Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 170

Even destroyed or stolen art evokes humanity to communicate across
national and cultural borders. The Taliban’s destruction of the Bemiyan
Buddhas in Afghanistan in ���� or Al Qaeda aligned Ansar Dine’s ����
destruction of the medieval Islamic mosques in Timbuktu, Mali, evoked
horror across the world. But there’s global spectatorship for pillages from
times past: the Parthenon marbles taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in
the first decade of the nineteenth century, and the Kohinoor taken from
Punjab in ���� can be curated in a distant land for strangers to behold at the
British Museum and the Tower of London, respectively. The ‘power’ of art
also often necessitates its destruction, therefore (tragically) stating another
universality. If intercultural dialogues are the first to open doors, the flip
side is that culture is the first to be threatened when doors are closing. One
of President Donald Trump’s first actions in office was to try to shut down
the National Endowment for the Arts. Reactionary political leaders often
complain that art does not obey society.
The Question in Art
The question cannot be if art speaks a universal language. Contemporary
arts tend to be secular and cosmopolitan, which endows their universality.
Rather, the lingering question needs to be about the conditions and the
context of the universal language art speaks. The evolving conception of
universal heritage has instructed the conditions and context of these values.
The idea of heritage conservation originates in the nineteenth century.
Art critic and poet John Ruskin noted in ���� that preserving historical
architecture was a necessity during the industrial revolution: “We have
no right whatsoever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to
those who built them, and partly to all generations of mankind who are to
follow” (Quoted in Klamer and Throsby ����:���–���). While our current
conceptions of universal value in world heritage may be traced to these ideas,
we can equally detect here traces of linear, imperial, and expert-led thinking
that would form the basis of critiques of these heritage ideas. The British, for
example, not only impressed these ideas upon the world but also appropriated
for themselves the mantle of curation. They carried away, and continue to
hold, treasures from around the world in the name of conservation. The
case of the marbles taken by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon noted above
is perhaps the best-known example and continues to cause strife. The New
Acropolis Museum in Athens features blank spots in the exhibit for these
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