Professor Anthony Appiah. Photograph: Richard Ansett/BBC
2022 Getty Medal Lecture with Kwame Anthony Appiah: Whose Heritage? Preservation, Possession, and Peoples
GETTY CENTER
Museum Lecture Hall
This is a past event
Museums and monument funds typically understand works that they collect, display, and preserve through a concept of heritage. Heritage is meant to explain why various works are to be valued or disavowed, repatriated or collected, dismantled or preserved. Yet it's a concept that's interwoven with other concepts—ancestry, identity, property, memorialization—in ways that can create confusion. Gaining clarity about cultural heritage can help us understand the broader heritage of humankind.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He has taught philosophy in Ghana, France, Britain and the United States. He has written the New York Times column “The Ethicist” since 2015. His most recent book is The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018). Appiah is a recipient of the 2022 Getty Medal. He is a contributor to the 2022 Getty publication Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities.