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by 8note 1272 days ago
Europeans everywhere care mostly about owning and profiting off of artwork, preservation of a work is important insofar as it allows Europeans to hoard the art and sell it, or grant prestige to their museums and galleries compared to other museums and galleries.

The cultural preservation is utterly unwanted - that's why things like the Benin bronzes have been forever broken and split up amongst Europeans in pieces, rather than retained as the one cultural work of being a history book for people to actually use in benin.

The same happens with Europeans in British Columbia. Rather than cultural preservation, the Europeans put totem poles on metal brackets to make sure they stay up forever and will never fall down, removing the intended time component of falling down, decaying, and being made anew. The intention of Europeans is to remove the cultural component and traditions, and turn it into an ownable artifact.

1 comments

How was the Australian government profiting from installing security measures at the prehistoric cave art in TFA? I agree Europeans value history and sometimes see things as too static, but this is because Europeans are a thoughtful and sentimental people not because we are somehow profiting from putting delicate cave artifacts behind a gate.