Ivory: the elephant in the art gallery

It is dead as an art material, but calls to destroy ancient ivory artworks are a barbaric, and foolish, trashing of our cultural past

Ivory is beautiful. Carved and polished by craftsmen in fantastic shapes, this hard yet highly workable material fills the great museums of the world with curiosity and wonder. Consider the fantastic intricacy of a 16th-century ivory mask from Benin (in modern Nigeria) that can be seen at the British Museum, or the superb medieval ivory artworks in the V&A that include a Ninth-century Adoration of the Magi carved out of elephant tusk.

And yet ivory is murder. No one today can defend the killing of animals for their tusks. Ivory is dead as an art material no more of that, thanks. But what about all the ivory treasures that already exist, from the Lewis Chessmen to Islamic masterpieces?

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