Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damaged' in 60 years

I use to play on a minecraft server that had a griefer trap right at spawn. The server automatically monitored any attempts to grief and auto banned griefers while sending a server wide announcement.

When the server was wide open and anyone could join, the ban notice would spill out so fast we had to get an admin to silence it.

When we swapped to a whitelist that required a person to submit an application and wait to be approved, messages were rare. Only one or two a week.

When we swapped to invite only, we never had the message go off. Not once from what I remember.

As we swapped between the three states (in an attempt to maintain a certain server population level), the pattern was kept up.

The lower the cost to get in, the more people who violated trust. The higher the price, the less people who violated trust. When personal reputation was on the line, no one violated trust.

I know that goes against what people want to believe that we are all the same, but fact of the matter is that most people are in fact not at all the same outside of a confirmation bias bubble that people often are not even aware they are in. Exhibit A are the several liberals that have been slaughtered while proving that muslims are not violent by hitchhiking or hiking through muslim lands.

It is easy enough of a thing to test and prove, even without putting the actual art at risk. You could just reproduce fake art and provide it to various different groups of people, including at various costs, to see what happens. It would surely show either that we are actually all the same, or that we are not all the same. Cue the subsequent rationalization and excuse making when the results contradict the cult doctrine.

I find that an extremely interesting study. The more screaming and preemptive hedging and excuse making you encounter, the more you know you will find heretical results.

* the scheme is not widely known/advertised among the student body, so it's closer to word-of-mouth recommendations than mass anonymous access. (Note that there are over 12,000 undergrads but they only lend out 100 or so pieces -- it's a self-selected 1% or so of students)

* there is a deposit plus the hassle factor of actually going to collect the piece, so you're not going to do it unless you actually wanted to display the art; this is a minor barrier to entry but it makes a difference I think

* students are easy to find and easy to impose penalties on in the event of actual malice, because you can just ask their college to intervene

* they take some obvious precautions to avoid major risk -- no lending of very valuable pieces, no lending of sculptures (which I guess to be at higher risk of being knocked over and accidentally damaged compared to pictures hung on a wall)

A painting requires a viewer for it to become art.

Would you be the artist for creating the comment? Or would I be the artist for using the comment and framing it in a creative way?