There are clear cut cases like with Pantheon, but for many artefacts there are no real owners left. Their cultures have been wiped out, and the people who wiped them out were wiped out too.
And frankly it's fine to care about survival of (otherwise publicly accessible) pieces of art and culture first and foremost. There's not going to be more of them.
As far as survival of arts and culture, the whole problem is that they aren’t the steward of historical treasures that threy claim to be. It’s insane that the British Museum, one of the preeminent museums in the world, is having stuff stolen from them, and can’t even identify what is stolen because they haven’t catalogued everything. If they want to claim that antiquities will be kept up for future generations, then they at least need to take that role seriously.
Naturally it's a good point in a thread about stealing from said museum (and yes I butchered the name). However its track record has been comparatively good, even if more due to geographic isolation of Britain and stability of its political system than anything else.
I don’t think they’ve been horrible stewards. And the British Museum is delightful to visit. I’m just pointing out that it’s a bit rich to loudly proclaim that you are the best stewards of antiquities (that other countries might otherwise have better claims to) and then not do simple things like properly catalogue your collections.
Yes, it was indeed unethical and there are many moral and legal arguments that the skeleton should receive a burial, but the stealing was arranged by a Scottish surgeon and not the British government. It was removed from display last year. There seems to be some additional legal issues too, at least for the board of the museum: "since 1799 its trustees had been legally bound to preserve the collection of John Hunter – the pioneering Scottish surgeon and anatomist who the museum is named after – in its entirety" [1]
it’s not possible to be legally bound to commit a crime, so if those “legal issues” (nice euphemism) are great enough then it doesn’t matter what some dead dudes agreed to. the contract is toilet paper from 400 years ago, even if you really like the dudes and the current state of affairs.
Most of the countries these artifacts come from don’t have the ability to properly store and protect them. Not to mention mass looting and stealing that would/could occur in the more politically unstable countries.
> Most of the countries these artifacts come from don’t have the ability to properly store and protect them.
ok, but the problem this article is discussing is that the British museum doesn’t have that ability either.
if you don’t know what objects you even have, how could you possibly be ensuring the proper storage conditions?
Absolutely wild logic that gets thrown around when it comes time to defend looting and pillaging that in many cases occurred during living memory or not far removed.
Can't understand how they brainwash people to accept theft, murder, and plundering other countries. What did they do to you to justify that? It would be an interesting field of research. Or are you just a poorly educated evil bloodthirsty sociopath?
You obviously don't understand what the word realist mean, imagine being that poorly educated while thinking you are superior. That's not being a realist it is just being propagandized and brainwashed, western exceptionalism is a mental illness like all delusional supremacist ideologies.
If I apply for US visa (which I will not, ever!), I have to wait for 3 years and get single entry visa at best which is ridiculous, they also ask for insane amount of info from me!
Wait until you see Schengen-area visa requirements then: bank account statements, property ownership proofs, education certificates on top of what US would generally ask you for. And then you get exact-dates-of-trip visas (compared to US issuing 3-year or 10-year visas) — or, well, get denied simply because (even if you had a visa that allowed you to travel to that same spot a month ago).
Luckily, Serbia got on the Schengen allow-list in 2009: I kept replacing my passports before expiration since I had no pages left.
I'm pretty sure the CIA wasn't funding art before it was founded in 1947, so I have to imagine the US values for the part of modern art history before then aren't what GP was asking about
