Bad news for researchers in museum ethics, whose field is now officially redundant: ICOM has announced that museums operate ethically by definition.

It’s always nice to see stout defences of intellectual liberty:

I wonder whether the university made any use of its research centre with specific expertise on the ethics of cultural heritage:

Recently the Telegraph not only carried an opinion piece on the Benin Bronzes, but supplemented it with a news item about the existence of the opinion piece. (Links may be paywalled.)

Heritage organisations are less immune to short-termism than their vocation might suggest. I know of a National Trust property that got rid of its snowplough (dead money, according to the accountants), and then found itself unable to open for parking on many Winter days.

Now that we know the entire fabric of statutory protection for listed buildings and scheduled monuments can be suspended at the local police commander’s whim, it has been a grimly fascinating exercise in social psychology to see how rapidly the iconoclastic impulse spread from slaver to abolitionist. I toyed with the idea of a spoof campaign …

After suggestions that Greece would push the Marbles onto the EU’s post-Brexit agenda, it’s unclear whether this is still being run up the flagpole:

Atlas Obscura has an odd article about 1850s photography of Egyptian archaeological sites, wherein capturing the ‘strange emptiness’ of scenes minus the contemporary population living nearby is characterised as some sort of ‘colonial agenda’ that ‘sidelined or erased indigenous residents of other countries’. Which is the kind of thing that would be easier to swallow if …

The Sarr-Savoy report to Emmanuel Macron on heritage restitution has an English translation, and I have read it. It’s very... French. That is, it reflects the stereotype of the continental intellectual whose writing can never merely be about a subject when it can bear witness to it, and whose language teems with temporalities and specificities and …

Every time I write on AR I find stuff I want to catch up with before the text has even made it through editorial.

I interviewed Tony Milligan (K.C.L.) about the ethics of space exploration for Pod Academy. It was his work on cultural value in space I built on/responded to in my piece for Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, and as things turned out we were co-contributors to that volume, so it was particularly interesting to have …

Historic England has commenced a series of what it calls online debates ‘where conservation and heritage experts debate the topics uppermost in their minds’, beginning with: ‘Why is a diverse and inclusive workplace essential for the heritage sector?’

This week I learnt that my work has been plagiarised in a heritage/UNESCO-themed document apparently issued to school pupils by the Nanking Model United Nations. Setting a great example there...

I’ve long thought it curious that returning art confiscated by the Nazi regime gets treated under the heading of restitution of cultural heritage, given that it deals with personal property, seldom with what belongs to Jewish culture or German culture or whatever culture. I’m reminded of that by an article seeking to argue that we should …

In theory, having a topic linked to my research background hit the limelight should be a Good Thing and a source of Career Opportunities. In practice, what I find is at best that cultural appropriation sold out when it went mainstream.