Your linking of the arguments for retaining treasures to racism is a common move: I think it obscures real questions. If the point is to return the treasures to their rightful owners, it seems reasonable to ask who that might be (if it’s to return them to their ‘native soil’ then there are often questions about what the fate of the objects will be, and why soil should get a vote). All manner of frankly crazy stories have been told to support different flavours of nationalism, some of the strangest by the British: many arguments for ‘returning’ objects are based on such stories, or pander to the desires of national governments striving to bolster their legitimacy. Questioning such motivations doesn’t have to be racist, ethnist or chauvinistic.

Most of the arguments in favour of keeping stolen cultural artifacts here amount to no more than “the wogs would not take good care of them anyway” and/or “besides, the people living there now are not the people whose artifacts we looted”.

I’d imagine the latter would not go over well if say the Lewis chessmen were looted from Britain by another country, while the former is just not true anymore (with some exceptions)

There’s an excellent argument for using fakes – putting the real ones up would be irresponsible because they will be damaged by pollution and acid rain.

I suppose it doesn’t matter that much for a bog-standard chunk of a column, but things with details that could be eaten away (or broken off and stolen!) are probably best kept indoors and replaced by duplicates.

Some items are made of materials that can stand up to pollution, but others practically melt.

1) Make sure countries have some oversight over how things are stored and/or displayed in other countries’ museums.

2) Provide some method of generating revenue from visitors, and sending that back to the source nation. Gift shop? Micropayment buttons by every exhibit? Higher ticket prices? Traffic tracking so that souce countries are paid depending on how many people pass by and how long they pause at a given item?

3) Establish discounted/free admission for the source country’s citizens, and discounted and/or heavily subsidized travel packages to the exhibiting museums, administered through embassies or consulates.

In terms of education possibilities, I bet it would be far more enriching to send Egyptian families to London, than to send them to Cairo. (And likewise, with sending an Ohio family to London, rather than the Smithsonian; or sending an English family to the Smithsonian, rather than London. This is not an argument of English superiority.)

I’m sure the US would see a huge flaw in this in that it would involve people from those countries travelling here, and also that every such trip would provide the travelers with an opportunity to overstay their visas.

What should happen?

Only as long as the people who possess them are sane enough to not destroy the item in lieu of returning it.

Likewise, the efforts of the Greeks to obtain the marbles probably led the British Museum to make sure that they were restored and showcased.

The best way to preserve cultural treasures may be to make sure that they all are at the center of various disputes over ownership.

1) arguments from cultural nationalism (the Elgin marbles are the cultural patrimony of the Greek people and the Greek people are responsible for looking after them)
2) arguments from egalitarianism (the Elgin marbles are the cultural patrimony of all mankind and it is unfair that so much of this common heritage is at present concentrated in London and Western Europe)

Anyway, like I said, I am not a convinced believer in the the proposition that each nation ought to control its own most significant cultural products. But I think there are two reasonable positions here. A nationalistic one, which says that any such artefact is, above all, the common property of the nation that created it, and a cosmopolitan one, which says that it is the common property of mankind. But even if you take the second view there are issues about the justice of the majority of these artefacts being held in London. A cosmopolitan, if she is an egalitarian, ought to be concerned that Londoners (or Western Europeans) have ready access to a wealth of cultural treasures which has been placed out of reach of most of the world’s population.

The caryatids on the Erechtheion now are replicas, and the originals are in the museum—actually, currently being moved from the old museum to the new one, I believe, except for one that Elgin got.

There’s supposed to be a place prepared in the new museum for the blocks of the Parthenon frieze, and I expect that if the British Museum ever returned them, perhaps at that point replicas would be put up on the Parthenon itself—but I imagine not before then.

This is probably the crux of the matter. If they were to do this, why not go the whole nine yards and fix the thing to as near say pre ottoman destruction as possible. I saw a lot of temples in Egypt where the columns for instance were reassembled. The necessary augmentations are quite visible, and on the whole, I think the effect is positive. But there still is an ick factor (I not going to deconstruct this further than that) about replacing parts that actually exist with fakes. Fidelity? I don’t know, I am retreating back to numerical linear algebra.

Well, the ancient Athenians were also rather fond of them, you know.