How Kim Kardashian unwittingly exposed a museum’s dubious morals

The influencer inadvertently exposed New York’s famed museum for possession a stolen Egyptian coffin - and lifted the lid on its secretive history.

Kim Kardashian arrives for the 2018 Met Gala in 2018 where she inadvertently exposed the famed museum for possessing a stolen Egyptian coffin.

If ever a scandal was hiding in plain sight, it’s the one revealed this week at the mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An entirely plausible report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) suggests that the Met could be holding more than 1,100 antiquities linked to convicted or alleged traffickers and looters.

Fewer than half of those 1,100 objects, it’s claimed, have records detailing what the art world calls “provenance” - an account of how they left their countries of origin and through what hands they passed. The implication is that America’s biggest museum appears to be one of the world’s largest repositories of stolen goods.

I say this scandal has been hiding in plain sight because one of the Met’s most famous directors, Thomas Hoving - during whose tenure from 1967 to 1977 the museum went on a huge spending spree to “catch up” with older rivals such as the Louvre and the British Museum - admitted as much decades ago. “My collecting style was pure piracy,” he declared, and he revelled in it. In his racy memoir (well worth reading on artnet.com) he delighted in reminiscing about using his “address book of smugglers and fixers” to purchase stuff for the Met, no questions asked.

He was a brilliant scholar but also a rogue - a combination encountered more often than you might think. He got away with it because that was an era when Americans felt they could, indeed should, behave like imperial powers have always behaved: as though licensed to pillage their way across the globe.

Yet it seems from this week’s revelations that although Hoving died in 2009, his “ask no questions” attitude lived on. Many of the 1,100 items on the ICIJ’s list were acquired comparatively recently.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

One example was exposed by a sequence of hilariously random events five years ago. The biggest night in Manhattan’s social calendar is the Met Gala, held on the first Monday of May each year, when the world’s most fashionable celebs gather at the museum to flaunt their frocks. In 2018 Kim Kardashian turned up in a figure-hugging gold chainmail Versace effort. Whether it was the frock’s embroidered crosses or its wearer’s decolletage that best fitted with the gala’s theme ("Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination") was hard to say. Either way, photographers flocked to snap Kardashian next to the only object in the museum that glinted as much as she did: a 2,000-year-old gold Egyptian coffin, acquired by the Met the previous year for nearly dollars 4 million.

When photographs of these two heavenly bodies - Kardashian and coffin - went round the world, it made one man very angry. He was the Jordanian smuggler who had stolen the coffin in the first place, unceremoniously tipping the body of the high priest it contained into the Nile. The smuggler complained to what he thought was a fellow reprobate that he had not been paid for his skulduggery.

In fact the fellow reprobate was an informant for Manhattan’s district attorney’s office. And so the whole deal was exposed. The coffin had not been exported from Egypt in 1971, as its forged export licence had claimed. It had been illegally excavated in 2011, then smuggled through Dubai and Germany to France, where the Met had bought it from a Paris dealer. When the Met was confronted by the district attorney, it claimed that it had “unwittingly participated” in this illegal trade and agreed to return the coffin to Egypt.

Painting of Thomas Hoving, the MET’s controversial former director.

An unfortunate one-off? Not if the ICIJ’s revelations are to be believed. They suggest that, wherever Kardashian chooses to pose at future Met Galas, it’s quite possible she will be snapped alongside an object with just as dubious a provenance as that coffin. The US authorities seized no fewer than 29 allegedly looted objects from the Met last year alone.

Watching the integrity of the world’s most pompous collection of curators crumble before our eyes would be quite funny were it not for one thing. Every time an artefact is stolen to enhance some rich museum or private collection, someone else (usually a very poor country such as Nepal or Cambodia) is being robbed of its heritage. Many of those items would have been torn from sacred sites where they were the revered centrepieces of religious ceremonies.

So much attention has been focused on how institutions such as the British Museum profited from imperialism in the 19th century, or how the Soviet and Nazi regimes profited from art looting in the 20th, and it’s right that we make amends for those crimes. However, we also have to acknowledge that looting is still going on, perhaps more than ever. When will it end? While the antiquities market remains unregulated and largely unpoliced, while there are still collectors with far more money than scruples, and while there are arts institutions as easily duped by faked paperwork as the Met claims to have been, the answer is never.

THE TIMES