This week was one of our last weeks of content for the course! It is insane how we are already approaching the end of the semester!
On Tuesday in class, we talked about Western collectors and how they stole artwork from other countries. There is a very strong debate today about whether that artwork that was stolen and placed in European museums today should be returned to their homelands. These artworks were taken from their homelands when European countries had strong power and claimed they could take care of artworks better than any other country could. This highlighted the “white savior” in them because they claimed they could provide the artwork with more of a careful touch. The Europeans also took the artwork for money purposes. This isn’t very surprising considering most people were greedy when it came to money and cared more about their fortunes more than anything else, including human feelings. Today, there is an issue of repatriation with these artworks. European display these artworks in their museums instead of returning them to their home country, depriving those people of their ancestors work and memories. This causes them to feel at a loss because there is nothing they can do to change this state and are left with a feeling of hopelessness and bad memory. European museums are against repatriation because they have a rule in place that prevents them from returning artwork to its homeland. This rule was originally put in place so that a museum director cannot sell off objects. This rule is completely different than the repatriation issue because it is not a matter of selling off artwork, it is a matter of property. If European museums have decided to keep the foreign artworks in their museums, then there needs to be changes to the way they are represented. Museums do not share the full story of how the artworks came to Europe, they only share in a way of love. In the podcast we listened to one line that really stuck with me was “love or appreciation does not out way the right of the community or the right of the community that should possess it”. Museums need to change the way they act upon the actions of their predecessors and think about how that is affecting the people from where the artwork came from.
In class Thursday, I was very thankful that we were given time to work on our final project and I am very thankful to hear that we will have time in class to do some peer editing and make changes to our final before fully submitting the essay. I was very stressed out because of the many exams and assignments I have coming up, so this time in class really helped with prep work and writing.
Meyer, Karl E, and Shareen Blair Brysac. The China Collectors : America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
“The Treasures of China”, by Justin Jacobs. Indiana Jones in History: From Pompei to the Moon.
A Question of Artefacts”, presented by David Baker. Analysis, BBC Radio 4, Oct. 20, 2019. podcast with transcription
