Is a Museum Just a Trophy Case? (Update)

**Stephen Dubner** (0:06)
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We are currently replaying a three-part series we made a few years ago called Stealing Art is Easy, Giving It Back is Hard.
As part of this update, we have refreshed facts and figures as necessary, and in this episode we've included some new material. This is part two of the series. Last week, we began with a simple question. How do the artworks and artifacts that you see in a museum wind up in a museum?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
For a long time, the entire art world didn't ask questions.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:38)
The Met got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us.

**Matthew Bogdanos** (0:48)
Guess what? My kids know it's looted.

**Stephen Dubner** (0:52)
But the museum world is changing.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:54)
Museums are now returning dozens of objects every single year.

**Bénédicte Savoy** (0:59)
Like Olympic Games for restitution.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:02)
Even though technically we legally acquired these, the origins of the acquisition was illegal. So therefore, everything else was tainted as well.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:13)
Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will explore one dramatic case that isn't settled yet.

**Victor Ehikhamenor** (1:19)
The disruption of the attack on the kingdom cannot be overemphasized.

**Bénédicte Savoy** (1:24)
Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum.

**Dan Hicks** (1:29)
Even took the bolts from the doors.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:32)
It turns out that stealing art can be relatively easy, but giving it back, that's the hard part.

**David Frum** (1:39)
The job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art. Yeah, put it in a pit, melt it.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:44)
The second episode in our series about returning art starts right now.

**SPEAKER_11** (2:00)
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host Stephen Dubner.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:16)
Matthew Bogdanos is a former Marine Colonel who now runs the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. We met him in our previous episode.

**Matthew Bogdanos** (2:26)
We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures.
If it's legal, great, we should keep it. But if it's illegal, then it should go back to the country of origin.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:39)
But how does that happen? If a museum or a private collector on Fifth Avenue has a 3,000-year-old treasure that is found to have been looted or otherwise stolen, the country of origin may not even exist anymore. So how does Bogdanos manage that?

**Matthew Bogdanos** (2:55)
Every country treats these differently, but we have yet to have a country who hasn't just been over-the-top appreciative and extraordinarily gracious. We returned an antiquity to Iran. Wait a second, the US doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran. What do I care? I'm not a politician. We returned a piece to the Palestinian Authority. Now move the map to Southeast Asia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. For that area of the world, these antiquities are idols.
They are worshiped. And the number of times I have gone into a temple in India, in Southern India particularly, and it's empty, and they're still worshiping the empty pedestal, or they have a photograph of an idol that was stolen, or they have a wax or wooden model. And now this goes in someone's Fifth Avenue apartment? Get the hell out of here. I mean, are you kidding me?
So we never lose sight of the fact that at the other end of our entire process, of prosecution, recovery, and repatriation, there's a community on the other side.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:05)
Bogdanoz makes all this sound rather clear cut, and that makes sense. He is a prosecutor. He's guided by the law. And the law, while complicated, is also decisive. It declares a winner and a loser, legal possession or illegal possession.
But art is even more complicated than the law.

**David Frum** (4:27)
Art is a place where our deepest spiritual values meet the marketplace. And so that causes all kinds of questions. I mean, how do you put a price on art? People do. It's a vast marketplace.
And strange things happen when you mix the most spiritual with the most commercial.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:45)
That is David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2022, he published a piece called Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Looted Art.

**David Frum** (4:56)
It's one thing when there's a war in Ukraine, and the Russian forces break into a museum in a Ukrainian city, and they take the artworks, and they put them in crates, and they take them back to Russia. And then the war ends five years later, and there's a peace treaty. That art, we know where it came from. It had a possessor. The possessors are still alive. They are institutions that still exist. And we can arrange for the art to come back from Russia to the museum in Ukraine from which it was taken. But when we're talking about lapses of 100, 200, 500 years, the whole concept of theft becomes kind of cracked. The second most famous Greek artwork in a European museum is the Pergamum Altar in Berlin, which is unearthed by German archaeologists. Pergamum was a city on the west coast of what is now Turkey.