New York: After an investigation of hundreds of artefacts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York linked it to indicted or convicted traffickers, the popular establishment is being called out for its unethical practices of collection.
One of the sandstone relics, a statue of Shreedhar Vishnu, was traced back to Bungamati, a village in Nepal. The deity was carefully tended to and worshipped by the locals until it was stolen in the early 1980s. A decade later, a wealthy American collector donated the statue to the Met. The museum did not send the artefact home but put it on display for around 30 years. Residents of Bungmati kept hoping that the statue would be restored. In 2021, an anonymous Facebook account 'the Lost Arts of Nepal' identified the statue but the Met has only removed it from the display.
One of the volunteers with the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign told The Guardian that the damage to the Bungamati community has already been done because when relics are stolen, it affects festivals, culture, and traditions.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in the last two years traced back many of the Met's collections to Cambodia, Greece, Italy, Egypt, and India among others. Law enforcement and researchers have now linked a large number of the Met's possessions to looters and traffickers. Met has voluntarily returned some but others were seized by prosecutors.
Reporters reviewing documents found that many items miss details about how they left the country of their origins. The then curator Thomas Hoving is said to have had a diary to keep the details of smugglers and looters.
Researchers also note that the Met is not the only museum to boast looted items in its collections. Museums across Europe are filled with items from colonised nations. An independent researcher Angela Chiu told The Guardian that the antiquities market has been called the largest unregulated market in the world. "It’s self-regulating, and you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors."