizabeth Marlowe:I saw that little slip there, yeah, and has the memo reached the looters in the source countries? Have they been told like, hey, you're not there, there isn't much of a market for these anymore? Has the looting actually been reduced as a result of these various measures? I think that's still an open question. What is clearly the case, though, is that people have not stopped buying objects that don't have. That you know that we can only trace back to like 1995. West 57th Street or on Madison Avenue, there's still many, many, many pieces for sale where there isn't clear proof of legal exportation from the country of origin. All there is is documentation that says, like this came from a private collector who bought it in 1987 or whatever. So and that's all you know, that's all. Those are all considered looted antiquities If they don't have proof of legal exportation. They are, they're considered looted and they shouldn't be bought or sold. There was just an article in the newspaper this morning in the New York Times, yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth Marlowe:About someone who you know was acquiring pieces and somehow, like didn't realize that the thing she needed to be asking about was proof of legal exportation from the country of origin.
Lara Ayad:So it sounds like it's interesting because you're talking about public opinion, about the you know, antiquities being in museums and should they be sent back to their countries of origin? You know, and it seems like a lot of people generally say yeah, and should they be sent back to their countries of origin? You know, and it seems like a lot of people generally say yeah, they should. I mean, if they're from that country, they should go back. I've heard conflicting opinions, but what's so interesting about this is the tension between that general public perception and the fact that so many people are still kind of collecting antiquities and are not even aware that they should be asking questions about hey, was this even legally coming from the country? What do you make of that conflict or that tension?
Elizabeth Marlowe:I mean, it's real. I do have sympathy for people who were taught to think about antiquities in one way and then the paradigm shifted and now we think about them in a different way. But these, you know, the opinion doesn't change overnight, right? We're asking people to fundamentally reconceptualize how they understand an ancient artifact. So they may have grown up or gone to school or been taught to look at an ancient artifact, to see it as a beautiful object, to understand it as the heritage of humankind, to believe that the most important thing they can do is to help it get out of the ground and onto a display shelf somewhere where people can see it. You know, that's a very understandable perspective.
Elizabeth Marlowe:But in the last couple of decades we've been taught other ways of thinking about antiquities. We've been taught to understand that without the context, without the knowledge of where they came out of the ground, really all we can say is how lovely it is, right, we can admire its beautiful forms, but any information that it might have been able to give us about the ancient world, anything new it might have been able to teach us, based on where it was found and what else it was buried with, right, All of that is essential for understanding how the object was actually used in the ancient world, and if we don't have that information, that is a terrible loss. So when objects are poorly excavated, right as in taken out of the ground without anybody carefully documenting the whole circumstances of the fine spot, when that happens, that's bad, Right and that's an archaeologist and, as you're a specialist in this archaeologist, that's what they do.
Lara Ayad:They kind of have a almost a scientific system for excavating, whether it's pieces of artworks or architecture, whatever. One of the main methods they use, for instance, to date whatever it is they find is to look for shards of pottery that are found in that same layer of dirt or that same strata, as they call it, and they use that to help date. And if we don't know the date of when something was made, that's taking a huge chunk out of what we can know about original cultural context, like who are the people that made these? Why? Why did they even make it to begin with? How did they use it? What was its significance in their daily lives? Um, and what you're saying, liz, is that when these, these don't get properly excavated or they're looted, we lose that information forever. I mean, can that ever be reconstructed? Is there any way to get that back?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Almost never. It's very difficult to like you know, later on some piece of information comes out. There's a wonderful example, but it's famous because it's so rare. There was the top half of a statue of Hercules that surfaced on the art market. That was acquired by prominent collectors, that ended up going to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and then a couple of years later, the bottom half of the statue came out of the ground in an archaeological excavation.
Lara Ayad:Was it like on the other side of the planet, like what dude kind of loses half of his body?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, I mean basically like looters found it first and then archaeologists went back to the site and found the rest of it, right?
Elizabeth Marlowe:So that's a rare example where, you know, this beautiful statue of Hercules was eventually reassociated with the place in the ground that it was from, but that happens extremely rarely, as you can imagine. I want to say, though, just to go back to your point, right, so, you know, so far we've been talking about kind of two ways of thinking about antiquities. You can understand them as beautiful ancient objects and the heritage of humankind, and that can point you in one direction and lead to one kind of well-intentioned behaviors. You can think about them as archaeological artifacts, where they're meaningless unless we have all this contextual information. But there's lots of other ways of understanding them as well. Right, that makes this a really complicated landscape to navigate, right, there are these source countries that say this is national patrimony, and even that is sort of a complicated that. You know, that requires a whole bunch of like complicated ideas that not everybody is going to agree with, right, turkey wasn't Turkey 2000 years ago.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So we might say yeah, yeah, yeah, there's, you know, there's people who argue that.
Elizabeth Marlowe:You know, that kind of nationalist mindset does not do justice to the complexity of the historical record, to the history of human migration over time.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Right, there's lots of ways in which we can argue about that paradigm.
Elizabeth Marlowe:And then there's even more ways of thinking about these things. Right, we can also think about the very local community, right, say, the farmers who have lived on a plot of land for generations and periodically their plow turns over some little treasure, right, and maybe in their house they have like a whole bookshelf full of things that have come out of the ground in their fields over the course of generations. Right, a tie to the past that they have developed over centuries, finding these archaeological artifacts which, technically, they should be turning over to the Italian state, right, because this is national patrimony. So, all of which is to say there's the art paradigm, there's the archaeology paradigm, there's the national paradigm, there's the small community, farmer, you know, attachment to the soil paradigm, and these are all in conflict with each other, right? So it's. It's kind of no wonder that we are in this place today where all of these competing understandings of antiquity are clashing up against each other right, there's also the antiquities as investment which is a whole other dimension of my research right.
Lara Ayad:Yes, yeah. So this is amazing because and we're going to get into that in a minute, cause cause this article you wrote for hyper allergic wasn't the first time you were a whistleblower, so we'll get into the other instances where you kind of like did a you know, a big kind of almost a scandalous expose on things going on with ancient art and the circulation of antiquities. But it's interesting because you have these different paradigms or these kinds of like. I mean, if I could describe it another way a sort of a story, a meaning making story about antiquities and there's so many different perspectives you can take. And I am fascinated by this localized perspective where you're looking at, like, antiquities as being part of the earth and the land and then whoever is finding them and lives on that land and has been there for a while is forming this relationship with these antiquities. That maybe doesn't fall under nationalist paradigms, doesn't fall also under this idea that antiquities are part of a universal culture, a universal language, which you know I have some mixed feelings about the kind of idea of, like a universal human language to an extent that I mean, europe didn't exist 2000 years ago, there was no concept of Europe, so we can get into that with definitions of Western civilization in a minute, because I think you can speak to that very well. So I just wanted to share that that. I think that's so interesting.
Lara Ayad:Ancient Egypt is a perfect example, too, of a kind of like place and popular culture where people who are not Egyptian at all and have no ancestry from that part of the world think that this is like part of their kind of cultural heritage. And as a modern Egyptian, you know, and the kid of immigrants from Egypt, I kind of have some issues with that. It's like hello, still here, we still exist, we have a cultural patrimony, but of course, like as you said, liz, there's so many other complicated sort of um things at play and like who should benefit from accessing and knowing about these antiquities. I mean, I think that's really such a key question, um. So I just thought I would share that because I think you're, you're, what you're bringing up here is just kind of.
Lara Ayad:I think it just kind of shows that there's not really always an easy way to identify the bad guy and the victim and the hero right, like sometimes those categories can get a little bit muddled. So I wanted to to get to another instance where you were whistleblowing. I think this is another great, a great um example. So you have found out some information about a famous or infamous antiquities dealer in new york named jerome eisenberg. What have you found about eisenberg? What did he do?
Elizabeth Marlowe:yeah, so I should say um, so I haven't blown this whistle yet. In fact, this might be one of the first times I'm no, it's not. It's not the first time I'm telling this story publicly. I've given it in a couple of public talks but as a I'm still working on it as a publication and still trying to figure out what form that publication should take is one of the most prominent was one of the most prominent, best known antiquities dealers in the US.
Elizabeth Marlowe:He was certainly one of the most prolific and long lived. He liked to tell a lot of stories about himself, one of which is that he began dealing antiquities at the age of 12 because he made a little newsletter about Roman coins and you know, he was like a coin collector and he was buying and selling them already at the age of 12. And then he opens a gallery called Royal Athena Gallery and it was in operation for, I want to say, like 70 years. No, maybe he was dealing antiquities for 70 years. Maybe Royal Athena was only in open for business for 60 years or something.
Lara Ayad:But it was extraordinary. When did this take place? Was thiss through the early years of the 21st?
Elizabeth Marlowe:century, I mean really for like 50 years. The second half of the 20th century, we can say, was all like the Eisenberg era, where he was extremely prominent in the field and, you know, among the collecting community he was a prominent and influential figure. The part of his history that I am really interested in and this is a little piece you know, this is a tiny sliver of his overall practice as an antiquities dealer but one of the things he did in the 1980s was that he set up a collaboration, a partnership, with an insurance salesman in Detroit who was in the suburbs of Detroit, actually a guy based in Bloomfield Hills, and I actually think it was the insurance salesman who came to Eisenberg and not the other way around. But at any rate they teamed up and this insurance salesman in Detroit became a so-called gallery agent for Eisenberg's New York City gallery. And what he was doing this insurance salesman was selling antiquities out of Eisenberg's catalogs, so the actual objects were never seen, he was just showing people the catalogs and persuading his insurance customers to buy antiquities as an investment. This was started in the mid-1980s, right, so when everything is like go, go, go, art is an investment. Tangibles are like this hot category and Eisenberg. In his catalogs at the time and in fact throughout his career, all the way up to what he was saying on his websites at the end of his life.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Eisenberg was talking about antiquities being an excellent investment category that routinely yield 8% to 10% returns. That was a claim he was making all the time. He wasn't guaranteeing it right, but he was saying it is normal for antiquities to yield eight to 10 percent returns. And you know, it's sort of fascinating to imagine. You know these guys in Detroit being told about Eisenberg by their insurance salesman. Somebody that they've, you know, I think, formed a close relationship with insurance salesman. Somebody that they've, you know, I think, formed a close relationship with this person has, like, sold them life insurance. So he's like, learned everything about their finances. You know, really kind of a close personal relationship that they would develop. But then he would you know at the end of it he would say like, and, by the way, I've got a great opportunity for you. I've got this connection to this guy in New York and what the investors told me because I was able to interview yeah, you talked to some of these investors.
Lara Ayad:I mean, what were they like? What did they tell you?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, well, you know they were telling me what they were told at the time, which is that this guy in New York you know they were telling me this with great enthusiasm he's a genius, he's a, a guru, he was the model for indiana jones, a couple of them told me. One of them told me he he was the discoverer of the dead sea scrolls. Wait what?
Lara Ayad:did eisenberg wear correct? Did eisenberg wear the hat like? Was that why they were saying he was the model for indiana jones?
Elizabeth Marlowe:yeah, no none of this, none of this of this, but I do think it's interesting that this whole investment scheme got started in the mid 80s, just a couple of years after the Indiana Jones movie came out, after Raiders of the Lost Ark. So I think the idea, you know, of like treasures coming out of the ground from the ancient world, I think was very much part of the zeitgeist at the moment and this whole scheme benefited from that. So he would. So these investors would buy these pieces, being told that you know they should hold onto them for around 10 years that's how they would maximize their returns but that you know this was a, this was a really good investment and you know good chance. It was going to yield eight to 10, 10%. And then every year Eisenberg would send them an appraisal document, an updated appraisal, you know, sort of very fancy looking certificate that I've seen. You know these investors showed me their documents telling them the new value of the piece they bought last year.
Lara Ayad:But they weren't like. Eisenberg didn't sell the piece, he didn't actually know what the new value is, quote, unquote but he was just sending them this document saying that he did know.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, I mean it was. It was a new appraisal based on nothing other than the fact that a year had gone by.
Lara Ayad:It's almost like a stock. It's almost like Eisenberg was treating the antiquities and their monetary value is like the way that stocks sort of operate, which is fascinating to me. It's almost like he knew. I mean, I know this is getting very psychological, but it's almost like he kind of knew that these investors thought about these material goods in that way.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Right, Very much so, and I mean, this is the kind of tragic part of this. He would send out this new appraisal and every year the number was somewhere between 8% and 10% higher than it was the year before. Right, like what a coincidence, just what he was telling them.
Elizabeth Marlowe:But that increased value was based on no real information whatsoever, right? The Appraisers Association of America, of which he was a member. They have all kinds of guidelines about, you know, that govern what an appraisal has to be based on, right? You have to provide things like comparables, right? So he should have been able to tell them well, a piece very similar to yours sold at Christie's this year and it, you know it, brought in this much money. Therefore, right now, I think you're.
Elizabeth Marlowe:But he wasn't doing any of that. He wasn't getting new photographs of the pieces, he wasn't coming out to inspect the pieces, he wasn't providing comparables. This document wasn't saying what purpose the new appraisal was being issued for. He also was not promising that he didn't have a financial stake in the appraisal, which is also supposed to be part of the process. So he was sending them this updated document and, just as you say, the investors were reading this like a quarterly stock report. I mean, they absolutely understood this new document that was coming to them every year telling them that their piece was now worth 10% more than it was worth last year. They understood that to be an unequivocal, objective statement of fact.
Lara Ayad:Yeah. So, let me ask you something. So why is it? Why was it such an issue that Eisenberg was doing this? I mean beyond, mean beyond, of course, the fact that he was not being transparent with the investors. He did not follow guidelines that were set by these professional appraisal organizations that were set out for collectors, for people who sell or deal art. But what's also some of the larger, what are some of the larger ramifications of eisenberg having done something like this?
Elizabeth Marlowe:yeah, so you can look at it from a number of perspectives. So just from the investor's perspective, right, I mean the sad awakening that they all got. And all of the ones that I spoke to told me that they were quite unprepared for this when it happened, when they were ready to cash out, prepared for this. When it happened, when they were ready to cash out, they just thought they were going to say, like, okay, we'd like our money now, and that Eisenberg would just give them the amount of the last appraisal right, that he would just take the object back and pay them the amount that he had told them was its current value. In fact, what he was willing to do was to take the piece back on consignment and he was willing to sell it right, to list it in his catalogs and sell it in his shop at the price which he had promised it was now worth. But then the investor had to wait for it to sell at that price and, given the fact that these actually were pretty inflated prices because the antiquities really kind of weren't going up in value by that amount, in most cases the pieces just sat there. They just sat and sat and sat. So that was the part of it that was like I think there was some real lack of transparency and maybe some yeah, some due diligence. That was not happening. Some transparency that was not happening.
Elizabeth Marlowe:The part of where the story goes really south is that this all started in 1985. The investors who didn't get out within the first 15 years or so encountered a set of circumstances which were quite unexpected to everyone involved, which is that in the early 2000s, the whole antiquities market essentially collapsed as a result of the scandals that ensued because of the trial at the Getty and the whole episode that's known as the Medici conspiracy, where there was a dealer who was convicted in Italy and there were stories in the New York Times. This is the era when one of the most famous antiquities in the Met's collection, a vase that was painted by an artist named Euphronius, that was proven to have been looted and that was returned to Italy. So there was this period in the first decade of the 2000s where there were stories in the Boston Globe and the New York Times and the LA Times and the New Yorker I mean this was just continuously in the news around looted antiquities and all of these pieces were being repatriated and it had a tremendous impact on the market and all of the pieces that these investors had purchased and whose value they thought had gone up and up and up and up. In fact the value just went off a cliff, I mean, the market completely burst in that moment. So the ones who didn't get out before then, by and large, have lost all their money. So that's.
Elizabeth Marlowe:It's a kind of interesting story from the perspective of, you know, the idea of antiquities as an investment. And if you go back to that point I was making earlier about how antiquities can be understood in all of these different ways, I think that's one way to understand what went wrong here. Right, if you just think of antiquities as beautiful artworks that belong to the world, you can make a case for them as an investment asset, as an investment class. But if you understand antiquities, if you understand antiquities as archaeological artifacts, as national patrimony right, then those are paradigms that don't work at all with the idea of antiquities as an investment vehicle. And basically, what happened in the early 2000s is that that national patrimony paradigm prevailed over antiquities as art.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, and that's fascinating too, because it's almost like you could almost argue that Jerome Eisenberg was almost a democratizer of art in a way that he was bringing art and bringing antiquities to the masses, including to these investors who, for the most part, from what I understand, didn't have a background studying art. They didn't really know about art. But you know, you kind of like he brought these artworks to these people's like look at this beautiful world patrimony, look at this beautiful world heritage. You can invest in some of this, like as an asset, but also like you are kind of becoming part of this global universal story or paradigm, if you will. So there's there's that thing, on the one hand, of Eisenberg being a democratizer, but on the other hand, what he's essentially doing and this connects back to what you were talking about with, like bubon and turkey and the circulation of the bronzes earlier On the other hand, what Eisenberg was doing was also funding the looting of cultural heritage and kind of putting it up for grabs, if I'm understanding right.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, absolutely Absolutely. That was one of the things that distinguished him from other antiquities dealers during this time period. He was very happy to move volume, so he was very willing to sell less expensive antiquities. Right, he wasn't one of these dealers who just catered to the super wealthy and just sold top-end pieces, top end pieces.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Eisenberg did sell some very high end pieces, but over the course of his career his commercial practice was really distinguished by the volume of pieces that he was moving and selling to investors like these kind of middle class, you know, like doctors and dentists and mid-level auto executive, auto industry executives outside of Detroit. Right, that's who was buying these pieces. So, yeah, not people who came to the art world who were interested in antiquities, who cared about, you know, the various gods and figures who were represented on these objects. That was not their interest at all. And in fact the investors were quite adamant with me like no, no, no, we did not have any interest in art, this was just an investment and in fact many of them had been involved with a previous investment opportunity with Eisenberg in rare stamps.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So, whether it's like rare US stamps or ancient antiquities, it was sort of all the same to them.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, it looks like Eisenberg had a couple of different markets there that he already landed. I mean, it's just kind of like I'm sitting here sort of marveling.
Elizabeth Marlowe:I'm critical of Eisenberg but I'm also kind of marveling at just how like resourceful he was, if you want to say that I mean he was, you know yeah, yeah, the catalog that he produced that was sort of at the base of this whole operation, the catalog he issued in 1985, which doubles as a guide to the collector and investor, is really a remarkable document in his efforts to kind of create a whole different way of understanding antiquities in the US.
Lara Ayad:That's incredible. That's amazing. Well and clearly. I mean, you know people can learn about ancient Roman antiquities, for instance, when they go to museums, and then you have these like sets of investors who sort of just saw art, the stamps, the marbles, the antiquities is all the same thing. But ancient Rome seems to have captured the imaginations of people all over the world, but particularly in the United States and in parts of Europe, and what I think is so interesting is that you see ancient Rome portrayed in so many movies and shows, and I know there's a Gladiator sequel that's actually set to be released later this November. What do you think of these shows and movies? Do you think that Hollywood does a good job of portraying life in ancient Rome?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Well, okay, so there's two ways to answer that question. So I am a professional, you know, I have a degree in this. And the short answer. There's two ways to say no, yeah, I mean so the? You know the short answer is no. They like they get a million things wrong. It's cringy. You know we sit in the audiences. You know I sit in the audience and I'm like rolling my eyes about all the things they get wrong.
Lara Ayad:What did they get wrong?
Elizabeth Marlowe:What's like the first thing that comes to mind for you oh, I remember in the first gladiator there's a scene inside marcus aurelius's tent and he's got all these marble portrait busts in his tent. So already it's ridiculous right that a roman emperor would bring marble portraits out on campaign with him. This is the opening scene of the movie. You know where they're? Like in the middle of the German forest, so like guess what? They weren't schlepping around these like 80 pound marble busts with them.
Lara Ayad:They were much more practical.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, that was already ridiculous. But then the thing that I was like really snorting about is that Marcus Aurelius is shown having a portrait bust of one of the emperors who comes after him in his tent, right, so like no, you know, he was not clairvoyant, he couldn't, he didn't have ESP and know who a future emperor was going to be to have a bust of him in his tent. So you know, they get details like that wrong. I have a friend, kind of an important kind of an important detail.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, I have a friend who was asked to be a consultant. I won't name what the show was. She was asked to be a consultant on one of these kind of hollywood type productions and they asked her um, all right, so you know, the opening scene is a wedding and we want to know how would the ancient romans have decorated the inside of a temple for a wedding? And my friend had to say, like Romans didn't get married in temples, that's. You know, we understand where you're coming from.
Lara Ayad:Like today, we get married in churches.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So back then they must've been married in temples. But in fact, no, that's not what temples were used for. And she was told well, we've already built the set, so tell us, like, how to decorate it. She was like, okay, nevermind, I cannot work with you people. So you know, so there's always going to be this kind of enormous, unbridgeable gulf between what the experts know and what people who care about the entertainment of the masses prioritize, so sort of from the get-go. You know, when you ask me a question like that, my answer has to be like oh no, these movies about ancient rome are terrible because they get everything wrong. That said, I will say I have a strong populist streak and it is my view that if these movies are exciting and reach wide audiences, that makes it much more likely that those audiences might go to the library and check out a book about ancient Rome.
Lara Ayad:Or maybe listen to a podcast where an ancient Roman specialist is coming on and talking about antiquities. An ancient Roman specialist is coming on and talking about antiquities.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yes, there's so many good podcasts out there today about ancient history, about, you know, ancient history in the modern world, the Roman, I mean, there's everything. There's so many ways to get high quality information and I think if a popular movie or TV show peaks, does a good job of peaking somebody's curiosity and that prompts them to want to learn more. Whether it's as a podcast or taking a class at college or reading a book or whatever it is, I think that that does a lot of good.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So I would rather that these movies do get made than not.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, because my understanding to Liz is that and I've seen this even too in my own previous life as a college professor too and talking with other academics is that some people feel like, oh well, those movies shouldn't get made because they're getting it wrong and so. But what you're saying is actually no, if the movies are at least starting people off getting interested in that part of the world or parts of the world, that part of history or that time and place, then that's a good starting point.
Lara Ayad:Right To then give some information to people about.
Lara Ayad:oh well, actually this is kind of how life was like and maybe they got some of the costumes right, but you know people didn't get married in temples, and here it's a resource where you can learn more about that yes yes, yeah, absolutely yeah, yeah, you know, um, when I I also learned a lot about ancient Rome, of course, in school, like when I was in high school, I learned that ancient Rome was just, it was the Hallmark of Western civilization. It's the model for American government and democracy. Um, you know, if you go to Washington DC, you'll see buildings that are loosely modeled off of ancient Roman buildings temples, administrative buildings, with the columns flanking, and they're like kind of symmetrical and even like mainstream media outlets, wikipedia they tend to portray ancient Rome in a very similar way, even to this day, as this benchmark of Western civilization. You hear that term a lot.
Lara Ayad:I wanted to put this concept kind of in conversation with some extremist groups that we've seen active over the past five to 10 years, and that includes groups like the Proud Boys, and I bring this up because actually they've kind of resurged in news media very recently when President Donald Trump was victim to that attempted assassination.
Lara Ayad:One of the groups to come out and claim to defend him during the presidential campaign is the Proud Boys. And I think this is so interesting because my understanding about groups like the Proud Boys is that they actually put a lot of stock in what they see as ancient Roman culture and this larger idea of Western civilization, and they actually claim that their ideology they describe it as Western chauvinism. So they are basically claiming that Western civilization is superior and that it was wholly responsible for creating the modern world. So I'm curious from your perspective, liz, as someone who knows a lot about ancient Rome, you know a lot about its span what do you think of the Proud Boys' claims, especially given how popular ancient Roman culture, as we think of it, is in the United States?
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, I mean, obviously it's like toxic and horrifying, and I think a lot of the rhetoric that you are pointing to, you know, I don't think everybody who uses the term Western civilization means this, but certainly I think for groups like the Proud Boys, I think Western civilization is the more polite way of saying white supremacy, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of spaces where those two things are, just like you know, sort of at the same end of the spectrum, and I do think it's really important for those of us with training, with historical training in this area, to do everything we can to push back against that kind of rhetoric, um, and to help people understand that, like there is no, like western civilization is a construct, right, there's, there's no such thing as western civilization. It is, um, it's, it's a historiographical invention that In what sense?
Lara Ayad:What's a historiographical invention? Just so that our listeners can understand.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Yeah, yeah, I mean in order. So the story of Western civilization, you know, is a story in which there's some, there's some nugget. Anthony Appiah describes it as like a golden nugget, you know that like starts, starts in Egypt and then is somehow transmitted to Greece and then to Rome, and then, like, maybe it's like a little bit submerged through the dark ages and then it reappears in the Italian Renaissance and shapes, you know, the flourishing of Europe, and then eventually it's transmitted to the US.
Lara Ayad:And this idea that there's like I just want to say sorry to interrupt. I just want to say I think it's also kind of ironic and hilarious that this whole thing starts in Africa. Essentially, yes. We can talk about we can talk about Egypt and its place in Africa, maybe for another conversation, but I do think that is quite interesting.
Elizabeth Marlowe:The Western civilizationists will, like you know, basically ignore the fact that Egypt is located in Africa. They won't look at a map you know, yeah, yeah, exactly that. You know. The problem with this golden nugget concept is that it requires the erasure, right like the ignoring, of a whole bunch of other phenomena in order to tell the story that way, right. So, for example, just to name like you know, there's hundreds of examples of things I could mention that you know. That would show you that there is no no like clear through line.
Lara Ayad:Of Western civilization. What's a great example that strikes you? I?
Elizabeth Marlowe:mean. One example of it is that huge numbers of the Greek texts that have come down to us we have mainly because Muslim scholars in places like Damascus and Baghdad and Cairo were very interested in them and they were the ones who were copying them and, like studying the mathematical principles and the philosophical treatises and the natural science, I mean like that was like a major route through which many of these texts actually arrived. Or, you know, another question we might put to this whole Western civilization model is like is Russia part of it or not? Right, is Russia like on our side or not on our side? Because you could argue that the religious tradition that is closest to the form of Christianity that emerged right out of the Roman Empire, right, the Christianity that goes, that flourishes in Constantinople, right, that's Russian Eastern Orthodox religion today, right? Like is that the air of Western civilization over there? Because, like, for a very long time those guys were not framed as being on our side.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So, there's any number of examples that we could bring in to say like here's one way, it doesn't work, here's another way it doesn't work, here's a whole category, you know. And also like what are the values of Western civilization right? Is slavery part of Western civilization or not part of Western civilization?
Lara Ayad:Well, that's an interesting point, Liz, because in most parts of the ancient world, including ancient Rome, people had slaves, and these slaves were sometimes brought from other parts of what's now Europe. Sometimes these slaves were brought over from parts of what's now West Asia, parts of what's now Africa, but it wasn't those kinds of continents with the racial designations they have were not understood in that way in the ancient world, if I understand correct. Yeah, absolutely.
Elizabeth Marlowe:And so you know people will try to tell you that like liberty is like part of our Western heritage, but like or Western civilization, like, like, what does that even mean? Or they'll try to suggest that democracy is a through line of Western civilization. But that's also like very much not true, right? Athens' experiment with democracy like ended pretty quickly within a generation or two, and then nobody thought that was a good idea. Nobody's consciously reviving the Athenian model of democracy for millennia, right? I mean, read what the British have to say about democracy in like the 18th and 19th century. They think this is a terrible idea. So the notion that there's any kind of like actual continuity that ties this all together and that leaves out the parts of the world that we don't think of as being part of Western civilization, it just doesn't work historically.
Lara Ayad:Right right.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So that's what? Yeah, when I say it's a historiographical construct, right? What that means is just like someone has chosen to connect the dots in a very particular way because it serves their interests in the present.
Lara Ayad:That's so interesting and it also has some real implications, Liz, for like what you're revealing as implications too, for even like portrayals of of race in ancient Rome, Like when you look at like movies and shows and stuff like that, especially from, like I'd say, 10 to 15 years ago and older, everyone's portrayed as being kind of like Anglo white, if you will, and I think now there are some shows and movies coming up that are kind of pushing against that. But but can you, can you tell us like who exactly was an ancient Roman in ancient times? Like, was that one kind of race of people? Was that one ethnicity of people? How would you describe that?
Elizabeth Marlowe:I mean, one of the things we know about the ancient world was that it was incredibly interconnected and that there were movements of people all over the place. Right, I mean, the real thing that ties the Roman empire together is the Mediterranean, and that was a very navigable body of water. So there's people moving all the time, whether for reasons of commerce. The Roman army is is a like remarkable force in terms of, like, moving populations all around and kind of scrambling populations. So, yeah, there, there's no like, there's no pure, there's no pure Roman line. One of the one of the really interesting like non controversies recently was when the BBC produced a show about Troy, you know kind of fictional account of the fall of Troy, and they cast someone with black skin to play the role of Achilles and people went crazy. And they also went crazy because there was a dark skinned person portraying Zeus. Like we know that Zeus was white, like what is that?
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah, yeah and.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Achilles isn't a real person either.
Elizabeth Marlowe:So you know like these are these notions of like who is white? It's just not. It wasn't an ancient way of thinking. You know, one of the ways we can clearly see skin color having totally different significance in the ancient world compared to what it does for us If you look at wall painting from the Roman world, one of the really striking features is that skin color is used to differentiate men from women. Yes, absolutely, it's not a marker of race, it's a marker of gender, right, which we also know isn't true, right, right.
Lara Ayad:It's not a marker of race, it's a marker of gender right, which we also know isn't, isn't true, right, it's not like women were walking around with pale, yellow skin and men were all just ruddy and brown, like that's not that simple, because there were working class women who worked outside got dark. There were upper class men who got to stay inside and were much, maybe, lighter skinned, and those people have different ethnic backgrounds than they run the entire rainbow, right, yeah.
Lara Ayad:Yeah yeah, that's fascinating. Well, I am very, not only like really excited to hear more about scholars really kind of busting myths about ancient Rome and seeing how this gladiator sequel is gonna come out in relation to this, but also, like, where can people find out more about, like, what happens with the DA's office in New York and those bubon statues? Like, are we going to hear a little more about it? Are you going to post about it on social media?
Elizabeth Marlowe:I hope so. Right now all eyes are on one museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art is the last one that is holding on to its bubon statue and in fact we're all sort of waiting to see what's going to happen with that case. I'm sort of waiting with my own publishing process of this story to see what's going to happen with the Cleveland case, but yeah, yeah, cleveland. Whereas all of the other museums, as soon as the Manhattan District Attorney showed up and said we believe you have a piece that was looted from Bubon, they said oh yes, look at that, we do. And handed it right over. Right. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but the process was pretty smooth because the story had been so well documented and told so many times since 1970.
Elizabeth Marlowe:But unlike any of the other US institutions, the Cleveland Museum of Art has taken a very different stance and has basically said prove it, which it depends what the burden of proof is going to be, whether the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that tie their statue to that site is going to be enough for them that the loss of that statue would be so tremendous to the quality of their collection, to their sense of themselves as an institution, that they are willing to take what I see as a tremendous risk to their reputation in trying to fight this.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Whether their statue was stolen from this particular site in Turkey or whether it was stolen from somewhere else they don't have an export license there is no doubt that that statue was stolen from somewhere, and it is surprising to me that they are choosing not to see this moment as an opportunity to say oh yes, our collecting practices in the past conformed with ethical norms back then, but we, like everybody else, are now operating under a different ethical paradigm. We recognize the shift in public opinion. We recognize the new ethical landscape in public opinion. We recognize the new ethical landscape. That museum, for whatever reason, is sort of saying like, yeah, no, we don't recognize that and we are going to dig in our heels and defend the choice we made in 1986 when we bought this thing that was smoking hot and not give it back because you can't prove that. You know exactly which hole in the ground it came out of.
Lara Ayad:Wow, sounds like the Cleveland Museum might need some of your Brussels sprout ice cream. I don't know.
Elizabeth Marlowe:I've dished it up. I wrote a very scathing article, another article in Hyperallergic. You can add it to your show notes if you want, I will Awesome. I wrote an article really kind of laying out the case, like the ethical case for them to surrender that piece. But you know, so far they're not listening to me.
Lara Ayad:Maybe, hopefully, down the line, they will listen, and I'll definitely put that in the show notes for sure, because I'm sure that listeners are really going to be wanting to eat that up. How can people follow you on social media? How can they get your news?
Elizabeth Marlowe:I am on Twitter, or X as it is, um, even though I feel like I'm on a sinking ship there. Uh, they should email me. I'm happy, I'm happy to chat with anyone. I I love talking about these kinds of things. I'm you know. People tell me what they're interested in. I'll recommend more readings to them.
Lara Ayad:Awesome. Yeah, I'll put your. I'll put your contact and your ex or Twitter contact in the show notes as well. And yeah, this was so much fun, Liz. I feel like I learned so much and I mean, I'm just, I'm just thrilled that we got to have this conversation. So thank you so much for being on the Cheeky Scholar.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It was really fun to chat with you about all of this and, yeah, I look forward to seeing where you go with the podcast next Awesome.
Lara Ayad:Thanks a lot.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Take care you too.
Lara Ayad:Bye.
Elizabeth Marlowe:Bye.
Lara Ayad:Procrastinating on that study group. Join us instead and hit the subscribe button. You'll get the newest episodes delivered right to your favorite podcast app while you're thinking about college and all those other life choices. Thanks for joining us on the Cheeky Scholar and until next time, keep it real and keep it cheeky.