#museum looting

[catandgirlcomic]

Slime to student ratio

[hafwen]

Looting at multiple museums in Sudan

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

cnetizens post souvenir they got at various chinese museums

these are all fridge stickers

[homerstroystory]

Looks vs. Loot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by The Antiquities Coalition (@/CombatLooting) on Twitter

Transcription below the cut

1: The #MetGala may be "fashion's biggest night," but tonight's event hides some dark truths at @/metmuseum...including a long history of looted antiquities. To spotlight some of the contested objects from the Met's collection, we are featuring #MetGala vs. Loot [THREAD]

2. First up: @/KimKardashian in @/Versace at the 2018 #MetGala posing next to the Golden Sarcophagus of Nedjemankh. The coffin was purchased by @/metmuseum in 2017 and repatriated in 2019 after this viral photo helped solve the case. (link)

3. Next, her sister @/KendallJenner in @/givenchy at the 2021 #MetGala as the 13th century wooden Temple Strut with Salabhinka, returned from @/metmuseum to the Government of Nepal in 2022, after it was determined to be looked from Itum Baha in Kathmandu. (link)

4. Another object from Nepal, @/rihanna in @/Margiel at the 2018 #MetGala as a 10th century Shiva in Himalayan Adobe with Ascetics. @/metmuseum was gifted the sculpture in 1995, but repatriated it to Nepal in 2022 along with the temple strut, after learning both were stolen.

5. Dakota Johnson in @/gucci at the 2022 #MetGala as a terracotta kylix (c. 470 bCE). This piece, valued at $1.5 million, was seized from the @/metmuseum in July 2022 after being linked to Italian antiquities trafficker Gianfranco Becchina. (link)

6. @/billieeilish in @/gucci at the 2022 #MetGala as the Fayum Mummy Portrait. Looted from Egypt and sold to @/metmuseum in 2013, it was seized in September '22 by @/ManhattanDA as part of a global investigation into an international trafficking ring. (link)

7. @/iamcardib in @/ThomeBrowne at the 2019 #MetGala as a painted linen fragment displaying a scene from the Book of Exodus, 'Exodus Painting" (250-450 CE), valued at over $1.6 million. The fragments were also part of the seizure by the @/ManhattanDA in September '22.

8. @/Beyonce in @/givenchy at the 2013 #MetGala as a 2,300-year-old vase that depicts the god Dionysus. The vase is linked to Giacomo Medici, an art dealer convicted of conspiracy to traffic antiquities in 2004, and was seized from the @/metmuseum in 2017. (link)

9. @/blakelively in @/Versace at the 2022 #MetGala as a bronze statuette of Jupiter. This object is among 27 antiquities that were returned to Italy and Egypt in 2022 after investigators seized them from the @/metmuseum. (link)

[blueiscoool]

Moscow Auction House Sells a $1 Million Painting Stolen from a Ukrainian Museum

In Russia, Ukrainian artist Ivan Aivazovsky’s painting “Moonlit Night” has been put up for auction, according to Ukraine’s former Deputy Attorney General and Prosecutor of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Gyunduz Mamedov, who has reported the auction plans.

Russia’s looting and destruction of Ukrainian museums and cultural heritage sites have resulted in significant losses, with nearly 40 museums plundered and almost 700 heritage sites damaged or destroyed since the invasion began in February 2022, causing cultural losses estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros.

The first report that “Moonlit Night” will be the main lot of the auction, which will take place at the Moscow Auction House on 18 February, appeared on the Telegram channel by Russia’s state-funded news agency RIA Novosti, noting that the painting was estimated at 100 million rubles (approximately $1.09 million) before the sale.

‘In 2017, [Interpol], at the request of [Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Crimea], put the paintings on the international wanted list. Thus, Russia openly disregards [international law], as according to the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the export of cultural properties and transfer of ownership is prohibited,” Mamedov emphasized on X.

In 2014, during the early stages of Russia’s occupation of Crimea, Aivazovsky’s painting “Moonlit Night” was illegally transferred to the Simferopol Art Museum, along with 52 other artworks.

In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some of his works were destroyed in an airstrike on the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, and others were looted by Russian forces from Mariupol and Kherson museums, including “The Storm Subsides,” which was moved to the Central Taurida Museum in Simferopol, Crimea.

[rudjedet]

Broke: why are the pyramids still in Egypt? Because they don't fit in the British Museum

Woke: why are the pyramids still in Egypt? Because the Metropolitan Museum of Art couldn't fucking traffick them like they did 1000s of other artefacts

[lesbian-salamander]

[fairuzfan]

I want to say that institutions and museums and archives and libraries (particularly The Big Ones) are really quite colonized spaces with so so so many things wrong with them and I wouldn't expect any change to happen that really means anything. Like who cares. The whole thing is rotten anyways lol.

And I'm saying this as someone who believes in community archiving (ie, the communities that the content is about are the people who manage how they're represented) as the only really truly valuable type of archiving lol. Black community archives and Palestinian archives tend to revolve around this sort of memory keeping for the sake of the community rather than memory keeping for the sake of memory keeping and this is just a couple examples from my current studies in USAmerica. Like I would not expect any museum to be on the side of the people they represent under any circumstances unless it is directly managed by those communities.

Which when I say this, it's necessary to acknowledge lack of funding and resources and human ability to process, arrange, and describe and that ultimately the fault lies with the institution that profits off of the cultural heritage of others while providing no actual material reparations to the process of memory keeping at an academic scale.

[nubianisms]

Plunderers of lives, treasures, memories, identities…

[7pleiades7]

Diana (1777) by Jean-Antoine Houdon, marble, h. 63.5 cm, The Royal Lazienki Museum, Warsaw

[gemsofgreece]

Is it a cultural difference in understanding the concept of dignity or does the British Museum knowingly insults the Greeks by proposing that Greece should acknowledge that the Parthenon marbles belong to the UK in order then for the museum to “allow” them to be borrowed?

No. No. No. Keep the loot a ten times over, mates.

[jadeseadragon]

“Man carrying a box, possibly for offerings” (c. 2,900–2,600 BCE), Sumerian, copper alloy (image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Met Museum Returns Ancient Sumerian Statue to Iraq

[liusia-piu]

The Enarei were Scythian androgynous soothsayers who played an important role in Scythian religion. The Enarei were associated with the orgiastic cult of the goddess Artimpasa, also acted as seers and performed a special form of divination, in which they used the inner bark of linden trees and willow inflorescences. The Enerei belonged to the most powerful Scythian aristocracy. They were born men, but wore women's clothes, did women's work, spoke like women, and the Scythians believed that they were inherently different from other men, and their androgyny was of divine origin. The Scythians believed that the androgyny of the Enereans arose in this period as a result of the curse of the goddess Artimpasa on the perpetrators of the plundering of the temple, this curse was hereditary and was inherited by the descendants of the perpetrators of the plundering.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Foolish Bear, 84, left, and Drags Wolf, 75, came to New York on January 13, 1938 to recover from the Heye Foundation (Museum of the American Indian) two sacred skulls of thunderbird deities that they believed would end recent droughts in their native North Dakota. The men were members of the Water Buster or Midi Badi clan of the Hidatsa (Gros Ventre) tribe. This was the first known successful repatriation of Indian objects. They visited President Roosevelt on the way to New York.

Article about this repatriation

Photo: Associated Press via WHNT

[blueiscoool]

The Getty Museum Return Ancient Bronze Head to Turkey

A life-sized bronze head of a young man has been removed from view by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and will be returned to Turkey after the institution learned it was illegally excavated.

The head had been in the antiquities collection at the Getty Villa Museum since it was acquired in 1971. But the museum said it had received new information from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York indicating it had been illegally excavated.

The California museum did not reveal what new information had come to light about the excavation, and officials in New York did not yet respond to a request for information. The head has been removed from view until it can be handed over to Turkish officials.

“In light of new information recently provided by Matthew Bogdanos and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicating the illegal excavation of this bronze head, we agreed that the object needed to be returned to Türkiye,” museum director Timothy Potts said in a statement.

The district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the details of its investigation.

The Getty Museum said that its policies are to return objects to the country of their origin or modern discovery when reliable information indicates they were stolen or illegally excavated. In 2022, the museum returned a cache of artworks to Italy after learning that they were linked to disgraced antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina.

The bronze head dates to somewhere between 100 B.C.E and 100 C.E. and is a separately cast component of a life-size figure, detached from the body at the upper neck. The eyes were once inlaid with an unknown material that was not preserved. Researchers have not yet identified the body of the figure. The subject of the figure also remains elusive as it was fabricated in a “highly idealized” style and has not been matched to a member of an imperial family or other named individual, the museum said, although an inscribed alpha (“A”) is visible on the interior of the neck at the bottom rear edge.

Some scholars have associated the bronze head with the archaeological site of Bubon, in the Burdur province of southwestern Turkey. Bubon was subjected to illicit excavations in the late 1960s.

Potts added that by returning the head to Turkey, the museum seeks to continue building a constructive relationship with the Turkish Ministry of Culture archaeological colleagues in the country.

In total, the Manhattan District Attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit has recovered more than 4,500 antiquities stolen from 30 countries with a value in excess of $410 million since it was launched in 2017.

By Adam Schrader.