The Met's Role in Protecting Cultural Heritage

I am just a few months into my tenure as director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and while getting to know the institution more, I have been reflecting on the multiple roles of our encyclopedic museum and on the importance of each of the several ways we serve visitors and scholars as well as our city, nation, and world. Chief among The Met's leadership responsibilities is the upholding of the policies and practices surrounding the responsible acquisition of art and archaeological materials. I am especially proud of The Met's ongoing and rigorous work in this area and I would like to outline our current thinking and plans for approaching this work in the years ahead.

We should start by appreciating The Met's place in the museum landscape. The Met is a large, comprehensive, and unique institution. Its holdings include more than 1.5 million objects covering five thousand years of global art history, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The Museum did not begin with a royal or state collection; rather, the Museum was founded 149 years ago by a group of New Yorkers who admired the great museums of Europe and had lofty ambitions for their city and their relatively new nation, and sought to bring art and culture to a growing metropolis. The collection was assembled gift by gift.

Today, The Met is many things. Physically, it is the largest art museum in the world, at over two million square feet. Our attendance has grown steadily and steeply over the past decade, from four to more than seven million visitors annually. And, importantly, having assembled among the world's most skilled and ambitious curators, conservators, and scientists, The Met has policies and practices for building and administering our collection that are important guideposts for all museums.

The Met engages with the world in multiple ways. We provide education, understanding, and discourse about the cultures of the world and the objects in our collection both on site and—possibly even more important for our vast global audiences—through digital platforms, print and online publications, documentary videos, and outreach initiatives. We are in dialogue with museums and governments around the globe and have long-standing, collaborative relationships with many of them.

The Met has a comprehensive loan-exchange program (in the last year, we sent well over three thousand works to other institutions and venues globally for long-term use and another twelve hundred for short-term use, such as exhibitions), and annually we interact with dozens of nations and international museums. We also host staff exchange programs (including with China, Russia, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Romania), and are a major partner in a range of conservation training initiatives—including an extensive, six-year Indian conservation fellowship program, and a project that involves the training of museum professionals from Iraq, Syria, and Jordan in the photographic documentation and publication of endangered collections. Finally, we are involved in ongoing excavation projects in Egypt (in Dahshur, Malqata, and Amarna) and Greece (Palaikastro), all in partnership with local governments.

Policies and practices on the acquisition of antiquities and archaeological materials have evolved greatly in recent decades, and The Met has encouraged greater respect for cultural heritage, and greater transparency. The Museum's approach rests on four bedrock principles:

• Transparency: The Met collection is available to the public, in our galleries and online. Our goal is to publish the provenance (or known history of ownership) for all works as part of their entries in our online collection. We have made great and rapid progress toward this goal in recent years: currently 364,000 works—eighty-four percent of our online collection—have published ownership history. Through the Museum's Open Access initiative, we have made all images of public-domain works in our collection available under Creative Commons Zero license—free to use, share, and remix, without restrictions.

• Research: As part of our scholarly mission, The Met's curatorial departments continually study the existing collection and publish updated research. Annually, our team of curators, conservators, and scientists publish dozens of academic papers—many in partnership with expert colleagues at other institutions—and we host dozens of colloquia and other scholarly events.

• Ethical Acquisition: The Met's curatorial staff research the provenance of all works prior to acquisition. The Museum does not acquire an object without proof that it was outside its country of origin before 1970 or legally exported. In exceptional circumstances, the Museum may acquire a work of art that does not meet "the 1970 rule," provided The Met's research and justification for acquisition is published on the Association of Art Museum Directors' object registry. In these instances, The Met hopes that posting the object online will cause any further information regarding these works to come to light.

• Restitution: When The Met discovers a work in its collection was acquired illegally, we seek to restitute that work to its source country. For example, this past year, Met staff in the Department of Asian Art identified four works as likely stolen. The Met contacted the Indian and Nepalese governments, and restituted the works. If a work in the collection is claimed to be looted property, The Met is committed to addressing the matter thoroughly and as quickly as its research allows.

Recent years have brought more intensive review of the holdings and practices of museums throughout the world, including The Met's. This effort requires the museum community as a whole to review its approach—to expand on our activities and make provenances more accessible—and individual museums to review their own myriad individual circumstances. Issues of cultural heritage are inherently complicated, and a leading institution like The Met has multiple responsibilities: to research the history of objects; to illustrate the history and development of its collections; to identify the most fair and appropriate treatment of objects; and to be transparent in our policies and practices. This work requires the skill, rigor, and exceptionally high standards within each of the multiple disciplines that contribute to the review of any one circumstance.

I look forward to helping lead The Met in cultural heritage issues. In the months ahead, we will be examining how we can raise the visibility of our policies and practices, and we will be further engaging with museum and government leaders around the world.