Eisenhower on American Greatness and Art Acquisition

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, 2nd April 1946, speaking in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when he was awarded a life fellowship of the museum:

"The freedom enjoyed by this country from the desolation that has swept over so many others during the past years gives to America greater opportunity than ever before to become the greatest of the world's repositories of art".

An opportunity dealers and collectors over there in subsequent decades took advantage of - thus creating huge desolation of archaeological sites and monuments, not stopping at items stolen from museum stores. This serves as a shameful monument to the undiscriminating greed of contemporary collectors of decontextualised artefacts and those involved in their commerce. Meanwhile their lawyers argue that what few laws the US has instituted to regulate their satisfying of greed were intended as a "compromise" to benefit and uphold that market. They argue that they should not be being applied in the way they are, arguing a free-for-all where American collectors get what they want is somehow the best way to "preserve" decontexualised artefacts. It does not however do anything to help preserve the places from where those artefacts are plundered to fuel that exploitive free-for-all no-questions-asked market.

And other countries have to just get used to the idea that Chicago Ron and others of his ilk can commercially loot the archaeological sites away to their heart's content and scurry off with the loot for "passionate" US collectors to shut away in ever-growing private artefact collections the other side of the Ocean without raising a peep of protest. How dare they oppose the US collector's "rights", eh?

Photo: Eisenhower looking at evacuated art in Europe.