The Art of Status: Looted Treasures and the Global Politics of Restitution

Why is art restitution a matter of politics? How does the artwork displayed in national museums reflect the international status of the state that owns it? Why do some states agree to return looted art and others resist?

National art collections have long been a way for states to compete with each other for status, prestige, and cultural worth in international society. These collections, however, also include large quantities of art looted during imperial expansions and colonial occupations. While acquiring art (through licit or illicit means) was once a sign of high international standing, the markers of such status have since significantly changed. A new international legal and normative architecture governing art provenance developed after World War II and became institutionalized in the 1990s and 2000s. Since then, there have been national and global social movements demanding the return of looted art. This shift has established not only that looting is wrong but, more importantly, that restitution is morally right. As a result of this reframing of what it means to own art, an artifact's historical provenance has become a core element of its value and the search for provenance and demands for restitution a direct threat to state status. The same objects that granted states high international status have now become objects of stigma.

In The Art of Status, Jelena Subotic examines this relationship between the restitution of looted art and international status, with a focus on the Parthenon ('Elgin') Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, and a collection of paintings looted during the Holocaust that are now housed at the Serbian National Museum. Subotic tells the story of these artworks, how they were looted, how they ended up on display in national museums, and how the art restitution disputes have unfolded. While these cases are different in terms of their historical context of looting and ownership claims, the movements for their restitution, and resistance to it, illustrate the larger questions of how national cultural heritage is internationally constructed and how it serves states' desire for international status and prestige.

Speaker:

Jelena Subotic is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007). She writes broadly about international relations theory, memory politics, cultural heritage, state identity, and the politics of the Western Balkans.

Her latest book, The Art of Status: Looted Treasures and the Global Politics of Restitution, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. The book examines the relationship between looted art and international status, by focusing on the debates about acquisition and restitution of the Parthenon Marbles, Benin Bronzes, and a never before written about collection of Nazi-looted art housed in the National Museum of Serbia.

Here other books include: Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, the 2020 American Political Science Association European Politics and Society Book Prize, the 2020 Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Prize for the Best Book in International History and Politics (American Political Science Association) and Honourable mention, 2020 Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies; and Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2009).

Professor Subotic’s research has appeared in a number of academic and public policy journals, including International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Foreign Policy Analysis, and many others. She is the recipient of a number of research grants, including from the National Science Foundation and USAID, and is a frequent commentator on Holocaust revisionism, war crimes and the politics of the Balkans for CNN, BBC, and other international outlets.