Buckingham Palace art collection to go on gallery display for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Buckingham Palace art collection to go on gallery display for the first time

theguardian.com

32 pointswholeness42 comments

> they are double stacked in a sumptuous interior

Tangential and complimentary: if in London... The Wallace Collection [1] [2] is a fantastic off-the-mainstream collection of works focused around the time of the French Revolution. Convenient location for public transport (just off Oxford Street), low foot traffic, off the typical tourist trail radar, knowledgable staff.

[1] https://www.wallacecollection.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Collection

Lots of PR moves going on recently with the Royal Family...

Sorry did I miss something?

Prince Andrew is in a spot of bother

I find it genuinely surprising that such significant art is owned by the royal family and yet wasn't on display for the broader public until now.

I find it genuinely surprising that we still have a royal family.

I wonder if royal houses are a net economic positive due to increased tourism. That would be the only reason to keep them. It's like a really long-lasting, expensive reality show.

I think it was Niall Fergusson, perhaps in 'Empire' or maybe 'Civilisation', who argued that the modern purpose of monarchy is to protect the citizenry from its government -- particularly the emergence of extreme forms of government. You might not agree but I found it quite persuasive.

As an Irish person I don't find it persuasive at all. There's pretty much nothing a monarch can do that a non executive president can't, and the UK's monarch didn't protect anyone in Northern Ireland from gerrymandering or the B-Specials.

My take on it, personally, is that the primary benefit of a monarch is precisely that they are inherently illegitimate, in a way. This means that every day they have to justify to the people and keep answering the question "Why do we keep these people around?"

A president only has to convince (fool?) the people twice, and can always hide behind a "mandate" from the people to justify bad behavior. A monarch has to fight to earn that legitimacy every day. Plus they have the incentive of not screwing their kids' inheritance up. That's the value I see in it anyways, I don't know if there's a more sophisticated articulation of this idea out there.

So they have to behave so they can continue to lord it over us.

In reality it takes a huge amount of propaganda from the British media to keep them in place. If there was anything resembling an objective assesment of them then they would be gone.

I'm pretty sure they would fear an extreme form of government as much as the rest of us.

I'm pretty sure tourists would be flocking to Buckingham Palace (Hotel) after we became a republic, just as tourists flock to Versailles.

Pretty brave of them considering some of the pieces were not acquired peacefully.

If the Royal Family was shy about things not acquired peacefully, that'd be interminably awkward.

Which ones, it doesn't mention it in the article.

No one really knows because they won't make the list of items public. It's all based on circumstantial evidence, and the fact that the British Museum has a bunch of stolen artifacts.

Complete BS. The Royal Collection is very public: you can view images of most of the significant pieces on the website: https://www.rct.uk/about/picture-library

Are there problems with how some of the stuff was acquired? Probably. I don't know. But the lazy assertion that their holdings are secret (the things in this exhibition or the collection more generally) is just completely off the wall.

It's fashionable to complain about colonial theft of artifacts. Fine. Please apply the same level of rigor to statements about this topic as you would to statements about technical subjects. Don't spread FUD or try to glamorize your ignorance by saying "no one knows."

"A computerised inventory of the collection was started in early 1991,[28] and it was completed in December 1997.[29] The full inventory is not available to the public"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Collection#Collection

They're literally hanging on the walls of Buckingham Palace for the world to see for £26.50.

Some of them are, not all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Collection#Collection

Governments steal lots of stuff all the time. The least they can do is do something useful to the taxpayer with it.

This collection is not owned by the UK Government. The Royal Collection has some items owned by the Queen herself as a private individual and some items are owned by the Crown (which is a difficult enough abstract concept even if you are British but in this context, it basically means the reigning monarch).

The collection is managed by a charity, The Royal Collection Trust, and other than the tax advantages all charities have, there's no taxpayer involvement here.

Regardless of who legally owns it or the circumstances under which it was acquired the queen acquired most of it as a side benefit to or result of her official position.

I see it no different than displaying some gift in a presidential library. It's simply the right thing to do.

Or they could give it back to the people they stole it from.

The UK has a long history of not returning anything - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/wh...

The Chinese government's supposed approach is pretty interesting - https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-chinese-art-heist

well there are pros and cons to that, in many places in the world you would risk losing the piece forever regardless what the locals claim.

plus while something may have come from a region and people of the world that no longer exist and the attachment is in name only. As in, there is no connection to the society that created the works to the one that rules the area now. There is always a case for those stolen within a few generations but going back beyond that is not always warranted. Plus when you get into some art and such who was the last rightful owner, you stole from someone who stole it from another and so on.

I would prefer a world where these antiquities are preserved but open to anyone to see.

This type of attempt to intellectualize cultural theft is usually how colonizers rationalize it.

I understand what you're saying, but thats like making the argument that you shouldn't have the fancy car because it's safer in my driveway than yours.

Eh, without colonial cross-pollination and cultural appropriation, many of these works would never have been inspired or created to begin with.

You want to redress the past, invent a time machine. Otherwise, it is what it is (or, rather, was).

I guess the other option is stealing it back from the European museums holding it, but I suppose now it would be called theft rather than "cultural cross pollination"

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/28/chinese-art-theft

Let me go to your house, steal your stuff and keep it forever and call it crosspollination.

If he fails to shoot you dead enough to prevent it then it's all yours. That's how these things work at the international level. Sure nowadays a country can appeal to the UN if they are being robbed but that isn't guaranteed to be helpful and back when the UK took most of the stuff there was no UN.

(Shrug) Being a white male landowner, I probably have it coming.

Or you know we could just agree to 1) not steal things and 2) return the stuff we stole from others

(Shrug) They're dead, and don't need their stuff back. I'm not.

So we can steal it right now and not return it to your descendants ?

Since when has the UK become the arbiter and police of the World's Art. Is it also rescuing currently "at danger" heirlooms ? Who are they to decide that they get to show it? For e.g. the Kohinoor diamond from India. Blatant theft. But sure done by a white colony so it must be fine. Saviors and all that.

I really doubt the Elgin marbles would disappear from Greece

Does this also include all the art and treasures that the British stole from the entire world?

The British Museum is an active historical crime scene.

The western world loves talking about intellectual property, morality, and intellectual honesty, but here you actually have the British flaunting all the treasures that they stole from the rest of the world.

Your property was stolen by someone too, long ago (or maybe not so long ago, depending on where you live). You gonna return that too?

Everything is stolen; nothing is stolen.

Let me break into your house and steal your stuff. "You gonna return that too?" - NO finders keepers.

“Good museums borrow, great museums steal” - Pabla Picassa

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