Visiting the Romanian city of Sibiu at the invitation of our old friend Ilie Rotariu, we stumbled across a publicity campaign for museums – with a difference. Of course, museums matter, but it seems that their importance as guardians of national treasures only gets noticed by some people when they get robbed.
The recent theft of three Dacian spiral bracelets and the golden Helmet of Cotofenesti, almost 2,500 years old made global headlines. The pieces were stolen from a Dutch provincial museum where they were on loan from the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest. The thieves assumed correctly that it would be easier to take the pieces from a small provincial museum than from a major institution in the heart of a capital city. The city of Assen only has a population of 68,000, compared with the 1.7 million in Bucharest. A good example of how to ‘create size’ by borrowing assets from bigger places, as we suggested in the book Small Cities with Big Dreams.
Unfortunately, the assets borrowed by the Dutch Museum were also a very portable and attractive target for the thieves who blew their way into the museum with explosives. The fear is of course that the thieves will simply melt the gold down, making it a lot easier to dispose of. Even though three suspects have been arrested, there is no sign of the gold. The theft made global headlines, but not the kind that the museum or the city of Assen will have wanted.
Perhaps the biggest impact of this high-profile theft will be on the common practice of museums lending artworks and artifacts to each other. Without this facility, most exhibitions would not be feasible, because few museums are large enough to curate major shows of their own works. This will be a particular challenge for smaller museums, which generally rely on the larger ones to lend them eyecatching works to stage ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. This was the tactic used by the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch to develop the Visions of a Genius exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch in 2016. This event attracted 1.4 million visitors to this small city, even though it did not have a single Bosch work of its own. These types of shows may be much more difficult to organise in future if larger museums are more wary of lending their artworks, or if insurance costs increase to the point where major exhibitions become unaffordable for smaller institutions.
One of the more positive impacts of the Assen theft has been the mobilisation of the cultural sector in Romania, which has developed campaigns underlining that “museums matter”. The collective nature of cultural heritage has also been highlighted with a poster saying “And you've been robbed”. Not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of irreplaceable cultural heritage.
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