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They were trying to cover up attempts at acquiring legitimate artifacts? Seems like OP is right; they are trying to acquire legitimate materials and that it is

They were trying to cover up attempts at acquiring legitimate artifacts? Seems like OP is right; they are trying to acquire legitimate materials and that it is most likely they got duped.

jfengel 7y ago
Wikipedia has an entry for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal If this were a one-off thing, this might indeed be a non-story. But it fits a pattern of them putting collecting over scholarship. It casts doubt on their entire catalog, and makes it look as if they fund conferences as a fig leaf to grant them unearned scholarly authority. It may not mean anything to techies at Hacker News, but within the circles of archeology and biblical study, it's a warning that people should reconsider their relationship to the museum.
- creddit 7y ago
  I'm familiar with the scandal. I'm just saying that it points more toward the museum having been actually duped. They are clearly interested in getting genuine artifacts given the lengths they are willing to go to obscure shady provenance.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    > scandal Scandals - numerous. Buying dubious pieces that have been stolen or faked shouldn’t be taken as a good thing. This logic isn’t applied to real museums luckily.
    - jfengel 7y ago
      It's a practice real museums have mostly stopped. There's enormous controversy about what they should do with their existing ill-gotten gains -- most prominently the Parthenon Marbles in the UK, but that's just the lid on a massive can of worms. (There are rumors that Greece will hold up any trade deal the UK wants to make with the EU until they give the pieces back, and expect all hell to break loose in the museum world after that.) The Bible Museum reflects a cultural attitude the celebrates the imperial age, when rich countries just took what they wanted from poor ones. There are a lot of people in those rich countries who want that back.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    Ah, I see. That makes sense. I see their willingness to accept artifacts of dubious provenance as part of an overall pattern of having things other than scholarship at the top of their agenda. But yes, I do think they'd prefer genuine artifacts when available -- even if that destroys provenance information. If they cared more about provenance, they'd be less likely to be duped, and it makes it hard for me to see them as purely a victim.
    - creddit 7y ago
      > If they cared more about provenance, they'd be less likely to be duped, and it makes it hard for me to see them as purely a victim. Fair point. I don't doubt their propensity to be duped is rather high due to self-imposed biases.
    - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
      If scholarship was at the top of their agenda... they wouldn't be a Bible Museum. This Museum literally shows people how the Earth is 6,000 years old and people interacting with Dinosaurs. Edit: I mistakenly confused The Bible Museum and The Creation Museum. In my shame, I am committing to leave the original comment unedited, so that it can receive all the down voting it deserves.
      - jfengel 7y ago
        I think you're thinking of the Creation Museum, in Kentucky. That's a whole different travesty. The Museum of the Bible is located in Washington, DC, not far from the Smithsonian. On the surface it's a much less flashy and overtly religious institution. It presents the Bible as a piece of world history in an archeological context, supported by scholarship. It doesn't muck about with creationism. It's rather respectable. Underneath that are more subtle problems. It's funded by the same religious zealots who would not allow their employees' health care to cover birth control (and took it to the Supreme Court, where they won). There's a subtle underlying tone pushing American-style evangelical Protestantism -- one that could easily be overlooked, except that incidents like this one imply that there's an element of religious imperialism going on as well. So they are funding and supporting genuine scholarship, and are not at all obvious wackadoodles like the Creation Museum. But nonetheless scholarship may take a back seat to a religious agenda, one that has been a rather pernicious force in the US -- including leading to things like the Creation Museum.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. Suppose that actual genuineness is a lower priority than having something exciting to display while not getting caught with fakes. In that case a murky acquisition pipeline is still a benefit, in that the obscurity makes it harder to prove the fraud. This is of course a pretty common behavior in corporate America. Look at the number of executives during the financial crisis who suddenly went from, "We are financial geniuses, deserving of great power and greater compensation," to, "We were innocent victims who could not possibly have known what was going on in the companies we control utterly." Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures.
    - dmix 7y ago
      > Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures. Except that whole racket in your financial industry analogy depended entirely on a 3rd party (ie, a government packed with their buddies from private school) to tip the scales in their favour, on either end, for it to actually work. There's no third party being corrupted to give credibility to the museum here, they can't really just give credibility to themselves like that - just as the bankers couldn't bail themselves out, when they otherwise were faced with devastating and long-term financial consequences for their behaviour (ie, the appropriate response or natural outcome). A museums reputation matters and events like this directly affect it... which is why we have major news stories and Wikipedia articles about it. I don't think it's helpful to shame them for engaging with the scholarly community, or to shame them for attempting to be good merely because of past behaviour (which is far too common practice today on social media, as if people and organizations can't become better or more responsible, and are forever just evil like in movies). It sounds like the natural corrections processes were already working here... they got pressured from the sources of credibility (scholars, media, etc) which was influenced because of prior bad acts where they lost reputation already. If they attempted to corrupt those sources instead of engaging with them I'd be more concerned. But really there's not much here, especially given the negative spin in the article, which is what the OP was critiquing. The end result was bad-for-business PR and they probably paid millions for stuff they can't now use in their museum, sounds alright to me, things are working... I also doubt they'll be as trusting next time.
- lowdose 7y ago
  Genuine question, what is the overlap of archeology and biblical studies?

They were trying to cover up attempts at acquiring legitimate artifacts? Seems like OP is right; they are trying to acquire legitimate materials and that it is most likely they got duped.

jfengel 7y ago

Wikipedia has an entry for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal If this were a one-off thing, this might indeed be a non-story. But it fits a pattern of them putting collecting over scholarship. It casts doubt on their entire catalog, and makes it look as if they fund conferences as a fig leaf to grant them unearned scholarly authority. It may not mean anything to techies at Hacker News, but within the circles of archeology and biblical study, it's a warning that people should reconsider their relationship to the museum.

creddit 7y ago
I'm familiar with the scandal. I'm just saying that it points more toward the museum having been actually duped. They are clearly interested in getting genuine artifacts given the lengths they are willing to go to obscure shady provenance.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > scandal Scandals - numerous. Buying dubious pieces that have been stolen or faked shouldn’t be taken as a good thing. This logic isn’t applied to real museums luckily.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    It's a practice real museums have mostly stopped. There's enormous controversy about what they should do with their existing ill-gotten gains -- most prominently the Parthenon Marbles in the UK, but that's just the lid on a massive can of worms. (There are rumors that Greece will hold up any trade deal the UK wants to make with the EU until they give the pieces back, and expect all hell to break loose in the museum world after that.) The Bible Museum reflects a cultural attitude the celebrates the imperial age, when rich countries just took what they wanted from poor ones. There are a lot of people in those rich countries who want that back.
- jfengel 7y ago
  Ah, I see. That makes sense. I see their willingness to accept artifacts of dubious provenance as part of an overall pattern of having things other than scholarship at the top of their agenda. But yes, I do think they'd prefer genuine artifacts when available -- even if that destroys provenance information. If they cared more about provenance, they'd be less likely to be duped, and it makes it hard for me to see them as purely a victim.
  - creddit 7y ago
    > If they cared more about provenance, they'd be less likely to be duped, and it makes it hard for me to see them as purely a victim. Fair point. I don't doubt their propensity to be duped is rather high due to self-imposed biases.
  - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    If scholarship was at the top of their agenda... they wouldn't be a Bible Museum. This Museum literally shows people how the Earth is 6,000 years old and people interacting with Dinosaurs. Edit: I mistakenly confused The Bible Museum and The Creation Museum. In my shame, I am committing to leave the original comment unedited, so that it can receive all the down voting it deserves.
    - jfengel 7y ago
      I think you're thinking of the Creation Museum, in Kentucky. That's a whole different travesty. The Museum of the Bible is located in Washington, DC, not far from the Smithsonian. On the surface it's a much less flashy and overtly religious institution. It presents the Bible as a piece of world history in an archeological context, supported by scholarship. It doesn't muck about with creationism. It's rather respectable. Underneath that are more subtle problems. It's funded by the same religious zealots who would not allow their employees' health care to cover birth control (and took it to the Supreme Court, where they won). There's a subtle underlying tone pushing American-style evangelical Protestantism -- one that could easily be overlooked, except that incidents like this one imply that there's an element of religious imperialism going on as well. So they are funding and supporting genuine scholarship, and are not at all obvious wackadoodles like the Creation Museum. But nonetheless scholarship may take a back seat to a religious agenda, one that has been a rather pernicious force in the US -- including leading to things like the Creation Museum.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. Suppose that actual genuineness is a lower priority than having something exciting to display while not getting caught with fakes. In that case a murky acquisition pipeline is still a benefit, in that the obscurity makes it harder to prove the fraud. This is of course a pretty common behavior in corporate America. Look at the number of executives during the financial crisis who suddenly went from, "We are financial geniuses, deserving of great power and greater compensation," to, "We were innocent victims who could not possibly have known what was going on in the companies we control utterly." Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures.
  - dmix 7y ago
    > Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures. Except that whole racket in your financial industry analogy depended entirely on a 3rd party (ie, a government packed with their buddies from private school) to tip the scales in their favour, on either end, for it to actually work. There's no third party being corrupted to give credibility to the museum here, they can't really just give credibility to themselves like that - just as the bankers couldn't bail themselves out, when they otherwise were faced with devastating and long-term financial consequences for their behaviour (ie, the appropriate response or natural outcome). A museums reputation matters and events like this directly affect it... which is why we have major news stories and Wikipedia articles about it. I don't think it's helpful to shame them for engaging with the scholarly community, or to shame them for attempting to be good merely because of past behaviour (which is far too common practice today on social media, as if people and organizations can't become better or more responsible, and are forever just evil like in movies). It sounds like the natural corrections processes were already working here... they got pressured from the sources of credibility (scholars, media, etc) which was influenced because of prior bad acts where they lost reputation already. If they attempted to corrupt those sources instead of engaging with them I'd be more concerned. But really there's not much here, especially given the negative spin in the article, which is what the OP was critiquing. The end result was bad-for-business PR and they probably paid millions for stuff they can't now use in their museum, sounds alright to me, things are working... I also doubt they'll be as trusting next time.
lowdose 7y ago
Genuine question, what is the overlap of archeology and biblical studies?