“A policy of acquisition by expropriation was instigated. This conception of emancipation and liberation bore the seeds of post-slavery colonial interventionist ideology; it gave it its wording, even: freeing populations from tyranny while appropriating their belongings to take them back to France, the land of freedom. Peoples were robbed in the name of progress; they could come to admire their treasures in the museums of France, which kept and conserved them in the name of a principle greater than the egotism of a single nation: universalism. Voices opposing this policy were rare, and they came from the royalist camp. Royalist Quatremere de Quincy formulated the argument that has constituted the critique of these practices: he raged ‘against the conditions of the a priori acquisition of works: the pillaging of the societies of origin, putting the context of creation into parenthesis, the—inevitable—refusal to conceive of the artist or artisan’s expressive intention, the ignorance of the ‘effects’ of sense on the public, etcetera.’ [28] The universal museum is by essence imperialist and colonial.”
from A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum by Françoise Vergès
Additional citation: [28] “L’art à l'époque de l’apocalypse: Le musée” by Jean-Louis Déotte, Patrimoines en folie.
