We Give You Heads, You Give Us Tibet Freedom
Nothing sweetens an ongoing cultural property dispute like a little blackmail. As I wrote about last week, two bronze heads were plundered from Beijing’s Summer Palace over 150 years ago, and somehow ended up in the possession of Yves Saint Laurent, whose art collection is going under the hammer this week in Paris. China has been pressing the French government and Christie’s auction house not to sell the statues in an effort to reclaim the pieces and bring them back to Beijing. A Chinese cultural preservation group even filed a formal injunction to pull the items from the auction, which was rejected Monday by a Paris court. To rub some salt in China’s wounds, Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent’s former lover and the conductor of this week’s sale, released a statement Monday offering the statues to China for a price much higher than any money. Berge said:
I am prepared to offer this bronze head to the Chinese straight away. All they have to do is to declare they are going to apply human rights, give the Tibetans back their freedom and agree to accept the Dalai Lama on their territory.
If they do that, I would be very happy to go myself and bring these two Chinese heads to put them in the Summer Palace in Beijing. It’s obviously blackmail but I accept that.”
Pretty ballsy. Because not only is the offer utterly shallow, it will bring even more shame to China for its inability to reclaim its relics. I bet the Beastie Boys, wherever they are, are smiling today.
“it will bring even more shame to China for its inability to reclaim its relics.”
well, that might very well turn out to be a correct prediction about the future. yet more striking is that Monsieur Berge _has_ already made a fool of himself. It’d be somewhat different if Berge were an American or Indian. But this Monsieur Berge tried to make a dig at the chinese on supposedly moral grounds relying on a couple of objects in his possession, which objects, without the perfectly immoral actions of _his_ recent ancestors - the Franco-Anglo looting troops - would not have been his to begin with. This Monsieur Berge, with his statements, ironic and clownish unbeknownst to him, appears to have gone right by you without either your irony- or your morality-sensor registering a thing.