Sp it seeem s Kelly Clarkson bought a ring once owned by Jane Austen and wishes to possibly actually take possession of it. However, the UK Culture Minister Ed Vaizey is not happy about it:
It’s not the only thing though that is being held up
Now I actually do believe that countries should have a right to preserve its cultural heritage, but of course, probably the biggest culprit of ransacking other cultures for their artifacts is the UK. The British Museum would scarcely exist if it wasn’t for the theft of precious artifacts from all over the globe.
How is the last paragraph relevant to the rest of your post? Two wrongs don’t make a right, you know.
Are you pitting Britain for having an imperial past? Are you pitting the current British government for attempting to stop Ms Clarkson from buying a ring? (The horror!) What the fuck are you trying to say?
Oh and the Indians would like their land back please. Those of them that are still alive, anyway.
I don’t know of course, but do UK citizens really regard a random ring owned by an author as “national treasure”? There’s been a lot of famous Brits over the last thousand years. Is everything they ever owned a “national treasure”? Is it just extra sentimental because now Jane’s on the currency?
I was astonished to realize one day that Holbein’s portait of Edward vi is in National Gallery of Art in DC. It was part of the Andrew Mellon collection. When I saw it, it was just stuck up in a hallway, like maybe they couldn’t figure out where to stash it. I was half-running past on my way to meet some people and came to screeching halt because there it was, just sitting there. Nobody around it. No lines. No ropes. I got my nose up just six inches away.
It’s a glorious painting. The colors are so much more vibrant and delicate. All the reproductions I’ve seen don’t begin to do it justice. The brush work is so fine. I could have stood there all afternoon.
I was really surprised that England let that painting get away.
I’ll bet she Jane Austen bought the ring because she had a fancy event, and then decided it didn’t match so it was in a drawer for the rest of her life. Right, she wasn’t big on jewelry, but it’s not like buying the original Rosebud sled.
Sorry, that is one of my hot buttons - the Elgin Marbles were bought from the legal government of Greece at the time and removed. Sucks to be Greece and have been pwned by Turkey, but the marbles and many other pieces of art were legally purchased from the legal at that time government. Same with the stuff from Egypt - most all of the digs were done on permit, with the legal right to remove artifacts from the Egyptian government, or when they were a territory of France or Britain. Sucks to be them, but there you have it.
I am against people randomly looting archeological sites, but when something was removed legally, they have no leg to stand upon, just because the government changed from a colonial one to independent, it does not mean that everything done previously under legal contract and treaty is negated.
I suspect that’s basically it- they’re sticking her on the currency soon, so the government is pretending extra hard to give a shit.
I mean, they clearly don’t- even the line of text they’re putting on the note makes it pretty clear whoever designed it never actually read the book it came from (it’s a line about how fabulous reading is, originally said by a character who never reads anything, but is pretending to be cultured in order to get into someone else’s pants).
Oh, and if you’ve been to any of the UK’s major museums, it’s not surprising that they let the odd picture go elsewhere sometimes- they seriously have a crazy amount, and there’s far, far more in the basement than they can ever put on display, even of fabulous stuff. I mean- the British Museum is older than the US, and it’s been operated by rich kleptomaniacs with a hoarding problem for most of that time
This. If she had liked it she would have worn in in her coffin, and the archaeologists dig it up and it would be valuable. Things found while rifling through a dead person’s desk are rarely national treasures.
ETA: Though you could get a couple bucks on eBay with one of her paper clips.
Yeah, but in the Elgin case I have a hard time calling the Ottomans an occupying power vis-a-vis Greece. At least not quite in that period - ethnic nationalism had not yet overtaken the Ottoman state to the extent that Greeks were considered non-Ottomans. At that point in time “Turk” was synonymous with “hick” in cultured Ottoman circles and the wrong religion was a bar to high office, but ethnic ancestry generallywasnot.
In Lord Elgin’s defense, when he arrived in Athens the locals were routinely feeding ancient marbles into limekilns. He saved the Elgin Marbles. (Not that that’s any excuse for the UK hanging on to them now.)
