Originally published at: American fanatic arrested for smashing 2,000-year-old Roman statues in Israel | Boing Boing
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Reboing:
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Christian Taleban being Christian Taleban
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The perpetrator seems to be Jewish.
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Christian zealotry has been around far longer than the Taliban. American evangelicalism was a strong influence on the Taliban. So the other way around is more apt.
And this dude was Jewish
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Gotta love how the defense is essentially “no, it’s not religious extremism when we do it, the poor guy’s just confused and overwhelmed by being here”. And tbh I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that was accepted in an Israeli court.
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How about “he’s a dipshit asshole syndrome?” Seems much more honest.
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Not for nothing if not for examples like this, but I’d wonder if museums that hold a lot of ancient irreplaceable artifacts and pieces of art wouldn’t better protect the items in their care if they didn’t display the genuine pieces, but historically accurate reproductions, reserving the originals for scholarly use. Or, maybe, don’t display them on wobbly pedestals without so much as a velvet rope to keep the nutters out of arms reach.
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It’s that Jerusalem Syndrome. Originally the crusades started as tourist excursions, but once they got there… /s
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I’m not sure whether the much-vexed Roman provincial administrators of Judaea and Syria Paaestina would feel vindicated or irritated by the fact that this is still a problem after all that time.
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so did you read this somewhere. or is it contrarianist speculation, or what?
Taliban was founded 1994, and American religious extremism is older than that, so even just by that the analogy is wrong.
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Which part?
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A post was split to a new topic: Religious extremism in the Islamic World as being driven by American influence
Copies and reproductions are pretty common in the museum world, the thing is that most museums don’t have anywhere near the budget necessary to properly store, maintain and study the originals they own, let alone have the means to produce accurate exhibition-ready reproductions at scale (not to mention the extra archival grade storage facilities that would require in order to move all of the originals out of museums. But reproduction costs alone would be massive. Not to mention how this would inevitably further entrench existing biases and dominant narratives in museum curation as artefacts fitting these would inevitably be the first to be reproduced.
Beyond this there’s also an argument to be made for this being harmful to the concept of museums as custodians and institutions in their own right (not that they aren’t doing lots of harm to this already through, for example, not properly caring for their collections, or refusing to return droves of stolen artefacts, but never mind that right now) - a significant portion of the authority of museums as curators and disseminators of knowledge rests on the idea that they’re places where you can see real things and learn about them. Real archeological artefacts, real artworks, real natural historical finds, and so on. Moving to a wholesale “trust me bro, we have the originals, but they’re in the back and you can’t see them” model risks significantly undermining the (good parts of the) mission of museums as we know them today.
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If a copy is old enough it can be interesting and valuable in its own right.
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All of those are very good points that were running in the back of my mind as I was typing, and which maybe makes a stronger case for the velvet ropes and less wobbly pedestals.
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As someone with a tattoo of mighty Athena on his arm, I can say only this to said fanatic - my imaginary friend has a big pointy spear and an owl. Yours has a burning bush. Let them fight!
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