The public institution that gathers, preserves, studies, and displays the objects a society deems worth saving — opening the treasures of the world to everyone, even as its greatest collections hold much that was taken by force. The museum is the temple where a civilization keeps what it values, and argues over what it stole: a genuine public good built substantially on imperial plunder, and the place where the question of who owns the human record is fought out.
In 1897, a British naval force burned the West African city of Benin and carried off thousands of brass and ivory sculptures. Within a year, many of those Benin Bronzes were on sale and on display in the museums of Europe — admired as masterpieces, their origin a footnote. This is the museum's double inheritance, condensed. It is one of the modern world's great public goods: an institution that takes the treasures of human making and opens them, free or nearly free, to anyone who walks in. It is also a treasure house filled in the age of empire, holding objects looted from cultures that are still alive and still asking for them back. The museum gathers what a society values. It also keeps what it took. Both things are true of the same building, the same case, sometimes the same object.