ARTH 246 - Questions of Ownership: Looting, Curating, and Destroying Cultural Heritage Objects

FDR: HU
Planned Offering: Winter 2017 and alternate years.
Credits: 3

Cultural heritage objects are powerful artifacts to own, display, and even destroy. But why? This courses explores the ways art and cultural heritage objects have been stolen, laundered, purchased, curated, and destroyed in order to express political, religious, and cultural messages. Case studies and current events are equally studied to shed light on practices of looting and iconoclasm. Some of the questions we consider: What is the relationship between art and war? Under what conditions should museums repatriate art from its collections? What nationalist agendas are at work when cultural heritage objects are claimed by modem nation states or terrorist groups? Kerin.