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You may joke, but this is actually a very, very common issue collectors of historical documents face. Collectors of physical bond certificates also face this i

You may joke, but this is actually a very, very common issue collectors of historical documents face. Collectors of physical bond certificates also face this issue in the form of complete bonds being cut apart and the coupons being sold separately from the certificate itself. It's quite maddening, actually.

hnbad 4y ago
The sarcasm was that destroying a historical artefact "adds value", not that it is a common practice. Europeans literally used to cut up mummies and sell the fragments. But the only way it "adds value" is purely from the perspective of maximizing revenue, the same way scalpers "add value" by buying up products for cheap at the original price and then making a profit by charging more.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  Interestingly, Egyptian mummies resulted from a process whereby the enbalmers would take apart the human body from the inside out and preserve the organs separately, so in a way, the Europeans were merely continuing the process of "parting them out". As far as adding value, why not turn valuable works into NFTs by destroying them? https://culturacolectiva.com/art/frida-kahlo-artwork-burned-nft/ https://culturacolectiva.com/art/frida-kahlo-artwork-burned-...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- gjm11 4y ago
  I share your sense that there's something horrible about this. But I don't think it's necessarily true that the only way it adds value is "from the perspective of maximizing revenue". Suppose you've got a book with 200 pages and you can sell each page for $10k or the whole book for $1M. You get twice as much by selling individual pages and you are (hypothetically) a soulless money-grubbing philistine, so you slice it up and sell all the pages. Has anything been gained, other than extra money for you? Yes! 200 people now have a beautiful historic artefact that they value having enough to want to pay $10k for it. In the scenario where you don't play Lizzie Borden on the book, one person has the whole thing. But evidently the satisfaction they get from having it isn't 200x the satisfaction those 200 people each get, because if it were they'd have been willing to pay you $2M instead of $1M. Of course the paragraph above is the naive optimistic version. The cynical pessimistic version says that no one in the story actually cares about history or calligraphy or art or what have you, they just hope that in a few years someone else will be willing to pay more for the artefact they've got. (Maybe the very fact that the individual pages are worth more than the book composed of them is an argument against the cynical pessimistic version: if all that's going on here is a lot of soulless money-grubbing philistines trying to maximize their profits, then the price of the book should be at least the price of all its pages, because someone who owns the book always has the option of slicing it up, so apparently something else is going on here. But I fear a sufficient explanation is that everyone is a soulless money-grubbing philistine and the market isn't functioning efficiently.) [EDITED to add: Another bit of evidence that the relevant market, in this particular case and in the present day, isn't entirely composed of soulless money-grabbing philistine speculators: the story tells us that the person who bought it is not interested in selling it for $10k, because he loves having it, because it's beautiful and historic. Of course this doesn't tell us anything about whether when the book was sliced up for profit the market was entirely composed of s.m-g.p.s; maybe it was.]
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    I own a chunk of the Berlin Wall. If we had left it in one piece, imagine how much historical value it would have.
    - gjm11 4y ago
      I'm not sure how many levels of irony, if any, you're employing there, so here are my actual not-ironic opinions: If there were somewhere a museum large enough to contain it in one piece, that would actually have been pretty cool. Leaving it in one piece gumming up central Berlin, not so much. And of course there's some nice symbolism in the fact that it's all in bits.
      - GauntletWizard 4y ago
        Many levels of irony :) . Perhaps like the Great Wall it would have been better to run highways and tunnels through it but otherwise leave it intact[1]. There is in fact a gallery/museum with a large chunk of it, intact, including then-relevant murals painted just after the tearing down[2] - And that has immense cultural/historic value. It somewhat has the feel of a standard urban underpass, though. I don't think it's quite enough to capture the monstrosity of the wall. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badaling_Expressway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badaling_Expressway [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Gallery

hnbad 4y ago

The sarcasm was that destroying a historical artefact "adds value", not that it is a common practice. Europeans literally used to cut up mummies and sell the fragments. But the only way it "adds value" is purely from the perspective of maximizing revenue, the same way scalpers "add value" by buying up products for cheap at the original price and then making a profit by charging more.

Eleison23 4y ago
Interestingly, Egyptian mummies resulted from a process whereby the enbalmers would take apart the human body from the inside out and preserve the organs separately, so in a way, the Europeans were merely continuing the process of "parting them out". As far as adding value, why not turn valuable works into NFTs by destroying them? https://culturacolectiva.com/art/frida-kahlo-artwork-burned-nft/ https://culturacolectiva.com/art/frida-kahlo-artwork-burned-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gjm11 4y ago
I share your sense that there's something horrible about this. But I don't think it's necessarily true that the only way it adds value is "from the perspective of maximizing revenue". Suppose you've got a book with 200 pages and you can sell each page for $10k or the whole book for $1M. You get twice as much by selling individual pages and you are (hypothetically) a soulless money-grubbing philistine, so you slice it up and sell all the pages. Has anything been gained, other than extra money for you? Yes! 200 people now have a beautiful historic artefact that they value having enough to want to pay $10k for it. In the scenario where you don't play Lizzie Borden on the book, one person has the whole thing. But evidently the satisfaction they get from having it isn't 200x the satisfaction those 200 people each get, because if it were they'd have been willing to pay you $2M instead of $1M. Of course the paragraph above is the naive optimistic version. The cynical pessimistic version says that no one in the story actually cares about history or calligraphy or art or what have you, they just hope that in a few years someone else will be willing to pay more for the artefact they've got. (Maybe the very fact that the individual pages are worth more than the book composed of them is an argument against the cynical pessimistic version: if all that's going on here is a lot of soulless money-grubbing philistines trying to maximize their profits, then the price of the book should be at least the price of all its pages, because someone who owns the book always has the option of slicing it up, so apparently something else is going on here. But I fear a sufficient explanation is that everyone is a soulless money-grubbing philistine and the market isn't functioning efficiently.) [EDITED to add: Another bit of evidence that the relevant market, in this particular case and in the present day, isn't entirely composed of soulless money-grabbing philistine speculators: the story tells us that the person who bought it is not interested in selling it for $10k, because he loves having it, because it's beautiful and historic. Of course this doesn't tell us anything about whether when the book was sliced up for profit the market was entirely composed of s.m-g.p.s; maybe it was.]
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  I own a chunk of the Berlin Wall. If we had left it in one piece, imagine how much historical value it would have.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    I'm not sure how many levels of irony, if any, you're employing there, so here are my actual not-ironic opinions: If there were somewhere a museum large enough to contain it in one piece, that would actually have been pretty cool. Leaving it in one piece gumming up central Berlin, not so much. And of course there's some nice symbolism in the fact that it's all in bits.
    - GauntletWizard 4y ago
      Many levels of irony :) . Perhaps like the Great Wall it would have been better to run highways and tunnels through it but otherwise leave it intact[1]. There is in fact a gallery/museum with a large chunk of it, intact, including then-relevant murals painted just after the tearing down[2] - And that has immense cultural/historic value. It somewhat has the feel of a standard urban underpass, though. I don't think it's quite enough to capture the monstrosity of the wall. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badaling_Expressway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badaling_Expressway [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Gallery