A look into the Met museum’s collection reveals heaps of shady acquisitions

Last year, more than 3.2 million people walked up Fifth Avenue in New York City and through the massive doors of the heralded Metropolitan Museum of Art with longings to visit art you can see nowhere else in the world. Through the hallowed halls are Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Asian, and Middle Eastern collections (among many others), which form the museum’s world-class collection. But the most-visited art museum in the United States is—like many other museums—under increasing scrutiny for its acquisitions practices. With good reason.

A new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, published in The Guardian, details the methods of the directors and curators that grew the Met’s collections into one of the largest in the world. And what they found was not a shining example of art collecting. 

The museum was established in 1870 with 174 paintings, with ambitions to amass a collection that would rival that of the Louvre or the British Museum. A series of curators and directors without scruples concerning the nuts and bolts of actually getting the art did exactly that—the museum now owns over 1.5 million objects that the museum says, “reflects over 5,000 years of human creativity.” 

The review of the museum’s catalog found 1,109 pieces had been bought from known antiquities criminals, not even half of which had any further record about their pasts. When the investigators tried to fill in those blanks, they discovered the work of convicted art criminals, mobsters and other extralegal sources.

What, exactly, needs to be done about all the art the Met acquired through shady means depends on who we think art belongs to. There’s a strong case to be made that the best owners are the viewing public. In that case, keeping the artifacts at a place like the Met, where they can be viewed by many and cared for by experts, only makes sense. 

Institutions buying and displaying art from less-than-reputable sources isn’t unique to the Met, but its curators weren’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud when it came to the art trade’s dark underside. One director said that working with art smugglers was “a necessary role for a Met director,” and that “we all believe the stuff was illegally dug up.” 

But assuming that all art, from anywhere in the world and at any point in history, belongs specifically to the viewing public in the United States, is hubris. Historical artifacts taken from other countries under sketchy circumstances might have greater meaning to residents of the area.

In some cases, too, the artifacts in question aren’t relics of bygone cultures. Take the case of several statues that were taken from Nepali shrines in the 1980s. The statues in question are still sacred to living cultures. These communities have been trying in the years since to get the statues, which ended up at the Met, back.

“I understand the concept of preservation, but taking an object away from its living culture and putting it behind glass in a museum and then saying, ‘We are preserving this object for that country’—it’s just completely wrong,” Roshan Mishra of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign told The Guardian.

The Met is in the process of returning some of the art it came by using illegal means, due to pressure from law enforcement in Manhattan and from public pressure from groups like Mishra’s.

But even within a troubling pattern, it’s an oversimplification to say the museum owning and sharing every artifact it has should be sent back to where it came from. Each piece is being dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and sweeping statements about the morality of the Met’s entire collection are ultimately reductive. But to be conscientious visitors and appreciators of art, we need to remember on our next visit that, of the 1,000-plus ill-gotten artifacts we know of in the Met’s catalog, over 300 are currently on display to visitors. All the more reason to keep a skeptical eye on how we share and appreciate culture—and who is sharing it.