161–170 of 281 posts
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The German people stole it from someone else so why does it matter
The sculpture is of a man named Drusus Germanicus. What do you think "Germanicus" means?
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Someone buying something from a pawnshop usually is a bonafide purchaser. They would have a valid title to the property
No, that's the opposite of how it works, and that's what I'm saying in my comment. The original owner doesn't lose valid title just because it was stolen, and two people can't hold valid title at the same time (unless shared obviously, but you can't have two 100% owners). The second purchaser's title would not be valid, even if they initially thought it was at the time of purchase. It doesn't matter that you didn't k…
What amazes me about all these stories is the ridiculously low prices the thrift store charged. Here in the Seattle area, everything seems to grossly overpriced in thrift stores.
Goodwill in particular moves items between markets and prices them based on the local economy. Gone are the days of 2010 when you could walk into the Bellevue Goodwill and find lightly used designer clothing that some retired Microsoft engineer was tired of. Now everything's priced higher than eBay and there's no reason to stop by. Everyone else wants to be a "Boutique" and charge high end prices for used goods. Blam…
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The German people stole it from someone else so why does it matter
You don't know that. The German museum it was in was built in the 1840s, a hundred years before this sculpture was looted from it. It may well have been legally purchased a century or more before nazis existed.
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No, that's the opposite of how it works, and that's what I'm saying in my comment. The original owner doesn't lose valid title just because it was stolen, and two people can't hold valid title at the same time (unless shared obviously, but you can't have two 100% owners). The second purchaser's title would not be valid, even if they initially thought it was at the time of purchase. It doesn't matter that you didn't k…
But in this case the museum doesn't have a better claim than you do either that they aren't the thief, just an older one. In fact theirs seems worse, just a record that they possessed it at one point in the 1920s. Could be that the curators who first logged it into inventory were the original thieves in the line plundering it from someone else vs paying fairly.
Morally, it's debatable. Legally, it's straightforward, a stolen item does not become un-stolen with time, nor does the claim of the original owner diminish. Morally that's not how people think, but legally that's how it works.
The British Museum argument does not work for plebians. It's not "yours" just because you kept it for 100 years. Nor is it the next person's because they didn't know it was stolen.
The British Museum only works for the British because they were a god-ordained royal family that controlled an empire spanning the globe, then a nuclear-armed imperial power. It was based on the rather debatable legal theory of "try and stop us". It's increasingly recognized that it's unjust and seems increasingly likely that it will be dissolved sometime in the next hundred years. Because yeah, the same arguments apply to shit the British looted as shit the Nazis looted. It's not theirs. Maybe some countries will be willing to loan them back on a permanent basis though.
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> 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 ye…
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 .
> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. 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...
> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. 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...
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The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it.
I say all this not from a legal perspective but from an inheritors of history and culture perspective. We all inherit humanity's history and culture.
While cheesy, Indiana Jones was right: "It belongs in a museum" so it is accessible to humanity. But is that museum inherently this German one?