Beyond ownership: Resolving disputes over the care and display of multivalent objects of art and cultural heritage

In the fall of 2022, philanthropist Leonard N. Stern donated his collection of Cycladic antiquities to a group of nonprofit entities controlled by the government of Greece—which agreed to their long-term display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Twenty-two years earlier, the American Museum of Natural History and the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde Community of Oregon agreed to terms governing the care and display of an object they recognized simultaneously as the Willamette meteorite and as Tomanowos, an embodiment of a spiritual visitor. These incidents are not outliers, but guideposts, examples of contracts that anticipate or resolve, rather than trigger, ownership disputes. As the continuing debate over the Parthenon Marbles shows, courtrooms and their application of property law may not be conclusive arbiters of claims to things that lie in serial or simultaneous value systems. Works of art and art objects transported from their place of creation ignite cultural and political controversies; polysemic artifacts lie within competing systems of social, religious, and legal governance that prescribe or proscribe their use, destabilizing the application of a single standard. This session invites studies of objects subject to these competing systems of governance to identify and predict areas of conflict, and to model solutions. Consideration of these issues within the setting of museums will be particularly welcome.