Well, being a cynic, because she was in possession of a looted piece from some relatively powerful sources, a German museum! And the looting happened during a famous war, and the Germans are America's allies now and like really powerful allies.
but reading closer it says:
>Back at home, Young had a problem: She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds.
So it sounds more like she felt she couldn't keep it or sell it because of her morals.
on edit: of course if she had sold it maybe 10 years down the road the Germans come and say we want our head of Germanicus back please, then either the people who bought it are on the hook or maybe also her for selling stolen goods (depending on laws and how much people want to enforce them)
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?
I agree, I don't understand the principle here. And what about things like the Horses of Saint Mark [0], which were looted by Venetians after the sack of Constantinople in 1204?
The building itself has passed hands numerous times through questionable means. Should the Coup of 18 Brumaire count as Napoleon stealing the entire country, Louvre included? What of the subsequent Bourbon restoration; another crime or merely a rectification of the first? And what of the Charter of 1815? Or the second Bourbon Restoration?
Or is all of that legitimate because they all spoke French? (Remember, Napoleon was a Corsican!)
I read it more like her morals prevented her from keeping/selling it, not that some outside entity was preventing her from keeping it. I sometimes say "I can't have that" to a food item I'm physically capable of eating but my moral framework precludes me from eating.
I own land in the UK, which in reality means I brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who was given it by the king as a reward for helping kill the previous owner.
And if someone quarries marble on my land to make a statue, it has the same provenance.
So we've basically decided there's a sliding scale. If it was stolen at gunpoint 1960 you've got to return it, but if it was in 1690 you get to keep it.
The principle is quite old: its incarnation for normal individuals is called the “statute of limitations”.
This is true for many things: homes which people own taken from Japanese-Americans, wage theft discovered too late,…
If you only care about your children and you have an effective means of transmitting wealth gotten through evil means, you merely have to forgo the benefit yourself.
Because she doesn't have an army to protect her. The US returned a stolen bell from the Philippines after 117 years. The Philippines has been asking for it to be returned for a very long time.
Museums shouldn't be full of looted treasures, museums should be full of treasures of the culture who built the museum. It is an injustice that any significant artifact is not in the custodianship of the culture it belongs to and when the infrastructure is in place to preserve the items, they should be returned to the community they came from.
Even if we assume it rightfully belongs to people with Roman ancestry, that describes many modern Germans as well as it does modern Italians. People from these two regions were moving around and in near constant contact with each other for thousands of years. Somebody who is German today may have ancestors who were Italian two hundred years ago, and Greek 2000 years before that.
Most countries are full of land stolen from the ancestors of the people who lived there, which was then exploited by the thieves, to make them and their descendents, incredibly wealthy and powerful.
Indeed, across the entire globe, only a tiny fraction of the population own the vast majority of land and other resources.
Let's all sort out this much bigger and globally impactful inequality first, before worrying about some museum pieces.
> Is Italy, a country 200 years old, the heir of ancient Rome?
This is an interesting question. The answer is hard to pin down precisely, but sometimes when there is a change of governance the culture continues to exist. For instance, if something was produced in Japan before World War II, Japan remains the heir even though a new constitution is now in place. Similar with something produced in Moscow during the Soviet era: Russia is the heir. But something produced in Kyiv during the Soviet era, Ukraine is the heir.
> The easiest woke thing
Please don't derail discussion with inflammatory culture war, it's against the HN guidelines.
I think it’s a reasonable criticism that often the immediately “right” thing is in fact fraught with unintended consequences, and when there’s intense societal or cultural pressure to do the immediately right thing without thinking of those consequences, you could end up in a worse position than you began.
It's not shit you stole, not even shit your ancestors stole, it's shit someone who once occupied the same territory that you now occupy stole during a state of war.
I think for the same reason we have a Statute of Limitations on property crimes, you shouldn't have to return anything. Returning it would be very woke indeed.
If centuries ago your ancestors stole from a country that no longer exists in the modern day, then yeah it's woke to return it to a different country occupying the same geographic space.
It's interesting that you refer to the thieves as 'ancestors', but yet refer to those who were stolen from only in terms of "country", which then conveniently allows you to dismiss restitution based on a technicality ('the country doesn't exist anymore). Do the people who had their possession stolen not have existing ancestors too?
Several years ago someone stole my former startup's first hardware prototype, along with a bunch of other stuff. In 300 years, should my descendents have a right to claim restitution from the descendents of whoever stole my things?
Some pieces of art can be strongly tied to the history or culture of a nation/group. Is that really morally objectionable to give that back to the people that still strongly identify with it?
And using your bad example. If someone 300 years from now had an item of little sentimental value to them, but meant the world to another family that has a strong history tied with that company, wouldn’t you say that the moral thing is to give it to people that care about the object?
It’s not always about the law and giving legal responsibilities. It’s just about doing the decent and moral thing.
This one is hard to me. For instance, it’s obvious to me that you can’t pay interest on this thing but if it were an actual thing, surely one should give it back.
I mean, if I took a gold bar stamped with your name and authentically yours from you and decades pass and your son meets my son and my son shows off his gold bar, does your son not have a right to that bar?
Seems like straightforward theft. Intellectual property and imputed losses are hard but an item that is still itself? It feels different.
It's because the demand for items being returned only goes in one direction which supports what can only be described as 'woke' beneficiaries of the pieces. It's also not clear who properly owns what or why but it suits a narrative.
For example, do the people who think art taken during the colonial era from Asia and brought to France or England should be returned also think that art taken from the Catholic Church should be returned to the Catholic Church? Probably not. Has this happened? Yes, absolutely.
In any event morally unscrupulous rich people in other parts of the world may have no problem buying or stealing these items once they have left western museums where they may disappear forever.
I don't understand. Museums in the West are full of looted ancient art [1]. Why are they allowed to keep it, but this woman cannot keep this one item?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/learning/should-museums-r...