I feel like I finally got into a groove with this town. Had a coffee in my regular place, and off I went to the British Museum.
I found myself a bit peckish, and about an hour later had another coffee and a bite in a small sidewalk cafe. This place was a stone’s throw from the British Museum, so the three women working there must have experienced a steady stream of tourists all day long. They were absolutely miserable. These women were so clearly run down by their own existence, it was sad. The Eastern European haircuts, the dull, lifeless eyes, the exhausted way they handled their duties and spoke with the customers—it all spoke of a deep despair. Life to them was making mediocre food and coffee drinks for an endless stream of rude, blaze’ tourists struggling to speak English. It depressed me so much I downed my food, paid, and quickly scurried away.
The British Museum is a facilitating place, but it’s hard to ignore that it’s also a testament to the horrible brutality of humanity, and western civilization’s endless capacity to rob and pillage all that came before. Beautiful and at the same time revolting.
It’s a little hard to recon with the fact that everything in that museum (like many historical museums), was pilfered from the Near and Far East and from Europe. All stolen items. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, this is amazing… but shouldn’t it be nearer to the culture from which it sprang?”
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, (1833) in the National Gallery, London
I understand how ages-old antiquities can easily be destroyed in war torn countries. The reliefs of the centaurs fighting the men in the Parthenon, the reliefs of the lion hunt from Assyria, the aeons-old Egyptian sarcophagi and mummies, the freaking Rosetta Stone for crimminy’s sake… Amazing, but why is all this stuff here, in London?
The short story, I’m sure, is because richly endowed Brits (and Americans, no doubt) went to these countries when they were either impoverished or under siege, and offered their governments a shit ton of money to excavate these treasures and bring them to the museum, “for the benefit of humanity.”
And now I’m contributing to that larceny by attending the museum. So I’m as much a tacit contributor to the cultural appropriation as the next guy. SHAME ON ME.
It’s also kind of weird that here we are, all us thousands of tourists, gliding by room after room after room of fantastically old artifacts. And on we glide to the next room, to the next painting, to the next femur of an ancient farm woman… and to most of these artifacts, we give not much more than a cursory glance. “Oh, another bas relief from the Parthenon. Huh, this one’s more than 2,000 years old. Crazy.”
On to the next, on to the next, on to the next.
I got the same feeling at the National Gallery in the afternoon.
Room after room after room of these priceless masterpieces of fine art, mainly of European (white male) artisans. In truth, each one of those paintings deserves an entire day, or at the very least an hour, of intense study and speculation, just to understand the context in which it emerged, its meaning to its creator and its meaning in the wider context of history.
But we don’t take the time. No one does. We just walk on by.
But what else could you do? It’s overwhelming. There’s so much of it. And for the majority of the people there, we’re only visiting London for a brief period, so the instinct is to cram it all in. Sigh.
Between the galleries I got a pint and a pie at The Guinea, which was amazing. That pub is 350 years older than the formation of the United States! No big deal.
On to the next, on to the next, on to the next…