[MSN] Book Review of Tokeley's Rescuing Cultural Heritage from the Times Literary Supplement

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

How to own an artefact

John Ray
Jonathan Tokeley
RESCUING THE PAST
The cultural heritage crusade 
374pp. Imprint Academic. £25.
84540 019 4

A few years ago, Jonathan Tokeley, a restorer of works of art, was charged
with importing into England an impressive piece of Pharaonic art disguised
as modern Egyptian tourist tat. Tokeley maintained, and still maintains,
that he acted in innocence, that the piece was a fake, and that he has been
traduced in the press by malicious colleagues. The British legal system
decided that what he had done was questionable, and as a result he spent
time in Wormwood Scrubs, an event about which he is commendably frank.
There, no doubt, he had the opportunity to think about Egypt and the many
questions raised by the antiquities trade, and it is presumably the results
of his thinking which appear in Rescuing the Past.


There have been great works of literature written in prison. Boethius, John
Bunyan and Oscar Wilde are proof of this, but it is fair to say that
Tokeley’s self-justifying tirade is not a work in this league. He calls
himself a student of philosophy, a subject which he did indeed study as part
of his undergraduate career, but the result is nowhere near The Consolation
of Philosophy. It is more the sort of thing which can happen when an attempt
to write Newman’s Apologia meets the punk version of “I Did It My Way”.

Folklore has it that prisons are full of people who are convinced of their
own innocence and compassion for society, and who know that the real crooks
are all outside. It is not they who are at fault: it is something called The
System. In some cases they may be right, but in others they are simply in a
state of denial. In Rescuing the Past, almost all the people who appear are
out of step and reduced to the status of puppets by their capitulation to
self-interest. The only one in step turns out to be Tokeley himself.

In this account, the cultural heritage of Egypt is being destroyed, largely
by the Egyptians who are its protectors. The officials who are charged with
looking after the country’s many antiquities are corrupt, not through
deliberate depravity but because it is the only way that they can survive on
their salaries. As a result, great numbers of objects drift on to the art
market illegally or leave the country, stolen more or less to order. Worse
than this, the rickety education system means that Egyptians have no sense
of the aesthetic or cultural value of works of art: they are not, as the
celebrated Egyptologist Bernard Bothmer once remarked, “object-minded”. Much
of the work of restoration or conservation which takes place in that country
is mere play-acting, the efforts of people to stay employed and to keep
their superiors from interfering in their tea-drinking routines. Islamic
teaching, according to the author, encourages Egyptians to think of
Pharaonic monuments as the products of an age of pagan ignorance, or
jahiliyya.

Hence their destruction can sometimes be tolerated, as happened when the
Taleban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Tokeley believes that similar
events could start happening in Egypt as fundamentalism comes to the
surface. As caricatures go, this is dashing stuff, but as a contribution to
scientific relations with the owners of Egypt’s cultural heritage it is as
ungenerous as it is damaging. It is a bit like inviting the College of
Cardinals to a party in honour of The Da Vinci Code, as a way of furthering
dialogue with the Vatican.

Tokeley also accuses professional Egyptologists of conniving in this
disaster by concentrating on publication of convoluted articles on points of
grammar, in obscure journals, with an eye only to the next
research-assessment exercise and their own careers. They stay silent about
the shortcomings of their Egyptian hosts because they wish to continue in
those same careers. There is no doubt that the discipline has a generous
share of unreadable monographs which disappear up their own footnotes, but
this judgement ignores many of the joint projects of restoration and
reconstruction which have been done successfully in collaboration with
Egyptian colleagues, and with their keen cooperation. The archaeologists and
restorers from Leiden and the Egypt Exploration Society who worked
tirelessly with the Egyptians on restoring the reliefs from the tomb of
Horemheb at Saqqara will not recognize the picture which is given in this
book as a description of their work, and they will be right not to do so.


Tokeley’s real target is not Egyptologists or even the Egyptians. What he
most wants to challenge is the prevailing orthodoxy among archaeologists,
politicians, cultural ambassadors and museum curators which he terms the
Cultural Heritage Crusade, or alternatively the Libertarian School. For
Tokeley this orthodoxy is similar to a religious cult. It has a central
dogma, the notion of cultural heritage which he feels obliged to capitalize
in order to draw attention to the status given to it by its naive adherents.
This is the idea that a nation’s past belongs to that nation and no other.

Objects from that past which have been illegally removed from a country
should be returned without delay, and museums or private collections which
have other artefacts that have been acquired legally still have a moral
obligation to care for those objects, and to respect the sensitivities of
the nation from which they originated. Museums and similar buildings are the
temples of the Cultural Heritage devotion, and the cult has its own high
priests, in the form of figures such as Professor Lord Renfrew, anyone in
UNESCO, and the various heads of theEgyptian Antiquities Organization. This
misguided worship, according to Tokeley, is the main cause of the crisis
facing Egypt, and the same presumably applies to other countries whose
heritage is beyond their capacity to maintain.

His proposal to free us from this belief system is to argue that objects
from ancient Egypt are a commodity or resource like any other. Like such
things, they can be bought and sold, and they can also be privatized.
Western dealers and auction houses should be free to operate within Egypt.
This would force prices up to international levels, and eliminate corruption
and secretive dealing. (More money might well put an end to the improvised
cutting of corners which the author detects everywhere in Egypt, but it
would also introduce other forms of behaviour, some of them less than
desirable, and probably less than legal.) Because the market would be freed,
objects of art would find their way into the hands of the latter-day
equivalent of Plato’s Guardians, people of sensibility and wisdom who are
fit to be entrusted with the benefits of civilization. 

Presumably there is a difference between stealing to order and buying to
order, but one still wonders how brave this proposed new world would turn
out to be in practice. In recent years the economy of Egypt has been
liberalized to some degree, and the beginnings of a freer market in
antiquities have made themselves felt. But if there is progress of a sort
being made here, one can only conclude that it will come in spite of a book
like this, and not because of it.

Whom is Tokeley hoping to convert to this radical doctrine of the free
market? The academics, whom he urges to stop striking poses? This from an
author who is happy to strike a pose on almost every page of his book. Or is
he appealing to the Egyptians, who are described in one passage as people
who “can barely change a car tyre”? In my experience, Egyptian mechanics
have a talent for repairs and improvisations on old cars which is sometimes
close to genius. Does Tokeley expect to make allies out of people he goes
out of his way to alienate and belittle? Or is he simply reconciled to being
a misunderstood prophet, the only sane man in a mad world?


The market is frequently maligned, and its capacity to benefit is regularly
underestimated by purists. But there are dangers here. What Tokeley is
really saying is that the Egyptians, collectively, have forfeited their
right to their own heritage. If ownership is to be conferred on people who
are above reproach, and who have the means to give an object a good home,
who is to decide what or where a good home is? One of my favourite
paintings, for example, is the view by Monet of Antibes which is now in the
galleries of the Courtauld Institute in Somerset House. I would like the
original, and would try my best to dust it regularly. It may be that if I
hire some teams of private investigators, and then sex up a dossier or two,
I can demonstrate publicly, or at any rate to myself, that there are
academics in the world of London art-history whose ethical lives sometimes
fall short of that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I think I can see the pine
tree in the middle of the painting hanging its branches in dejection,
waiting to be rescued from all the mediocrity and sleaze. Clearly Monet’s
work of beauty would be better off in a purer environment, namely on the
wall of somebody like me. In practice this will not happen, but what if I
had the money and political influence to seriously challenge ownership of
works of art on moral grounds which just happen to benefit me?

Suppose I find a toddler clutching a teddy bear. I recognize the bear as one
of an extremely rare transitional design, which perfectly fills the
remaining gap in my collection. Intellectually, I can make sense of that
bear in the way that the toddler cannot. Obviously my claim to ownership of
the toy is superior, because I am a philosopher of these things. Can we
demand that he sell it to me, on the grounds that he does not know what he
is carrying, and the bear does not deserve such a fate? The author of
Rescuing the Past would seem to think that we can, and that we should.

Jonathan Tokeley has a considerable reputation as a restorer of works of
art. He is not modest about this, but there is no reason to doubt his
estimate of his own skills. He has clear ideas on how to solve major
problems such as the decay of the Sphinx and the preservation of the murals
in the tombs at Luxor. The range of his interests, as revealed in his book,
is genuinely impressive. He has served his sentence, and the fact that he
has should not be revisited on him, although there are times in his book
when he seems to want to revisit it on himself. He should be free to return
to his career. Perhaps now is the time for him to put his talents and
expertise to the cause of serving the past, rather than trying to commandeer
it.