Matt Campbell — The Man Who Stole the Gods
Journalist Matt Campbell and writer Carl Hoffman unravel a true story of wartime looting, obsession, and the contested ownership of ancient religious artifacts.
Why we picked this
The theft and repatriation of cultural artifacts is one of the defining ethical debates in art history — Campbell's true-crime approach makes the stakes visceral rather than theoretical.
Matt Campbell’s The Man Who Stole the Gods reconstructs the theft, disappearance, and long afterlife of ancient religious objects taken during wartime — a story that touches on questions of cultural ownership, colonial appropriation, institutional complicity, and the contested line between preservation and plunder. In conversation with Carl Hoffman, author of the acclaimed Savage Harvest and The World’s Most Dangerous Place, Campbell traces how these objects moved through the art market and what their fate reveals about how institutions value cultural heritage.
The debate over looted artifacts has intensified in recent years as major museums have faced pressure to repatriate objects taken during colonial occupation — from the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles controversy to the repatriation of Benin Bronzes from European collections. Campbell’s specific case provides a way into this larger argument that doesn’t require abstract principle: just the evidence of what actually happened.
Hoffman brings a travel writer’s eye for the human stakes of large institutional debates. This is a conversation about art history that is also a conversation about power, war, and what gets preserved and for whom.