I realize that Home & Garden isn't the section of The New York Times racking up the most Pulitzers, but that's no excuse for what was published there. In a piece entitled "Trophy Hunters With Their Eyes on Interiors," the reader is acquainted with a handful of daring "ultra-high-end contractors" who are tasked by their demanding clients to find all manner of old, ancient, antique, distressed and generally "very aged"-looking building materials all over the globe, preferably in third-world, war-torn countries. These include architectural elements, wood and stone reliefs, sculpture in the round and raw materials, such as stone and wood. Why? These (in at least one case) self described "modern-day Indiana Jones" contractors report it is mostly because you can "'get the merchandise for less money.'"
Heritage and natural resource protection issues are engaged in a staggeringly vague and naive way. When one of the profiled contractors is asked, "isn't he concerned that, in buying up old doors and walls from 100-year-old homes, he's taking a country's irreplaceable heritage?" his response is:
Tastes change, and people want what they see as new and better....Why should I dictate where and how people live, just because to me it seems charming or quaint? I'm not the one living there. I know what's beautiful to me and I want to make good use of it.Ugh.
To be fair, the author, Joyce Wadler, shares enough anecdotal information to lead the reader to believe that natural resources, namely wood, can be tricky to get out of sources countries without the right papers. And, she offers, at the rock-bottom of the piece, a link to the Forest Stewardship Council. She is utterly silent about cultural resources. Would it have killed Ms. Wadler to spend a very little bit of time researching the law on this? She clearly has some sense that what is happening here isn't quite kosher.
By not doing this, by not setting the practice of looting the cultural resources of vulnerable swaths of the third world into some sort of legal and moral context she has delivered a story with a destructive message: The rich desire these things and because of that lots of other people should too. These "ultra-high-end contractors" and their extractive work is heroic and glamorous. This swells the trade which leads to the increasing destruction of cultural resources. And, no messy moral problems because the locals are happy to sell it to us - cheap!
The New York Times, the "paper of record," should know better and this is shameful.
Image: The New York Times
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1 comments:
For Pete's sake, NYT...at least don't add insult to injury by called them "modern-day Indiana Jones!" It's bad enough real archaeologists have his spectre hanging over our heads...
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