Owning Beauty

Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: the Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004; 332 pp., £22.50; ISBN 0-226-03550-6.

With her opening question – 'What kind of property is art?' – Jordanna Bailkin strikes fear into the heart of the left-leaning art historian. Unlike the texts and documents which form the core materials of literary and historical research, the art historian's objects of study are also commodities in the luxury market. Not only a readily-exchangeable form of capital, the work of art is also often subject to a startling range of fetishistic (over-) valuations. While the study of patronage and collecting in the past is a respectable field of study with a large literature (naturalized as the 'history of taste'), the frank acknowledgement of cultural artifacts as property – as capital – reveals at least one of art history's roles as a service industry for the luxury market. In the easy traffic between academic art history, the museum and the auction house can be seen the seamless relationship between culture and property.

Art as property raises specific ideological and even ethical questions posed by no other form of property – stocks and shares, bullion, even 'real estate'. Who 'owns' the cultural heritage of a modern nation? What does it mean to be a 'trustee' of objects of cultural patrimony? How indeed can ownership be understood in a modern society? From the Parthenon sculptures (or 'Elgin marbles') to the 'ethnographic' collections of the British Museum or the Pitt-Rivers Museum, questions of ownership, claims for cultural restitution and repatriation, are pressing issues, and not just for the 'museum professional'. They are major political questions.

In Britain, the emergence of the liberal state saw the birth of most of the nation's great museums – the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum – and the state still plays a direct role as the effective owner of works held in public collections, the guarantor of the public interest in preserving cultural patrimony. This role is a direct inheritance from nineteenth-century Liberalism – and a troubled one. Jordanna Bailkin's wide-ranging and important book, The Culture of Property, explores the question of cultural property at precisely the moment when the nineteenth-century liberal state was facing crisis and collapse, in the decades before the First World War. How could the role of the museum and of cultural heritage be sustained and redefined during the strange death-throes of Liberal England? In contrast to the apparently irrefutable authority which museums, their curators and their taxonomies had exerted through the late nineteenth century, by 1900 culture, ownership and identity were suddenly, and profoundly, contested.

Bailkin's study is deftly arranged around three key problems: national identity, gender and the city. It is a tribute to this ingenious study, however, that none of the three major chapters takes an obvious case study. Thus the expected institutional histories of British Museum and South Kensington, for once, are absent, while other museums, more problematic and also more paradigmatic, are allowed to emerge. The opening chapter, indeed, follows the unsteady progress of a group of migrant objects, highly charged with symbolic as well as financial value. The hoard of Celtic gold turned up in Derry in 1896 by a labourer named Thomas Nicholl cut to the very heart of the British government's policies on Ireland – one, of course, of the primary fault lines in the crisis of Liberalism. As often in Bailkin's text, through careful reading a legal decision does not merely provide a reflection of jurisprudential trends, but offers a broader cultural insight. Thus, in 1903, we find the Attorney General for Ireland suing the Trustees of the British Museum for the return of the objects of Celtic gold. These, he alleged, had been illegally exported from Ireland and should belong – not to Nicholl, or to Joseph Gibson, the 'shrewd, hard-headed Presbyterian' who owned...