ArtReview
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You can't escape it: this is the same colonial museum we know, in a shiny new suit
Dan Hicks
As seen in:
Yahoo Life,
The Guardian,
The Independent (UK),
The Telegraph,
Taylor & Francis Online,
The Conversation,
Yahoo Sports Canada,
Artnet,
Hyperallergic,
Jacobin
and
Covers:
Museums, Arts, Culture, Legacies of Colonialism, Archaeology, Heritage, History, Empire, Restitution, Decolonisation, Universities, Teaching, Education, Curation, Anthropology, the "Culture War"
Dan Hicks’s Journalist Portfolio
View as a gridThe British Museum is an anachronism - here's how to fix it
The Telegraph
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The British Museum is an anachronism - here's how to fix it. The institution's image has been ruined. We need emergency stock-taking and a seismic policy change, says the Pitt Rivers Museum curator
'The last remaining argument against restitution has now been lost'
The Art Newspaper
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To make the British Museum fit for the 21st century it must create a comprehensive publicly accessible database of its entire collection, argues Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford
Are Museums Obsolete?
The Architectural Review
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Dan Hicks contrasts the outdated A History of the World in 100 Objects with forward-looking ideas surrounding restitution in his own book, The Brutish Museums
Quels seront les prochains défis pour les restitutions culturelles ?
artnewspaper.fr
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Les trois courtes années qui se sont écoulées depuis la publication du Rapport Sarr- Savoy commandé par le président Emmanuel Macron ont vu des musées européens et nord-américains effectuer des restitutions encore impensables il y a dix ans.
Let's Keep Colston Falling
ArtReview
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The statue of the slave trader is now on display in a museum, a year after it was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters 'When people die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.'
Can We Imagine Public Art Beyond 'Toxic Monumentality'?
ArtReview
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A discussion of states, "toxic monumentality", and how artists are rebuilding a "collective monumentality" in the 2020s, including discussion of the Testament show at CCA Goldsmiths
The U.K. Has Held Onto the Parthenon Marbles for Centuries-But the Tide Is Turning. Here's Why I ...
artnet
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Twenty-five years ago, in the preface to the 1997 edition of his book The Parthenon Marbles , Christopher Hitchens observed that "those who support the status quo at the British Museum have the great advantage of inertia on their side." Today, things could hardly be more different.
Looted art must be returned - but on a case-by-case basis
The Telegraph
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Few oppose the restitution of treasures stolen by force. But the argument for the return of artefacts like the Elgin Marbles is different
The UK government is trying to draw museums into a fake culture war | Dan Hicks
The Guardian
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t the bottom of Oxford's Cowley Road you won't find a bronze statue of a colonial-era British soldier, in campaign dress and pith helmet, rifle raised to the ready position, that commemorates the Boer war. Nor will you find human skulls arranged by type for the purposes of so-called "race science" in Oxford University's Museum of Natural History.
Does George Osborne at the British Museum Signal a Dangerous Blow to the Arts? - ELEPHANT
Elephant Magazine
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The man who presided over sweeping cuts to the creative sector in the UK is now chairman of one of its most important museums. It could be a warning sign of cultural vandalism to come, argues Dan Hicks " Buller, Buller!" was the cry as they smashed places up.
What are the next challenges for cultural restitution?
The Art Newspaper
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The three short years since the publication of the Sarr-Savoy report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron have seen returns by European and North American museums that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
Decolonising museums isn't part of a 'culture war'. It's about keeping them relevant | Dan Hicks
The Guardian
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The dead don't bury themselves. This is one of the first lessons that every student of archaeology must learn. A grave is never evidence of some Pompeii moment, a freeze-frame of someone as they were in life. It shows how that person was treated in death and by posterity.
If the Queen has nothing to hide, she should tell us what artefacts she owns | Dan Hicks
The Guardian
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f Britain's museums gave back all the stolen stuff then their galleries would be empty and they'd all have to be shut down". This old scare story is often repeated, but it confuses necessary and enlightened reform with iconoclasm.
Comment | Britain stole the royal, sacred Benin Bronzes from Nigeria-so why is Germany leading th...
The Art Newspaper
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"Colonial history told by British historians is a glorification of inhuman conquest", the artist Victor Ehikhamenor wrote on Twitter over the weekend. Rumours were beginning to circulate that Benin Bronzes may not be displayed at Berlin's new Humboldt-Forum, and steps towards permanent returns are being taken by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
New Books | The Brutish Museums
New Frame
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This is a lightly edited excerpt from The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press, 2020) by Dan Hicks. We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.
How Did the Benin Bronzes Come to Europe? Here's How Colonial Powers Raced to Loot Them Amid a Pr...
artnet
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In his acclaimed new book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, archaeologist, anthropologist, and Oxford's Pitt-Rivers Museum curator Dan Hicks investigates the motivations behind the British raid on the Benin Palace in 1897, which led to treasures being distributed around Western collections.
Why won't the British Museum return the Benin Bronzes?
The Telegraph
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The Museum's involvement in a huge project in Nigeria has only dragged it further into a fractious heritage debate
Britain must give the Benin Bronzes back to Africa - it's our moral duty
The Telegraph
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The curator of Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum explains why we should return African artefacts to their home continent at long last
'The looting was a chaotic free-for-all': Dan Hicks on the pillaging of the Benin Bronzes and how...
The Art Newspaper
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"Dismantling, re-imagining and re-purposing this outdated racist infrastructure is an urgent task" Dan Hicks A new book called The Brutish Museums about colonial violence and the restitution of stolen objects could not be more timely after France's National Assembly voted to return 27 colonial-era artefacts from French museums to Benin and Senegal.
Fallism and restitution: Removing racist statues and returning looted art objects - New African M...
New African (UK)
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Communities are making connections between racist statues in the streets and displays of White supremacy in museums. Fallism and the quest to return Africa's plundered cultural heritage are part of the same struggle, say Professors Dan Hicks and Nicholas Mirzoeff. 'Fallism' is an African movement - and one with a long history.
Hew Locke Challenges Empire in Birmingham
Hyperallergic
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The artist realized what he previously called an "impossible proposal," building a ship around a public statue of Queen Victoria, where she's joined by five smaller replicas of herself.
'A Radical Slowing Down': How Museums Are Responding to Our Troubling Times
ArtReview
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Laura Raicovich, Interim director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York I started work as the interim director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art less than a week after New York City went into lockdown to help stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Why Colston Had to Fall
ArtReview
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It can be tricky, we learn from the rolling news coverage of COVID-19, to put your finger on the precise time and place at which a disease emerged. The same is true for the epidemiology of anti-blackness.