International museum heists have populated our newsfeeds in a bizarre, whack-a-mole-eque fashion over the last few weeks, reinvigorating conversations around stolen artifacts and post-colonial remediations, as well as unleashing a relentless deluge of memes that inspired many a Halloween costume. And even while the Musée du Louvre bows its head in shame, taking blow after blow, first in the form of stolen and still-missing jewels and then in the revelation of its painfully insecure security system passwords, the current keeps steering me back to the British Museum. The once and always profiteer of colonial and extractive proclivities just … embraces PR nightmares with open arms, as if it’s above it all.
Its reputation as a symbol of imperial looting is so cemented that as soon as the robbers absconded with France’s crown jewels, people from all over were telling the British Museum to turn out its pockets. Given the museum’s storied collection of lifted artifacts, the public wonders (mostly in jest) if it’s become emboldened to steal artifacts once again?
(@livingformlk via X; screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic)
Just to recap: It’s not just the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of stolen objects the museum acquired through centuries of imperial looting, pillaging, and bloodshed across the world that render the British Museum unfavorable to most. It’s that the museum has made essentially no effort to reckon with its harm. It has spent almost 100 years repeatedly declining to repatriate the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, and maintains an ironclad grip over other contested objects in its collection, including an enormous swath of Benin Bronzes, the Rosetta Stone, and Moai from Rapa Nui (Easter Island), among a long list of priceless cultural, archaeological, and spiritual/animated objects. The museum hides behind opaque artspeak and institutional bullshitting, claiming to be “negotiating” and “developing relationships” with those seeking restitution.
Not so secret, really … (Screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via X)
Even its own halls aren’t immune to thievery. Adding insult to injury, the museum is in the middle of legal proceedings regarding internal thefts within its collection across a decade — thus nullifying any argument that the institution is a safer and more stable environment for these invaluable objects. Who among us can’t feel a twinge of satisfaction at the irony of allegations that ~a thief~ plundered a collection from the Institute of Imperial Loot?
And if you thought it couldn’t get any more egregious, the museum dug itself into an even deeper hole by opting to renew its highly criticized BP sponsorship, even though a majority of British arts and culture institutions have dropped the petrol giant’s funding over the last decade. Shortly after announcing its billion-dollar initiative to eliminate its carbon footprint entirely, at that.
If it wasn’t so depressing, I would say that I’m kind of impressed with the museum’s commitment to wickedness and backwardness. But thankfully, everyone else’s humorous, bittersweet takes bring a smile to my face.
Contrary to everything I’ve written in this post, it really can be that simple sometimes. (Screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via X)
(Screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via X)
What’s clear is that the best coping mechanism we have for our joint exasperation and disgust is trolling the fuck out of the British Museum. We’ve done it right here at Hyperallergic for April Fools’ Day; an artist has outright stolen from the museum as an ironic statement; and it’s been the site of climate protests long before the first can of soup was ever thrown at a van Gogh. And thousands of others who’ve been maligned by the institution’s … er … acquisition practices have visited it specifically to make derisive, sarcastic, and ultimately viral content.
But while these memes are funny and confrontational, their virality and tone can flatten, objectify, and, in some occasions, even discount the phenomena they call attention to, inadvertently normalizing the very crimes that they needle.
We’ve seen this happen with the proliferation of “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” tagline, which initially took off as a means of raising awareness of the atrocious systems of anti-Blackness, including no-knock warrants and police immunity, that facilitated the state’s murder of the 26-year-old African-American EMT, and holding them and their perpetrators accountable. But they ended up collapsing a brutal reality into comedic social media fodder, if not a commoditized punchline altogether. And they eventually lost steam as the pursuit of justice for Taylor hit roadblocks, and attention drifted elsewhere, suggesting it was never that deeply felt by many. (Aja Romano has also written an in-depth, thought-provoking piece on this for Vox.)
While tackling a completely different problem, Morgan Sung observed in Mashable that the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” theory-turned-meme variations initially tried to remind people not to lose focus on the hidden networks protecting the powerful and perverse. But it soon ended up doing that very thing: diluting and devolving the real issue into a spammed one-liner that lost all meaning as our eyes glazed over from repeated encounters.
When taking on systems that continuously subdue, marginalize, and extract from us, distilling their complexities and absurdities into accessible, exaggerated humor and public shaming does help get everyone in on the problem at hand. But it also runs the risk of oversimplifying the insidiousness of these forces and compressing the layers of historic depravity into something easily consumable — often yielding results that don’t differ so much from institutional posturing.
All of that is to say that while these memes and other jabs may not be driving actual repatriations or even impacting attendance (the museum stays flush, funded, and flourishing one way or another), I give them credit for keeping the British Museum in hot water even when it’s not in the headlines. They give voice to the helpless indignation we all feel. And it deserves to be knocked down a few pegs in the court of public opinion from a respected, worldly (lol) educational institution to the big box of deceit, harm, trauma, and thievery that it is.
