Can I recommend a podcast called 'Stuff the British Stole' by Marc Fenell (aka 'That Movie ... Guy'). It looks at exactly this, including situations where an artefact only exists _because_ it was stolen.
The issue of "this is a convenient thing to think if you want to feel less bad about stuff being stolen" aside, it's worth considering that a world in which these things weren't stolen might also be a world where colonialism didn't run rampant throughout the world and the "destruction" they were saved from may have been a consequence of that colonialism.
Anyways, I think to some extent our civilization is descending into a kind of mass packrat disorder. We seem to fetishize preservation to an unhealthy degree on both small and large scales. Sometimes things break, are burnt down, or are left unmaintained until they die. But new things are created all the time, and maybe sometimes we get a little too stuck on the old stuff and don't acknowledge the new.
Kids these days. If they’re not addicted to novelty and the social media algorithm, they’re freebasing historical preservation. I’m honestly not sure how you square the circle between obviously consumerist trends like fast fashion and mass-produced “collectibles” with fetishization of preservation and franchise-based popular culture. It kind of seems like different people like different stuff?
Of course if you’re talking about architecture, there’s lots of fetishization of the not-very-old stuff from last century, because They don’t want you to know that we lost the building techniques of the Tartarian Empire. Or something.
Even within disposable consumer goods people stick random products from the 80s in plexiglass and call it precious and sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's an idea out there that actually "using" a product like an old video game is somehow debasing it. In the end though I don't think people have much choice on the consumer product side of things. It is what it is for various reasons.
But really I'm talking about broader social trends and what we do at the society level. Yes, architecture. Mustn't tear down that building that no one has been able to live in for 20 years, it's sacred. But also relics, ideas, monuments to even monumentally stupid and awful things, etc.
> That sounds like an a posteriori justification for stealing, like saying "see, that building ended up being bombed, so it's a good thing I stole all these Ukrainian paintings from the country last year"
There's a difference between justification and acknowledgement. Just because people are able to acknowledge that specific artifacts only exist because they were stolen, does not mean that they believe the original theft was "right or reasonable."
> Just because people are able to acknowledge that specific artifacts only exist because they were stolen, does not mean that they believe the original theft was "right or reasonable."
I mean...sure, but then what's the point of this facile acknowledgement? Yeah, if you hadn't burglarized my house yesterday, all my things would have burned up in the fire that happened there today. That's all well and good, except you still stole my shit. The fact that you inadvertently saved it from being burned is irrelevant to the action of the theft.
> I mean...sure, but then what's the point of this facile acknowledgement?
Why should anything beyond facile acknowledgement be expected from the average person when it comes to appreciating artifacts that still exist on our planet?
Is it a moral crime to simply appreciate a painting, even though it was stolen hundreds of years ago? Are people "justifying" that crime that happened before they were born, because they're glad that the painting still exists?
> Is it a moral crime to simply appreciate a painting, even though it was stolen hundreds of years ago?
Yes. Because your enjoyment deprives the ancestors of the people who actually created it. Try personalizing this to see if it resonates. There's a quilt that has been in your family for centuries, with each family member adding a patch. At some point, your house is burglarized and the quilt is taken. Hundreds of years later, the quilt is around the world, being seen by people who have absolutely no connection to it, meanwhile your great^n children no longer have access to this piece of their cultural heritage.
> Yes. Because your enjoyment deprives the ancestors of the people who actually created it. Try personalizing this to see if it resonates. There's a quilt that has been in your family for centuries, with each family member adding a patch. At some point, your house is burglarized and the quilt is taken.
If my house was burglarized and a family quilt ended up in a museum after it was stolen, I certainly wouldn't blame the patrons of that museum for looking at it. My grievance would be with the current custodian of the quilt.
It's reasonable to expect stolen property to be returned. It's not reasonable to expect people to know the history of every piece of property they look at in order to determine if it was stolen or not.
And for that matter, if the people it was stolen from decided it wasn't worth preserving who are you to decide they're wrong? It's the height of colonial arrogance to assume we know better, that we can value the works of other cultures better than they can. That our enjoyment is more important than their history and self-determination.
> if the people it was stolen from decided it wasn't worth preserving who are you to decide they're wrong?
Huh? Where did I "decide they're wrong"? In this hypothetical you're concocting, you're saying someone "looted" something from someone's trash? That's not what looting typically means. Looting typically means taking things the people from whom they were taken from deemed valuable.
I'm agreeing with you ("and for that matter..." as in "yes, and..."). The 'you' is general, to the people arguing that enjoying the thing in the museum is a morally neutral thing, and I'm bringing it back to the broader topic where we're talking about looted goods.
I have a hard time categorizing ISIS destroying thousands of years old ruins and artefacts as “self-determination”. If I had the choice between stealing these artefacts and putting them in a museum versus letting a radical group of religious fundamentalists destroy a valuable part of ancient history I would chose the former.
You can have a hard time categorizing it all you want, that's still what it is. People making choices and doing things that have consequences.
You just don't like it, and that's fine. I can't say I really like it either. But it doesn't mean it's your job to fix it or that you have a right to just take the things preemptively. Continuing to perpetuate colonial abuse is not going to somehow Magically Fix Everything This Time For Sure, it's just going to keep making things worse.
What's the actual harm here? If one group doesn't want something and another group finds the item interesting, who is hurt by the second group valuing it? If nobody is hurt, then where is the sin?
the harm is that usually the decision about whether the "one group" wanted it was made by the "another group", probably without actually consulting with anyone in the first group.
And you know what, maybe they don't in the moment. But essentially none of these things ever get repatriated even when the people they came from explicitly say they want them back. And you can see the logic that justifies this ongoing theft all over this comment thread: "the people who stole it are dead so it's ours now."
This is the problem with all of these after-the-fact justifications. In order for them to exist, the things have to have been taken before the destruction. If I steal your TV and then your house burns down, have I "saved" your TV even though I still won't give it back? Am I now in the moral right?
These small analogies are obviously not perfect, but I think they illustrate the order of causality when we talk about "harm".
> If I steal your TV and then your house burns down, have I "saved" your TV even though I still won't give it back?
What if you die and i buy your tv at an estate sale, and then later your ancestors change their mind? [I'm mostly just posing this as a thought experiment, i dont think its exactly the same as this either]
I mean there is a lot of nuance involved. Sometimes i think repatriating artifacts is the right thing to do. However, if we were talking about say Roman artificats i would say that the modern descendents are so far removed that their claim is no more legitament than anyone else. But there are certainly cases where modern descendents have compelling claims.
Rome is a very particular case. I suppose some friction in this whole comment blob might be from people trying to limit their scope to the artifact in the article.
But really, for the most part Roman artifacts are in Rome or Italy or the descendants of Roman client states they came from. Rome was never really looted like Africa or the Americas or even much of Asia were over the colonial power era. Likewise, neither were the colonial powers themselves, so there’s no real culture drain being helped along by holding on to a Roman or British or French or Spanish artifact.
For the most part when conversations need to be had about restoring artifacts, it’s that period we’re really talking about.
The "moral crime" (a term the previous poster used, not me) is in knowingly patronizing something that houses stolen goods, not in whether you enjoyed them or not. 'Enjoyment' was just the example the previous poster used, the same would hold true if they had said 'hatred' instead of 'enjoyment'. If you come over to someone's house, and watch whatever is on their stolen TV, it doesn't matter if you're enjoying what's on the TV or if you hate the TV, by knowingly associating with the thief you're tacitly OKing their actions.
Unfortunately a lot of the old art in the world only exists because by modern reconing it was stolen. Consider the fabulous collection at the palace museum in Taipei. Much just like it was destroyed in the cultural revolution.
> That sounds like an a posteriori justification for stealing, like saying "see, that building ended up being bombed, so it's a good thing I stole all these Ukrainian paintings from the country last year".
The logical fallacy here is using one unrelated bad event to justify another unrelated bad event.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would be that we should constantly keep looting art left and right, because who knows where and what is going to be destroyed at any moment.
Nor did I say that anyone said that it "justified" the theft. What I said was that that line of argumentation "sounds like an a posteriori justification for stealing".
When an object is stolen from a cache which was otherwise destroyed, 1) that is by definition a statistical anomaly, and 2) it may contain information from a time/place that is otherwise irrecoverable, which could make it valuable.
Between these two facts, I think it would be way weirder if everyone quietly ignored the historical record of a specific artifact just because it was stolen. Imagine walking through a museum with a tour guide who is able to give mounds of information about every piece on display, until you ask them about a certain bust, and they say "oh we don't talk about the history of that piece" and you say "why not?" and he says "because it's not relevant".
Be honest, what you're actually saying is, "this information isn't relevant TO ME."
I feel like there's some misunderstanding here. I am not at all advocating that the fact that objects had been stolen be suppressed. I'm advocating for the explicit opposite. What I am, however, saying, is that I find it odd that museums are allowed to keep these stolen artefacts, while the woman in the OP was not.
Can I recommend a podcast called 'Stuff the British Stole' by Marc Fenell (aka 'That Movie ... Guy'). It looks at exactly this, including situations where an artefact only exists _because_ it was stolen.
I believe you're looking for the phrase "post hoc", because a posteriori refers to knowledge that can only be gained from application of a test of some sort, whether logical or scientific.
It's a glib fact (and in fact, not even a fact as you by definition cannot assert something that didn't happen as a fact) that detracts from the theft.
But sure, yes, if they had not been stolen, certain items may have been destroyed. OK. And, so what, what's your point beyond this trite truism?
http://www.marcfennell.com/stolen (Sorry I couldn't find the RSS feed)