In a series of five lectures, faculty members from the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin will present and discuss current issues concerning the politics of cultural ownership. Who owns artefacts in museums? Who has the right to decide whether an art work should be restored? Who has the authority to speak for a culture threatened by collapse? Can cultural identity itself be an object of ownership? What happens to the notions of copyright and intellectual property in an era of internet, new media and filesharing? The debates triggered by such questions not only lead to legal disputes, they tend to touch upon - and sometimes challenge - some of our most fundamental intutions about politics, ethics and human identity.

It is not necessary for interested students to attend all the lectures. Each lecture is an independent exploration of an issue relevant to the general theme.

THE LAST OF THE CROW?
Thomas Nørgaard and David Hayes

"Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life – whatever it is – is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem."
                                                       (Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation)

When a culture is threatened by collapse, what sort of person has the authority to speak for it? This question has received a bold answer in a recent book by the Chicago philosopher Jonathan Lear, who suggests that such a person should be capable of 'radical hope'. Lear develops this suggestion through a philosophical interpretation of the remarkable life-story of Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow Indians from 1876 to 1932. Faced with smallpox, a strong Sioux enemy, the disappearance of the bison, and not least the increasing dominance of the white man, Plenty Coups was forced to bring traditional forms of Crow life to an end. At the same time he was a firm believer in the future of the Crow way of life. The lecture will focus on Lear's understanding of Plenty Coups as a man of 'radical hope', and in that light discuss two fundamental questions about cultural identity. What does it mean for a threatened culture, like the Crow culture, to survive? And is it really the man of 'radical hope' who should lead the way?

The lecture will function as an introduction to Lear's book. It is not necessary to read the book in advance.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS: STEALING THE GLOBAL BILDUNGSROMAN
Catherine Toal

A number of recent contemporary novels show us examples of narratives written from the perspective of a protagonist who is a citizen of a different country to the author. Often these novels seem to be a form of substitute for the autobiographical Bildungsroman typically expected of a first or early-career novel (e.g. Nell Freudenburger’s The Dissident , David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated). Historically, the Bildungsroman was the aesthetic form which negotiated the experience of modernity, specifically, the culural shift from socio-economic conditions in which identity (as profession, class status etc.) was fixed and inherited, to one in which it was relatively undetermined, considered a matter of ‘choice’ and beset by problems of insecurity. What do the cultural appropriations of the contemporary Bildungsroman signify? How should we interpret its writing of subjectivity in the terms of another culture/identity, especially one regarded as being at a different stage of ‘development’ –whether ‘delayed’ or proleptic—to the author’s home space? How is the literary culture of globalization to be connected with the issues of legitimacy and propriety which dominate debate over its political and economic character?

IS THERE A RIGHT TO CULTURE?
Bruno Macaes

Do rights apply exclusively to individuals and are they meant to preserve our interests in freedom or autonomy? Or may the concept of a right also apply to culture? May rights be used to preserve particular cultures? Who are the beneficiaries of cultural rights? The intuition behind the concept of such rights is that human beings need to be part of a flourishing culture if they are to develop their abilities to the full and if their lives are not to be impoverished in shared meaning and social integration. From this perspective, to speak of human rights in the absence of a human right to culture may seem overly formal and individualistic. But this raises a number of problems. First, one may want to investigate the extent to which a right to culture is compatible with the liberal tradition of rights. If a particular culture includes practices that conflict with liberal rights to freedom and autonomy, can we conceive of a right to the preservation of these practices without sacrificing the rights of individual persons? It has been pointed out, for instance, that protecting cultures out of adherence to a human right to culture may involve the legal protection of arranged marriages rather than those resulting from the free choice of individuals. Second, the concept of a right to culture seems inconceivable in the absence of an increased role for the cultural or national group as a subject of rights. Because a right to culture is a right to maintain a way of life, the question of how best to preserve this way of life cannot be decided at the level of the individual.

CONTROVERSIAL ART-RESTORATIONS: IS HUMANITY ERASING ITS OWN PAST?
Geoff Lehman and Peter Hajnal

Recent years have seen a growing number of “sensational” but controversial restorations of major art-works including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, and other major works of the Italian Renaissance. Many of these restorations are controversial in part because they result in major changes to the appearance of these works. While some art-historians have hailed the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, for example, as the discovery of a new Michelangelo, others have criticized it as having ruined one of the most iconic items in the historical heritage of Western civilisation beyond repair.

The issues are not merely aesthetic, but involve deep philosophical problems about the identity of art-works, and questions about the value and autonomy of art in general. In this talk an art-historian and a philosopher will examine together some of the assumptions supporting the legitimacy of restoration procedures. They will defend the view that the issues involved require real dialogue between art-historians, philosophers, cultural historians, curators, artists, and scientists, and that many controversial restorations result in disaster precisely because an unwarranted trust in technology frequently effaces the need for such a dialogue.

The talk will also address some of the larger ethical and philosophical issues involved. Protecting works of art calls, first of all, for establishing the cause as important enough to be adopted by the wider public. It must be argued convincingly that such care for the condition of art-works is not frivolous in the light of the challenges mankind as a whole faces vis a vis the economy, or the environment. It also becomes urgent to ask whether the theoretical strategies developed by environmentalists can simply be adapted for the purpose of protecting art, or whether a new approach is needed altogether. To illustrate the difficulties in arguing for ‘preservation’ as opposed to ‘restoration’ the talk will offer for discussion a ‘Bill of Rights for Works of Art’ drafted by James Beck and Michael Daley in 1995 as a conclusion to their book Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business, and the Scandal. Students interested in attending this lecture are asked to prepare by reading this one page document and be prepared to discuss it during the session.

NAZI-LOOTED ART AND RESTITUTION
Aya Soika

This lecture looks at several restitution cases, particularly at the controversy of the restitution case of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Street Scene of 1913, returned by the Berlin Brücke Museum to the heirs of prominent collector Alfred Hess in 2006, and subsequently sold through Christies for a record sum. The aim of the lecture is to give an introduction to the complexities of 'ownership' of art works, and to provide an analysis of the role of provenance research in both institutional setting and legal process, by looking at a sample of case studies in which the principles for dealing with Nazi-looted art (as established in the Washington Declaration of 1999) were put to the test.

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