Last month, the New York Times reported on Shelby White, a trustee of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. White is a mega-donor to the Met, someone who has given the museum tens of millions of dollars in cash and many times that in the value of objects given or loaned to the institution. She is also someone who has had more than 100 looted objects, mostly antiquities from the classical world, taken from her vast personal collection and repatriated to their home countries. 88 of those objects have been seized by investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, 71 from her home, and the rest from the Met itself, in just the past two years.
Leon Levy and Shelby White Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [Tomás Fano, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
The coverage around White has focused, to my eyes, on the question of her personal culpability. The Times report quotes experts like Elizabeth Marlowe, director of museum studies at Colgate University, who says “there is no way that someone at her level of the market and her depth of collecting and her prominence at the Met” could have not known how to properly avoid trading in stolen artifacts. It also quotes White herself, who in a 2007 interview excused her history of acquiring looted materials by claiming that “even today, what is considered an acceptable provenance is unclear and changing.”
Whether or not White should have known better feels a little beside the point. Instead, I found this quote the most illuminating piece of the story:
“Shelby White is a profoundly generous supporter of the Met,” said the museum’s director, Max Hollein, “and she has had an enormous impact at this museum and many other institutions.”
I’m sure every word of that statement is true – but that in itself is the problem.
Shelby White is not an archeologist or an art historian; she and her husband’s fortune comes from investment banking and financial journalism. She has published a book, but it isn’t about the classical world; it’s called What Every Woman Should Know About Her Husband’s Money. And yet, because of her money, arguably the most important museum in the United States sets its priorities to match hers. And, as we have seen repeatedly, the Met seems less than interested in checking the provenance of such a major donor’s collection – a practice that, whether or not it is intentional, contributes to looting and antiquities theft around the world.
A few months ago I wrote about the British Museum and its ties to BP, whose philanthropic activity can be criticized as “greenwashing” or “reputation laundering.” It’s tempting to think that we can point out a few big bad corporations, like the oil industry, and identify their donations as especially corrupt. But the entire edifice of philanthropy exists for public relations and reputation building – even in the most seemingly benign circumstances, nobody signs a check for millions of dollars without expecting to direct how that money is going to get spent. The priorities of a millionaire hobbyist or a corporation are unlikely to match the priorities of scholars or the public.
Unfortunately, this reliance on philanthropy isn’t just an issue in museums. In general, we have seen a retreat from state support for public goods in the past four decades, as neoliberalism seeks to turn every institution meant for the public into playthings for the wealthy. We have seen the same pattern in higher education, public media, and any number of other sectors that would be better thought of as investments in our civic society than as profit centers. In the absence of that support, institutions have turned ever more toward the biggest donors they can find in order to meet their budgets, and those donors expect something in exchange for their dollars.
This is a crucial point for the modern Pagan movement. Our knowledge of ancient paganisms is mediated through these very institutions: our knowledge of the gods and the religious and magical practices of their ancient worshipers comes from scholarship. That knowledge reflects the biases of the institutions that produce it. There are many fair critiques of, for instance, colonialist assumptions implicit in modern Paganism; those assumptions ultimately derive from the fact that modern Paganism developed in response to scholarship created by colonialist institutions. (I don’t mean that in any sort of fuzzy intellectual way either – a walk through the Egyptian wing of the British Museum can confirm this.) I think our movement has, on the whole, done a lot of work to try and resolve some of those issues, but they remain because they were embedded in the material we started from.
We have to be concerned about how information about the past is presented to us in the modern day, too: as that presentation is shaped by institutions in response to their donors, so too does that presentation shape our movement’s understanding of ancient paganism.
What is to be done? Well, for one, philanthropy, in general, should be held up to much greater scrutiny and recognized as something other than a pure gift from kind-hearted donors. We should advocate for our institutions to be less reliant on private donations through greater support from programs like the National Endowment for the Arts or local and state agencies. And we should hold museums accountable for their practices, regardless of how it affects their relationships with philanthropy.
In 1990, The Met hosted an exhibition entirely devoted to White and her husband Leon Levy’s collection of classical objects, called “Glories of the Past.” That show contained over 200 artifacts from their stockpile; many of those same objects have now been repatriated as looted antiquities. The show, and White’s many donations thereafter, were offered as gifts to the Met. But there’s not much value in a gift if it was stolen first.
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