Museums: Toward a Culture of Cosmopolitanism (lecture)

Date: Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Time: 7:30–8:45 p.m.
Location: Getty Villa, Auditorium
Admission: Free; a ticket is required.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of America's leading public intellectuals, speaks about the role and importance of museums in a free lecture that is part of the University of Southern California's "Who Owns the Past in the Future?" series.

Appiah will defend the central role of museums in making available a cosmopolitan cultural and aesthaetic experience for people around the globe. According to Appiah:

Much recent media discussion of our great art museums in Europe and America has focused on a few objects in their collections that are claimed by people, often in other countries, often in the name of the cultural heritage of those countries. Some were stolen, some were imperial expropriations, some were just sold by people whose descendants would like them back. In talking about objects that some people think shouldn't be in these collections, we've too often lost sight of what should. So I should like to remind us of the central role of museums in making available a cosmopolitan cultural and aesthetic experience for people everywhere, and think a little about what that means for museum curators in the great universal museums."

A question and answer session will follow the lecture.

About Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, a major contribution to the contemporary discussion of identity and ethics. Like a postmodern Socrates, he asks probing questions about identity and ethical behavior in a world where the shifting sands of race, ethnicity, religion, and nationalism make the answers we find more important than ever.



How to Get Here
The Getty Villa is located at 17985 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California, approximately 25 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. See Hours, Directions, Parking for directions and parking information.