How do we just 'lose' so many valuable things?

Factual Questions
1

I find I quite often come accross references to valuable artwork, pottery, artifacts having been “lost” and i keep wondering what exactly this means and why on earth it seems to happen so often. I mean, i can understand how we can fail to find a glorious statue mentioned by Virgil and i do realise that much art has been destroyed by extreme dictatorial regimes (the recent destruction of the Red and Moon White Buddhas in Afganistan for example). But to give a more recent example, “Fountain”, the famous urinal entered for exhibition by Marcel Duchamp in 1917 and signed “R Mutt” was somehow “lost”. What do they mean? How can a piece of art disappear into thin air, especially one that caused so much controversy?*

Do they mean it was stolen? Someone moved house and forgot it? It got thrown down a well by accident? What? And not just “Fountain”, but an extraordinary number of artifacts.

I’m puzzled.

Fran
*The postscript to this is that a collector commissioned not another common-or-garden urinal, but a faithful reproduction. That’s the one that now stands in London’s Tate Modern. Oh, the irony.

2

Arse. Half the thread title got lost in Preview Land. Could a friendly moderator please, please change it to “How do we just “lose” so many valuable things”? Thanks.

3

I don’t know if you consider me friendly, but I fixed it. :wink:

4

Many causes. Theft, social upheaval, accident, anything that disrupts record keeping. Simple vandalism. Short-sighted bureacrats with a “clear this rubbish out” mentality (James Thurber described one-of-a-kind transcription discs of 1920s radio programmes being used as clay pigeons. Or ask any Doctor Who fan about missing episodes…) But I think the main factor is simple confusion. Things get moved into storage without a proper note being made, next time the store is cleared out, things go out into limbo and nobody has a clue where they went…

My first real job was working for a local authority, investigating records of drainage connections. (Exciting, huh?). I used to ferret around the council archives, and the amount of junk that was down there, that nobody knew was down there, was hard to believe. And when I started actually reading those records… I once found a 300 yard length of storm drain. No, not actually in the archives… it had been laid in by the side of a road a couple of decades earlier, and nobody in our department knew it was there, because that type of drain was normally the responsibility of another department - it just happened that we were supposed to look after that particular drain, but, well, the documents in question sort of got filed…

And, of course, documents get destroyed; another part of my job was picking through the tattered remnants of another council’s files, largely destroyed by a fire sometime in the Sixties. What pearls of wisdom perished in that conflagration, never to be seen again by mortal man? (Actually, in this case, none, but the general principle holds).

Record keeping is a tedious chore, and an easily disrupted one. But without proper records (and highly motivated slaves like myself to pore through them), the only way to track things down is to do a physical search for them. Such searches get done from time to time, sometimes with exciting or embarassing results. (There’s that story about the builders at a hospital who knocked a hole through a wall and found a fully equipped maternity unit on the other side, which everyone had forgotten about…) But, in their absence, things, well, get lost. Call it entropy in action.

Now, where’d I put my watch?

5

The base reason is that the value of items fluctuates over time, and in the estimation of the person owning it. Just because it’s valuable now, doesn’t mean anyone thought so at another point in time – or would think so in the future.

In the case of “Fountain,” though, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Duchamp deliberately threw it away. It would be the dada thing to do. :wink:

6

Don’t forget about private collectors. While an item may not technically be lost, often the public may not be aware of where an item is. I occasionally read about an item that was considered lost, but was actually in a family’s private collection for the last 150 years.

7

Steve Wright that makes much sense. I was thinking on an overall scale when it makes more sense to think of it on an individual level - then human error seems more believable. Ta for your answer.

Fran

8

Did anyone else see that story about the server at Stanford that was recently found after being lost for several years? It had been accidentally walled in during a rennovation by workmen who apparently had no idea what it was. “What’s this thing?” “Who cares? Hang that drywall so we can go to lunch.” The computer people knew they were short a server, but they couldn’t physically find it. Eventually, they followed some wires and had to break down a wall to get at it. It never went down or missed a packet of information the whole time, which is a minor miracle in itself.

Now how that fits in with burning the library of Alexandria, I have no idea. But there does seem to be some kind of connection.

9

In a library, someone might misplace something that didn’t seem important at the time. 50 years later, everybody wants to see that book. The staff goes to look at shelf A where it should be. Turns out, it’s been on Shelf Z on another floor the whole time.

10

[hijack]
ElDestructo, a need a link! I don’t seem to be able to narrow the search properly on Google.

We’re renovating a server room at work right now, and everybody needs to hear about this!
[/hijack]