I’m going to keep beating the “you guys don’t understand museums at all and the memes are actively harming any work done to improve things” drum until it enters the public consciousness as much as “did you know the Egyptian gods didn’t have animal heads?” I did it once and I’ll do it again.
Don’t just post a meme or think bringing up the BM at every opportunity counts as activism. Learn about how these places work from the multitudes of museum professionals and academics that exist on the internet. They’re more than happy to tell you about all the good and bad things that museums are. Then at least if you’re fighting for change, you actually know what you’re fighting for rather than posting half baked hot takes.
Y'know, I wanted to add to this with a well thought out piece on how a lot of people don't understand museums or even how colonialism played a part in how collections were formed (the truth - not the weird game of internet telephone facts people *think* makes them knowledgeable). That sort of stuff is important information for people to have.
But then I realised what I was seeing in people's replies/tags/comments was beyond anything I could do to try to help correct the situation. Basically, most comments that were being made lacked any understand on even the most fundamentally basic level, so have this instead:
'it should have been the british museum instead' - bestie, do you think the british were the only ones with an empire? France had one too, and you're never going to guess what's housed in the Louvre. absolutely tone deaf to just think it was only one country who did colonialism and has a museum with colonial items in. please go look up what the hobby lobby is up to, or why they MET has been in so much trouble. the issue is everywhere, so every time I see this statement, I think the person who wrote it is an idiot.
'the british museum stole everything anyway' - the museum, as in the actual institution, has never stolen anything. I mean that seriously. a large part of its collection isn't even stolen because there are legitimate ways to accquire artefacts. strange, I know, but more people would know that if they didn't just parrot hot takes on the internet. this is not to say that it doesn't have stolen objects, it absolutely does, but how they got there is way more complicated. mostly it's rich old guys who did do a colonialism donating things to the british people on their deaths and the government going 'we need to put these somewhere' (again...simplistic/lacking nuance).
'if things are stolen from museums we can repatriate' - no you can't. funny thing about recieving artefacts is that you need provenance and chain of custody. those are legal things and you'll be serving the country or culture the artefact should be returned to much better by *not* handing them stolen goods with no provenance.
'uhh I thought these museums were supposed to be better at looking after these artefacts. clearly they can't' - yeah, no, see the first part of that is the racist myth that conservatives use to prevent any talks on repatriation, we all need to cut that shit out. the second part is because people have been getting more hostile towards museums, governments have been using it as an excuse to cut funding for them (you may think that museums, including the BM, are very rich...they aren't. their value is in their collections, they don't actually have much money at all) and when funding is cut, they're stretched thin. That's how what happened at the Louvre happened. The more arts and cultural institutions are devalued and defunded, the more likely it is that they will close and let me tell you, those collections will be sold and none of you will see those artefacts again. they sure as shit won't go back to their country of origin. they're more likely to be displayed in a billionare's 8th mansion.
who cares? it's funny - you are a tar pit and part of the problem
