How to Say Nothing: A Case Study of the Museum Labels on Some Looted Bronzes
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2021-02-05

This paper examines how museums talk about objects in their collections with unsavory pasts. In particular, it focuses on a group of life-sized bronze sculptures that were almost certainly looted in the 1960s from Bubon, a Roman site in southern Turkey, and dispersed on the American art market. Bubon statues now feature prominently in the galleries of institutions such as the Getty, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met’s label is a particularly revealing case study of how museums use a variety of rhetorical strategies to obfuscate, mitigate, and deny uncomfortable recent history. Extrapolating from antiquities displays at other institutions, such as the Manchester Museum, that have been more willing to confront such histories head on, the talk will conclude with an attempt at a “decolonizing” rewrite of the Met’s label.


Elizabeth Marlowe, Colgate University