Nicker on 10/9/2018 at 18:08

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Thanks Heywood, I was about to make an appeal to keep this thread on track.

Any given museum only displays a fraction of it's collection to the public and the displays are often replicas anyway. For academics it's a matter of traveling to the location of the materials they need to study so I don't see that dispersal is a huge issue as far as public access is concerned. It could be done within a complex of adjacent buildings to guard against fire and flood.

That said, the neglect of collections and their relegation to substandard buildings, is not just a problem in poorer countries.

But it is not prejudicial to say that collections in marginalised countries are especially at risk, not just from destructive accidents but from predation. Corrupt officials selling artifacts to unscrupulous collectors is a huge problem.

Another issue is the deliberate destruction of museums as an instrument of war and cultural vandalism, as we see with Isis. They both profit from the illegal sale of artifacts and they get to erase the cultural memories of the people they attack. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1938, they had a dedicated machinery in place to plunder the universally valuable artifacts from art and museum collections, and to destroy the remaining treasures and buildings as a way of erasing Polish identity.

But I guess it's a pipe dream to hope that wealthy countries might dedicate resources to preserving the museums of foreign lands when they often neglect their own.