2023-05-04
53 分钟How did a freshly looted Egyptian antiquity end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why did it take Kim Kardashian to crack the case? And how much of what you see in any museum is stolen? (Part 1 of “Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard.”)
When you visit a museum and look at all the magnificent art and artifacts hanging on the wall, mounted on pedestals, encased in glass, do you ever wonder how all that stuff got there?
Often the answer would be they were stolen.
They were taken through brutal armed conflict and colonialism.
If you possess valuable artifacts, or if you control valuable artifacts, you have a form of power, and power is not something that most people are eager to surrender.
The british museum silence is as loud as a gunshot.
Museums have begun to look more closely at their new acquisitions.
It's a little bit like wandering into the middle of a traffic intersection without looking both ways.
There might be a disaster about to happen.
And some museums are returning their long held treasures to their places of origin.
It's like olympic games for restitution.
They are fighting to be the first to restitute important collections.
Today, on free economics radio, we begin a special series on this movement to return the world's treasures to the places where those treasures came from.
It is a complicated story.
It ain't complicated.
It's actually unbelievably simple.
If you take morality and pompous, arrogant, holier than thou out of it and.
Stick to the law, well, some people think it's complicated.
The Benin artworks are 500 years old.
They were taken 150 years ago.
There is no system where they can be returned in a way that is consistent with the values of a museum structure.