Values in ruins

In the first five days, some 55,000 people rushed to snap up tickets that until the end of 2009 will sell at €1 a piece. Internet interest has also been unexpectedly high, helping to boost the sense that with this new showcase, Athens is on to a winner to retrieve the Parthenon sculptures from the British Museum. "Altogether, 90,822 tickets have been sold," said the Greek culture minister Antonis Samaras. "From America to Mongolia, Australia to Nepal, internet users have logged into the [museum's] site. I, personally, have received letters of thanks from ordinary people in China. The interest has been phenomenal."

The nearest I've been to the ancient magnificence of something like the Parthenon is Berlin's Pergamon Museum. The monumentality of the Pergamon is somehow enhanced by the fact that not all of it is actually there. The dynamism of movement is emphasised mid-gesture by an incomplete, ruined figure. Much can be extrapolated from ruins such as they are installed in magnificent museums like Berlin's. But there's no space for melancholy where it is possible for an installation to benefit from increased wholeness by the reacquisition of looted sections. This is the story behind the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, whose reopening has revived the question of the Elgin Marbles. For me, there is no debate: they should be returned to Athens as soon as possible. Over 90% of people who voted in the Guardian poll asking just this question agreed. What place is there for equivocation when an institution representing a former imperial power is proposing to retain objects looted and in some cases severely damaged by a man acting in his own interests?