Decolonize Museums

by Shimrit Lee

**Behold the sleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.** The idealized Western museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for over a century: a uniquely rarified public space of cool stone, providing an experience of leisure and education for the general public while carefully tending fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representation and ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed their interest in diversity and...