39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

Who owns the past?

Alberto Garín1

Universidad Francisco Marroquín - Guatemala

Abstract

States like History because History is the easier way to justify the existence of States. For this

reason, States need to possess the History. In this paper, we are going to reflect on who has

the right to own the pass, what is the correct way to preserve the cultural heritage, and why the

free international art market could be one of the best method both to conserve the history and

to avoid States to capture it.

JEL Codes: H52, I21, Z11

Keywords: History; National heritage; Art market

1. Introduction

As a physical reality, time does not belong to anyone. As soon as the moment that has

already happened passes us by, time does not even exist. I can explain the possession of an

object or a territory based on historical rights: my grandfather took something, my father kept

it, I still have it. But I do not own the past time (which is already extinguished), there are no

historical rights per se. All I can own is the object preserved as time goes by. I cannot own

what doesn’t exist. I cannot claim rights to a vanished reality, only on a preserved good.

A set of intangible past events can be part of the memory of all those human beings

who decide to use it. Indeed as an intangible reality, past events are inexhaustible. Thus, the

Thirty Years War (1618-48) occurred but I cannot interact with a reality called the “Thirty

1
albertoga@ufm.edu - www.exploraciones.ufm.edu.
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

Years War.” I cannot fight the battles that occurred during those specific years in Germany; I

cannot change history by traveling to the past and introducing a new weapon to Spanish

troops. In today’s Germany, I can discuss the events that occurred between 1618 and 1648; I

can discuss the decisions taken in that conflict by Wallenstein or Richelieu; I can try to

establish the movements of Swedish troops or imagine the suffering of those defenestrated at

Prague. Indeed, with respect to intellectual work, I have no limits but my own knowledge

about the subject and no one should forbid me if I want to talk, discuss, or dream about the

Thirty Years War. This is because a memory is like a universal good. No group or person can

claim the exclusive right to speak about or study the Thirty Years War. No group or person

may prohibit others from investigating or writing about the Thirty Years War. And we can all

criticize the research work of others (for being incomplete, false, fanciful, etc.).

On the other hand, any set of material goods (works of art, archival documents,

archaeological sites, cultural landscapes...) belong to their rightful owner, private or public. Just

because they are objects of the past does not mean that they belong to everyone. This means

that the debate about the past focuses on objects that remain of the past and not on the

elapsed time itself. Heritage issues are not a matter of some fancifully preserved memory but,

rather, of property rights to material goods. We ask: who has the right to use, to exchange, and

to consume the goods produced in the past?

2. Is the art market in competition with historical research?

Since they are goods produced by human beings, the objects of the past (just like any

other object made by humans) may be used, exchanged, or consumed, always respecting the

owner’s property rights.

39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

Historical research analyzes object as a kind of testimony of the past and this analysis

does not depend (directly) on a good’s type of ownership or its use.

One of the collisions that can occur between the rights of the owner of an historical

good and the wishes of an historian involves the matter of just how to go about preserving the

good. But even in this case, the right of the owner to use the lawfully acquired property must

come before the historian’s determination to analyze it.

Indeed, in a market society, if the correct conservation of a property (upon which the

historian would insist) actually increases its value, then the owner is likely to opt for proper

conservation. In Spain, for example, in the town of Sigüenza, two hours northeast of Madrid,

property owners in the Old City are actively insisting on the archaeological study of every

building before its restoration, because they know that if they discover an historical house, the

price will rise immediately2.

But even if conservation is inadequate and, for that reason, a good cannot become an

historical resource, we should continue prioritizing the legitimate rights of the owner over the

interests of the historian. Eshmunazar, King of Sidon, requested in an inscription on the top of

his grave that no one open his tomb because nothing interesting was inside. Also he asked that

the tomb be left where it was. Today, however, his sarcophagus is on display in the Louvre

Museum, having been opened (Caubet and Prévotat, 2014). Sadly, the main interest of the

tomb is the long inscription Eshmunazar had written on its surface. Without moving it from

its original position, that inscription easily could have been transcribed, thus marrying the

interests of historians with the desires of the King of Sidon. Perhaps, later the tomb would

eventually be lost. But such was Eshmunazar’s wish.

2
From 2007 to 2008, the author of this paper worked as an archaeologist for the architectural firm of Carlos
Clemente in Sigüenza, Spain, performing precisely these kinds of archaeological surveys.
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

If the legitimate owners’ rights to historic properties are violated, we may enter into a

dynamic in which those owners of historic properties decide to prevent access, or else hide or

consume their properties because of their fear of losing their rights to them. Therefore, and

paradoxically, even though we believe we are protecting the national heritage, in fact we

provoke its destruction. As another example in Spain, in Guadalajara, the town council

contracted a private developer to build an underground parking lot in the Plaza Mayor.

Previously, an archaeological excavation was done and the foundations of a number of

medieval shops were found. A compromise solution would have been to preserve one of those

shops. The viability of such an agreement would have stemmed from the fact that the

developer would have earned prestige in exchange for losing a parking space. National heritage

technicians, however, threatened to paralyze the entire work in order to recover all the shops

(which would have meant the loss of 80% of the parking lots). During the discussions, the

developer chose to go ahead and destroy all the archaeological remains. In their eagerness to

preserve the entire site for Spain’s cultural heritage, the technicians ended up losing

everything3.

In any case, the use of an historic property by its rightful owner does not automatically

imply its deterioration or destruction. Similarly, an analysis by an historian does not imply that

the historical interpretation is valid. And what is more, a misinterpretation by even the most

professional historians can still produce a misguided conservation, affecting an historic site in a

worse way than when it is being used by its legal owner.

The Dama de Elche (Lady of Elche) is a bust dated, in theory, from sometime in the –

fifth and fourth centuries B.C., corresponding to the period of the so-called Iberian culture in

Spain. In 1996, the American historian John Moffitt questioned the authenticity of the piece,
3
The author of this paper tried to persuade Pedro Pradillo, the cultural officer of Guadalajara, against his
final "all or nothing" decision.
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

arguing that it is a forgery from the late nineteenth century (Moffit, 2005). Apart from the

open debate, Moffitt correctly remembered that a number of other “Iberian ladies” appeared

soon after the Dama de Elche. These were restored in some very creative ways, always

according to the model of Elche. So now, all these ladies are very much alike, not because all

of them are examples of Iberian culture but, rather, because of the general effort to show that

the Dama de Elche was an original discovery.

Another type of collision can occur between the legitimate owner of a property and

society at large, in this case the State. This problem is particularly acute when the State

determines that an historical good embodies the essence of a national identity. At that

moment, the State:

—Will move to restrict the owner’s rights. A clear example is Steve Jobs’s house in

Woodside, California, known as the “Jackling House.” When the creator of Apple wanted to

demolish the house, he found out that the township was going to declare the house a good

example of the Spanish neocolonial style, which for its part inspired the region’s architecture in

the 1920s (Lee, 2011). Thus, Steve Jobs lost any ability to modify a property that he had

acquired legitimately. Finally, he managed the building’s demolition. Shortly thereafter, in 2013,

the city of Los Altos, also in California, decided to declare the garage where Jobs and Wozniak

made the first Apple computer an historical landmark. Now it is Steve Jobs’s sister who gets to

have her rights undermined (Martín, 2013). Will we really forget the Spanish neocolonial style

or who invented the Apple computer if the Jackling House or Steve Jobs’s sister’s garage

disappear? No. Their existence is more a reflection of the desire of city officials in Woodside

and Los Altos to attract tourists than to preserve some rare historical memory. It would be

more honest to apply the concept of “eminent domain” and seek to protect those buildings as

objects important to the local tourist market not as sites of historical heritage.
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

—Furthermore, the State distorts historical interpretations. This is the case of the

Romanesque churches of the eastern Pyrenees, in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula.

Built by feudal lords, both lay and ecclesiastical, who sought to reinforce their positions of

power in the twelfth century (Sobrequés, 1989, p. 26-27), these churches have now become

one of the great symbols of Catalan nationalism, to the point that the best frescoes of these

churches are now in a museum in Barcelona, the Museo Nacional de Catalunya, which is the

epitome of Catalanism. The idea is not to preserve the heritage of the past but, rather, to

strengthen the cultural identity of Catalonia, establishing a direct link between the feudal lords

of the twelfth century and a particular subset of the citizens of a twenty-first century

democracy. Indeed, according to the Catalan authorities, the people of their region have more

in common with those medieval lords than they do with the contemporary citizens of the rest

of Spain. What they refuse to acknowledge is that those same feudal lords, if they were to rule

today, applying the same political system of nine centuries ago, would surely not hesitate to

wipe out today’s Catalan authorities who would do not represent anything at all for them.

“National identity” is merely an historical category created by the employees of States,

either existing States or States still in the process of constructing themselves. It is used to

justify the existence of these States. To think in terms of “national identity” is to avoid

understanding people as individuals and to see them as a homogeneous group of taxpayers.

Curiously, the use of history by nationalists (who always appeal to an undeniable reality

supported by events and a commonly shared heritage) is clearly irrational. The nationalist aims

to ascribe a single will, which somehow persists over a long period of time, to a specific group

of people, eliminating any choice that individuals in said group might make. Taken to the

extreme, this irrational “historical spirit” is found in such awkward phrases as “España es una

unidad de destino en lo universal” (Primo de Rivera, 1934) or “Spain is a unified destiny in the
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

universal,” which was deployed by the Spanish fascist party of Primo de Rivera in the early

1930s. According to the logic of the fascist phrase, all the people in the territory of Spain

became one person with a single and unique will directed toward universal greatness. This

homogenization of society is still present today in the nationalist discourse of most countries:

“us” versus “them” as monolithic wills that disallow the notion of personal freedom.

The “past-time” belongs to everyone. But the “past-object” can only belong to its

owners. When a government “nationalizes” the past, on the one hand, it steals that time from

the whole of humanity, and on the other hand, it fabricates its so-called heritage from each

individual owner whom it expropriates. The State favors neither the whole of society nor

individuals. The State just promotes itself.

3. How should we properly conserve an historic good?

Before I answer, remember that an historic good is characterized as an object of the

past, so technically speaking all man-made objects are historical: since they have already been

produced, they all have a past. From there, the transition to the upper category of “historical”

depends on the arbitrary will of time (whether or not the object continues to exist) and people

provided with the ability to decide what qualifies as historical and what does not. And we

would be wise to remember that public historical commissions, or whatever name they may

have, first appeared in the wake of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century.

The classic example here is the Musée Napoleon (now the Louvre), which was created

not to protect the works of art in France. In fact, the revolutionaries tended to destroy works

of art as symbols of the Ancien Régime. No, the world’s greatest museum was created to

display the greatness of the emperor (Malgouyres, 1999), and later, that of the French

Republic. The Louvre Museum would go on to become the model of national museums (state
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

or local). Items that are kept in them are selected because they magnify the State. Also, while it

is true that museum objects speak of history, they are not always the most representative of the

story they would tell. La Gioconda is famous because it is in the Louvre, not because it is the

best work of Leonardo da Vinci, or the most representative of the Renaissance movement, or

the best symbol for the status of women in fifteenth-century Italy.

Returning to the question of what makes for proper conservation, it should attempt to:

—Respect the originality of the object, which is complex (if not impossible), when you

consider that if we would like to preserve an object, we then apply a set of procedures that will

often change its original appearance, such as placing it in a glass case, applying chemical

coatings to it, displaying it under specific lighting, etc.

—Adjust our understanding of the object: if the historical value of the object lies, in

theory, in its ability to explain the past, then it should be preserved in a way that makes it even

easier to understand that past. For example, the object might still be in its original context, in

which case most of the national museums, built according to the Napoleonic museum, are

relatively meaningless. The paintings and sculptures of Catholic altars which are displayed

separately from these altars lose significant aspects of their meaning. The Roman sigillata

ceramic, which was the luxury tableware par excellence of the Romans, placed in a vitrine and not

on the dining room table, loses all explanatory power.

However, the biggest obsession of conservationists is to create “museums for all,” in

other words, State museums, where the pieces are grouped out of context, in many cases

rendering them incomprehensible, all just to increase the prestige of the State.

Taking a different approach, we might say that the dangers posed by conservation are

basically three:
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

—The destruction or disappearance of the work, a problem that is not foreign to any

object, regardless of who owns it. Recently, the town council of Madrid, in Spain, admitted

that almost two hundred works are missing from their art collections (García Gallo, 2014).

They have been lost, stolen, or simply destroyed.

—The inevitable deterioration that comes with the passage of time. Even the most

protected works may disappear, as is the case with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which

is decaying before our eyes, albeit slowly, thanks to an extravagant technique used by the

Tuscan painter.

—The modification of the object in order to make it fit an invented discourse. This is

the real risk, regardless of the use of the object made by its rightful owner. States tend to

distort their own heritage in their attempts to justify their existence. In history, it is increasingly

difficult to overcome nationalist myths, because once established, myth becomes the subject of

an irrational debate. The Mayas, for example, never saw anything approaching the current site

of Tikal in Guatemala, with their pyramids all in good condition and all surrounded by a grass

typically found on a golf course. But today the Guatemalan State needs to sell its historical

roots in the grandeur of the past, and thus all buildings are in good condition and they are

represented in clear balance with nature, perfectly ordered. The goal of the curators of Tikal is

not to try to explain to visitors how the Maya world actually was but, rather, how important

and careful the current Guatemalan State is.

4. Should we retain all goods from the past?

First, we will inevitably retain those objects or properties whose owners feel that they

want to keep them. These might be kept for pleasure, use or for some other reason, such as

their trade value.

39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

Second, beyond the conservation itself, an object has an historical value depending on

the analytical skills of the historian who evaluates it.

From the historian’s point of view, to accumulate goods just because they are old

makes no sense. But to accumulate goods whose analysis has already been performed to

perfection makes no sense either.

Actually, the key point is the owner’s interest in an object’s conservation and not the

historical value of the object itself. And the owner’s interest will always be linked to other non-

historical “values”: prestige, aesthetics, market value, the strengthening of national identity or

even the consolidation of the power of the State. History is almost always used, in general, as

an excuse for other goals. The Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain’s foremost educational center

for understanding of the history of painting, is, above all else, the insignia of the grandeur of

imperial Spain reflected in its royal collection. The question is not whether the visitor leaves

the Prado saying how much she has learned about iconography but, rather, that she leaves

impressed by how great Spain once was. Moreover, as the educational program of the Prado

Museum is currently formulated, either the visitor already knows a lot about painting before

going there, or she will leave having seen very large and very pretty pictures, but without

acquiring any real grasp of art history. But we know one thing for sure: she will be impressed

by how incredible the museum is and how many famous and important paintings it has.

We cannot keep all the objects of the past. First off, if we preserve everything, then by

definition we will consume nothing. Second, not all preserved objects have the same ability to

speak to us about the past. How many ceramic fragments obtained in an archaeological survey

should we keep? Archaeologists actually have an answer for this, which we usually do not share

with the general public. Researching and inventorying all the fragments that appear, we usually

discard (by returning them to the survey site) those which are not significant (which is usually
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

the vast majority of them). But again, this is something that we dare not say out loud, because

“to discard history” is not politically correct.

Once again, let me be clear: the ability to understand a good from the past depends on

the historian, not on the object. And what is preserved and what is not preserved should

depend only on the owner, not on the historian.

The knowledge of history is based on material and intellectual sources coming down to

us from the past. In principle, these sources come to us by way of their respective owners, who

either will or will not allow us to analyze them. We should also note that if the owner of the

sources is a public organism, this does not necessarily mean that it allows immediate access to

historians. Think of, for example, the classified archives of presidents, prime ministers, war

departments, and others that are not accessible until many years later. But well beyond the

types of security reasons that governments can claim, a private person always has the right to

defend his privacy.

As the result of a research, History becomes humanity’s heritage, and everyone and

anyone can think about and discuss every past event.

Unfortunately, much of History has become a legitimizing tool for States, which deploy

their specialized agencies (ministries or departments of Cultural Heritage), which then decide,

first, exactly which historical goods have to be preserved and studied, and, second, exactly

what must be the result of these studies, according to the official discourse. If needed, the

State can decide to confiscate an historic good from a private owner, especially if this good

reinforces the nationalist discourse. The good is acquired or expropriated, not because of its

age or its didactic utility but simply because it strengthens the State’s prestige (once again, we

must always keep in mind the history of the creation of national museums).
39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

5. Conclusion

To sum up, historic goods must be possessed by their rightful owners and should not

affect the ability of these rightful owners to use or exchange these goods, even beyond a

nation’s borders. Indeed, the international art market performs vital functions in cooperation

with private owners:

—It ensures the conservation of such goods. The new owner acquires them, usually

because he wants to preserve them in even better conditions than the previous owner. For

example, the works of Hispanic colonial art that we see in the Casa Popenoe in Antigua,

Guatemala, which are part of a private collection, are in far better shape than those exhibited

in the Colonial Museum of Art, a public institution also in Antigua, Guatemala.

— The international art market breaks up the Statists’ obsession with strengthening

national cultural identities. A national identity campaign does not allow the educational

development of citizens but, rather, promotes their alienation from the State. For example, if

all Maya art were only in Guatemala, that would not mean that Guatemalans would know more

history but, rather, that the State of Guatemala could even more easily distort History and

justify even more its “raison d’être” from ancient pre-Columbian times. After all, the Maya

objects scattered in different American and European universities provided the very best

incentive for those same universities to study this pre-Columbian culture, to the point that

today these universities can indeed serve as a relatively objective reference point for

Guatemalans who might want to get a proper historical perspective or real historical training

regarding their Maya past.

39th Annual Conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Las Vegas, April, 13-15, 2014

Despite what most Statists argue, a real free market of works of art does not threaten

anyone’s historical heritage; rather, it actually increases our ability to preserve and, above all, to

understand this heritage, and all with a much higher degree of objectivity than would be

possible otherwise.

References

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Louvre. http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/sarcophage-deshmounazor-ii-roi-de-sidon

García Gallo, Bruno. 2014. “El Ayuntamiento extravía 200 obras de arte.” El País, January 29.

http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2014/01/28/madrid/1390944939_040867.html

Lee, Henry K. 2011. "Steve Jobs’ historic Woodside mansion is torn down.” SFGate, February

15. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Steve-Jobs-historic-Woodside-mansion-is-torn-

down-2474921.php

Malgouyres, Philippe. 1999. Le Musée Napoléon. Paris: Réunion de Musées Nationaux

Martín, Javier. 2013. “El garaje de Jobs, propiedad histórica.” El País, October 30.

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Moffit, John F. 2005. "La Dama de Elche tras diez años polémicos.” Empiria. Revista de

Metodología de Ciencias Sociales, 10 (November): 185-209.

Primo de Rivera, José Antonio. 1934. Veintisiete puntos de la Falange española. Madrid: Falange

española.

Sobrequés, Santiago. 1989. Els Barons de Catalunya. Barcelona: Vicens Vives.