"It is extremely difficult to obtain an object without at least resorting so some kind of violence: I believe half your museum is stolen."
* From a letter by the German traveler Richard Kandt, to Felix von Luschan, Assistant-Director of Berlin Ethnological Museum in 1897. The same year the British looted the palace of the Oba of Benin. Kandt might have been writing to James Cuno, the Director of the Art Institute of Chicago and apologist of the universal museum, a nice way of calling museums stocked with lots of other people's, mostly stolen, properties.
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