Empty The Museums – Most Of What’s There Belongs Elsewhere

Simon Jenkins argues for the return not just of artifacts looted from other countries, but pretty much any art not created for a museum or gallery: “I want to see the Parthenon marbles as Phidias intended, even if recarved by a computerised jig. … Sensible people would long ago have replicated them and sent the old ones back to Greece. … So many great works – not all of them – derive meaning from where they originated. Malraux was right: a museum is without walls, a place of the imagination.”