The dangerous citizen.

Who or what possesses the criminal to steal? The very act of theft is either one of formidable revolution or one of great exploitation. The plight of the modern day thief can be defined as either one of expected consequence, or one of great surprise depending on the context. Now who is this thief? Perhaps, he is simply a con artist with good taste–possessing both an artistic and manipulative skill set, and symbolically, he could be as surreptitious as a private art gallery or as tyrannous as the British Empire. But who owns cultural and historical identity—the individual, the state, or institutions? Is it those who create, or those who control? It very well may be both in the case of art theft & the looting of antiquities. The theft and forgery of art, particularly antiquities, represent not only criminal acts but also complex intellectual and cultural phenomena that challenge traditional notions of ownership, authenticity, and moral value in the art world. By examining the historical context of looted artifacts and the ethical dilemmas surrounding their possession in major museums, this essay argues that art theft, in its execution and impact, should be viewed as a sophisticated form of intellectualism. A resistance that questions the legitimacy of cultural property and the systems that define who truly owns art.
Up until the late 19th century, in a world plagued with mostly war, the notion of ownership and theft was framed by concepts like 'prize rights'. The Columbia Journal of  Law & the Arts defines the phrase as, “the right that the winning party held to deprive the defeated party of its men, its wealth and its national pride…The act of plundering (direptio) was an actual method of acquiring ownership of res hostium—namely, the enemies’ movables” (Giardini 2019). So by this definition, you can see that the ransacking of ethnic valuables and the erasure of culture that comes with it, was essentially legal up until about 200 years ago. And in those 200 years, treaties have been signed as well as laws have been put in place to protect and preserve the national treasures and works of art/science of a specific nation, wartime or not. Even so, how can we address the deep-rooted greed and indifference within bourgeois society, especially when dealing with art that was looted during colonial rule? Consider the following: It has been only two to three generations since these legal protections began to emerge, and it’d be hard to imagine the grandchildren of a monarch simply handing over their now polished antiques (looted by their ancestors) back to the same country they still reign over today. Take the Benin Bronzes for example. Benin was a kingdom in southeastern, present-day Nigeria that was both wealthy and industrious, producing thousands of art pieces & objects that were mainly used for religious rituals and adornment of palace walls, dating back to the 1500s. In a YouTube video titled “The British Museum is full of stolen artifacts” by Vox Media, it is highlighted that today many of the original sculptures including engraved ivory tusks, brass sculptures, and plaques, are housed in the British Museum on the floor dedicated to African Art. These were of course acquired by not so honest means. In an article from the Santa Clara Business Law Chronicle, the author explains the timeline of how these coveted items fell under British possession. It states, “The Kingdom of Benin was ruled by the Oba, or Edo king, for approximately 700 years before being annexed into the British Empire shortly after the 1897 invasion. The busts, portraits, jewelry, sculptures, and small figures created by Edo artisans from as early as the thirteenth century…once adorned the buildings and courtyards of the palace but were later sold off to the British Museum and other collections across Europe.” (Echeona and Nadeau 2023). Professor and art-historian Chika Okeke Agulu describes the Benin bronzes as “visual archives of the kingdom in a society that did not develop written script as we know them”. If you did not know already, you can see clearly now that the ancient artifacts and art that are on view in museums are not just decorative items waiting to be purchased or locked away in an exhibition. They are remnants of past civilizations, connections to ancestors, and at the very least, missing pieces to a puzzle that an otherwise underdeveloped society may be trying to solve. So what is the subjugated supposed to do when you strip him of his culture after burning his country to the ground and leaving it in civil chaos? What breeds criminality? Well the answer’s in the question. He is supposed to steal.

In the preface of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre poses a question: “Sly and thieving: What did you expect? Their petty thieving marks the start of a still unorganized resistance.” It is in this quote that he refers to ‘you’ as the ruling class, and ‘they’ as the lower or oppressed class. Further context proves the very ‘you’ he is talking about is Europe, and the ‘they’, her colonies on the African continent and elsewhere beyond in the islands and so on. It’s a fair question. If you consistently steal from a man and pillage his home, you’d be foolishly arrogant to believe that those same acts do not find you somewhere down the line of further injustice. How could you prevent a culture that not only incentivizes criminality, but justifies it due to historical context? You created it! This is why the thief (the lowly and not the bourgeoisie) is the supreme among the artists, he is taking back what has been stolen from him! Every act of robbery from an institution with items of “disputed ownership” is an act of resistance that questions the status-quo and rejects the idea that culture is for sale. Now, some bit of restitution has been made to the Edo State of Nigeria (Benin City) and various other cultures across the world. In the article referenced previously–the Santa Clara Business Law Chronicle–it is stated that, “Today, various institutions worldwide have announced decisions to return these heritage pieces voluntarily from museum collections to their place of origin…driven by shifting international sentiment due to the growth of social media” (Echeona and Nadeau 2023). Although this offers a more optimistic view on the conversation around repatriation, still “the FBI reports billions of dollars’ worth of art that goes missing each year, and thefts of high-profile paintings are both infrequent and widely reported”, according to Ed Caesar in a New York Times article from 2013. He claims that the demand for stolen works will always be there as long as the ‘rightful’ owner wants them back. But who is the ‘rightful’ owner? I am of strong belief that you cannot steal something that has already been stolen. You quite literally are incentivized in a capitalist society to sell on the black market (cutting out the middleman), so why not be the criminal? At this point, it doesn’t matter if the thief has ethnic ties to the item he is stealing. The very items that are being stolen are now a silent part of a global revolution against the power structure. The currency he gains from a successful sale will act as a sort of reparation. A successful heist is indeed a mockery of the pretentiousness of the art world and its gatekeepers. 
Now the art forger is a specific case. There's a special type of irony that comes with replicating a piece of art so delicately that it is able to deceive the supposed “experts”. In an article from The Collector titled Art Forgery: 8 Things to Know About the Classiest Crime, there seems to be lots of confusion in the art world about what is authentic, and what’s not. 
“The answer is unclear, but even the estimated numbers are astonishing. Some experts believe that around 50% of all works on the market and in museums are forged. When it comes to loans and donations from trusted private collectors to big cultural institutions, museums rarely thoroughly research the provenance and material qualities of the donated works.” (Kirpalov S. Anastasiia, MA Art History 2023). The irony here is that millions of dollars are flooded into this industry every year and half of the valuable works are inauthentic. That makes the forger the perfect salesman in an open market. If you look at the case of Elmyr de Hory, a famous painter and art-forger who was the subject of Orson Welles’ documentary essay film, F for Fake, who was able to sell all of his forgeries for more than $50 million in today’s value, and convince art dealers and institutions like the Museum of Modern art in New York, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, that he was an European aristocrat who was willing to sell work from his private collection. You can’t help but wonder, why all the fuss about keeping people out? Exclusivity I suppose, and of course there are the conspiracies (money laundering), but regardless of the answer, a figure like de Hory, who was eventually forced to live a nomadic lifestyle, jumping from one pseudonym to another, is a perfect thief that disrupts the class of the elite, and acts as a sort of of martyr that “exalts the terrified masses” (Sartre 1961). 
So really, who is the thief? Well, he’s both. An acquisitive empire seeking ever-lasting growth and profit and will take from whoever to get it. He’s also a symbol of resistance—a force challenging the legitimacy of cultural appropriation and the commodification of history. In a world where the powerful still control vast collections of looted art, the act of theft becomes a reclamation of stolen heritage, a call for cultural restitution, and a critique of the systems that continue to define who "owns" art. By recognizing these acts as sophisticated intellectual challenges, we can begin to question not only the legitimacy of cultural property but also the deeper inequalities embedded in the structures of global power. 
I hope I have been able to educate you on some issues surrounding colonialism, and how it has fostered things we see today like cultural appropriation on a number of fronts. I also hope your eyes are at the very least squinted at the fact that crime is only a product of the environment it exists in. Ultimately, art theft and the question of cultural ownership are not just issues of law, but issues of justice, identity, and the right to preserve one's history. As a self-diagnosed kleptomaniac, dare I say crime is essentially needed and somewhat vital to the centuries-long struggle of the global south.

The dangerous citizen.

Who or what possesses the criminal to steal? The very act of theft is either one of formidable revolution or one of great exploitation. The plight of the modern day thief can be defined as either one of expected consequence, or one of great surprise depending on the context. Now who is this thief? Perhaps, he is simply a con artist with good taste–possessing both an artistic and manipulative skill set, and symbolically, he could be as surreptitious as a private art gallery or as tyrannous as the British Empire. But who owns cultural and historical identity—the individual, the state, or institutions? Is it those who create, or those who control? It very well may be both in the case of art theft & the looting of antiquities. The theft and forgery of art, particularly antiquities, represent not only criminal acts but also complex intellectual and cultural phenomena that challenge traditional notions of ownership, authenticity, and moral value in the art world. By examining the historical context of looted artifacts and the ethical dilemmas surrounding their possession in major museums, this essay argues that art theft, in its execution and impact, should be viewed as a sophisticated form of intellectualism. A resistance that questions the legitimacy of cultural property and the systems that define who truly owns art.
Up until the late 19th century, in a world plagued with mostly war, the notion of ownership and theft was framed by concepts like 'prize rights'. The Columbia Journal of  Law & the Arts defines the phrase as, “the right that the winning party held to deprive the defeated party of its men, its wealth and its national pride…The act of plundering (direptio) was an actual method of acquiring ownership of res hostium—namely, the enemies’ movables” (Giardini 2019). So by this definition, you can see that the ransacking of ethnic valuables and the erasure of culture that comes with it, was essentially legal up until about 200 years ago. And in those 200 years, treaties have been signed as well as laws have been put in place to protect and preserve the national treasures and works of art/science of a specific nation, wartime or not. Even so, how can we address the deep-rooted greed and indifference within bourgeois society, especially when dealing with art that was looted during colonial rule? Consider the following: It has been only two to three generations since these legal protections began to emerge, and it’d be hard to imagine the grandchildren of a monarch simply handing over their now polished antiques (looted by their ancestors) back to the same country they still reign over today. Take the Benin Bronzes for example. Benin was a kingdom in southeastern, present-day Nigeria that was both wealthy and industrious, producing thousands of art pieces & objects that were mainly used for religious rituals and adornment of palace walls, dating back to the 1500s. In a YouTube video titled “The British Museum is full of stolen artifacts” by Vox Media, it is highlighted that today many of the original sculptures including engraved ivory tusks, brass sculptures, and plaques, are housed in the British Museum on the floor dedicated to African Art. These were of course acquired by not so honest means. In an article from the Santa Clara Business Law Chronicle, the author explains the timeline of how these coveted items fell under British possession. It states, “The Kingdom of Benin was ruled by the Oba, or Edo king, for approximately 700 years before being annexed into the British Empire shortly after the 1897 invasion. The busts, portraits, jewelry, sculptures, and small figures created by Edo artisans from as early as the thirteenth century…once adorned the buildings and courtyards of the palace but were later sold off to the British Museum and other collections across Europe.” (Echeona and Nadeau 2023). Professor and art-historian Chika Okeke Agulu describes the Benin bronzes as “visual archives of the kingdom in a society that did not develop written script as we know them”. If you did not know already, you can see clearly now that the ancient artifacts and art that are on view in museums are not just decorative items waiting to be purchased or locked away in an exhibition. They are remnants of past civilizations, connections to ancestors, and at the very least, missing pieces to a puzzle that an otherwise underdeveloped society may be trying to solve. So what is the subjugated supposed to do when you strip him of his culture after burning his country to the ground and leaving it in civil chaos? What breeds criminality? Well the answer’s in the question. He is supposed to steal.

In the preface of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre poses a question: “Sly and thieving: What did you expect? Their petty thieving marks the start of a still unorganized resistance.” It is in this quote that he refers to ‘you’ as the ruling class, and ‘they’ as the lower or oppressed class. Further context proves the very ‘you’ he is talking about is Europe, and the ‘they’, her colonies on the African continent and elsewhere beyond in the islands and so on. It’s a fair question. If you consistently steal from a man and pillage his home, you’d be foolishly arrogant to believe that those same acts do not find you somewhere down the line of further injustice. How could you prevent a culture that not only incentivizes criminality, but justifies it due to historical context? You created it! This is why the thief (the lowly and not the bourgeoisie) is the supreme among the artists, he is taking back what has been stolen from him! Every act of robbery from an institution with items of “disputed ownership” is an act of resistance that questions the status-quo and rejects the idea that culture is for sale. Now, some bit of restitution has been made to the Edo State of Nigeria (Benin City) and various other cultures across the world. In the article referenced previously–the Santa Clara Business Law Chronicle–it is stated that, “Today, various institutions worldwide have announced decisions to return these heritage pieces voluntarily from museum collections to their place of origin…driven by shifting international sentiment due to the growth of social media” (Echeona and Nadeau 2023). Although this offers a more optimistic view on the conversation around repatriation, still “the FBI reports billions of dollars’ worth of art that goes missing each year, and thefts of high-profile paintings are both infrequent and widely reported”, according to Ed Caesar in a New York Times article from 2013. He claims that the demand for stolen works will always be there as long as the ‘rightful’ owner wants them back. But who is the ‘rightful’ owner? I am of strong belief that you cannot steal something that has already been stolen. You quite literally are incentivized in a capitalist society to sell on the black market (cutting out the middleman), so why not be the criminal? At this point, it doesn’t matter if the thief has ethnic ties to the item he is stealing. The very items that are being stolen are now a silent part of a global revolution against the power structure. The currency he gains from a successful sale will act as a sort of reparation. A successful heist is indeed a mockery of the pretentiousness of the art world and its gatekeepers. 
Now the art forger is a specific case. There's a special type of irony that comes with replicating a piece of art so delicately that it is able to deceive the supposed “experts”. In an article from The Collector titled Art Forgery: 8 Things to Know About the Classiest Crime, there seems to be lots of confusion in the art world about what is authentic, and what’s not. 
“The answer is unclear, but even the estimated numbers are astonishing. Some experts believe that around 50% of all works on the market and in museums are forged. When it comes to loans and donations from trusted private collectors to big cultural institutions, museums rarely thoroughly research the provenance and material qualities of the donated works.” (Kirpalov S. Anastasiia, MA Art History 2023). The irony here is that millions of dollars are flooded into this industry every year and half of the valuable works are inauthentic. That makes the forger the perfect salesman in an open market. If you look at the case of Elmyr de Hory, a famous painter and art-forger who was the subject of Orson Welles’ documentary essay film, F for Fake, who was able to sell all of his forgeries for more than $50 million in today’s value, and convince art dealers and institutions like the Museum of Modern art in New York, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, that he was an European aristocrat who was willing to sell work from his private collection. You can’t help but wonder, why all the fuss about keeping people out? Exclusivity I suppose, and of course there are the conspiracies (money laundering), but regardless of the answer, a figure like de Hory, who was eventually forced to live a nomadic lifestyle, jumping from one pseudonym to another, is a perfect thief that disrupts the class of the elite, and acts as a sort of of martyr that “exalts the terrified masses” (Sartre 1961). 
So really, who is the thief? Well, he’s both. An acquisitive empire seeking ever-lasting growth and profit and will take from whoever to get it. He’s also a symbol of resistance—a force challenging the legitimacy of cultural appropriation and the commodification of history. In a world where the powerful still control vast collections of looted art, the act of theft becomes a reclamation of stolen heritage, a call for cultural restitution, and a critique of the systems that continue to define who "owns" art. By recognizing these acts as sophisticated intellectual challenges, we can begin to question not only the legitimacy of cultural property but also the deeper inequalities embedded in the structures of global power. 
I hope I have been able to educate you on some issues surrounding colonialism, and how it has fostered things we see today like cultural appropriation on a number of fronts. I also hope your eyes are at the very least squinted at the fact that crime is only a product of the environment it exists in. Ultimately, art theft and the question of cultural ownership are not just issues of law, but issues of justice, identity, and the right to preserve one's history. As a self-diagnosed kleptomaniac, dare I say crime is essentially needed and somewhat vital to the centuries-long struggle of the global south.