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Comment by ah1508 | Hacker News Reader

Owing something usually give you the exclusive use of it but does not allow you to do what you want with it. You cannot walk in the street with a running chain saw even if you own it. Same thing with your car, you must respect a lot of rules. If you own a Picasso you cannot burn it. It is a political choice to let someone destroy a forest but not a Picasso.

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Interesting. Seeing as you need a licence to export certain works of art and antiques (from the UK) I wouldn't be surprised if there's a rule to prevent people from destroying a painting. However, I've never heard of such a rule. Perhaps because it's not something that people usually want to do. (A Picasso might not be old enough to be protected as an antique, of course.)

>If you own a Picasso you cannot burn it.

If I own a Picasso I can absolutely burn it if I want to. Don't like it? Buy it off me before I do, or don't sell one to me in the first place.

If you live in the US you can do that, and you can and will be prosecuted under the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). Other industrialized nations tend to have similar protections. People always have the choice to break the law, and if you go so far as to do something irreversible (like burn an original Picasso) a jury of your peers might not be so understanding of your god-granted individual liberty to be a Vandal.

Seeing as Picasso passed away long ago, presumably there would be nobody to prosecute me under VARA[1].

[1]: "In most instances, the rights granted under VARA persist for the life of the author (or the last surviving author, for creators of joint works)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act

To my reading VARA only applies to living artists

why is a picasso more important than an ecological system?

It is question asked by the soup thrown at paintings in museums recently. Like saying "Why do you consider that paintings must be protected and not the possibility to keep living on this planet ?" At least it is how I interpret it.

It is about rules elaborated by an educated society. Not perfect rules, but at least rules that preserve what this society consider "important". Many example show that humans that live in a given place are very well aware of how important is a "healthy" ecosystem and give rights to "a good life" to this ecosystem: Wanganui river in New-Zeland, lac Erie in US (this attempt failed), constitution of Ecuador, etc... Elinor Ostrom wrote interesting about this rules (governing the commons), she had the nobel prize for that.

Is not more important, but we can preserve both at the same time.

And those gluing this hands to valuable old master paintings are still imbecile puppets, no matter the alleged reason to do it in their minds.

> but we can preserve both at the same time

Sure, spending million on 'priceless' art... while spending as little as possible on preserving our ecosystems?

Who is spending millions on priceless art "instead to save the planet"?

Many arts museum's are private. Its duty is to preserve important human culture artifacts, not to save the planet.

* OwNing something

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