If I had 4.2 million euros I wouldn’t spend it on a fuck ugly mask.
Yeah but that 4.2 million is spare change for them. It’s not like they spent every penny they had on it.
If I had 100s of millions I’d definitely be buying shit like this for fun.
I still wouldn’t. You could get a replica of it for a few thousand dollars if you really wanted one in your home. 4.2 million is like what, 100 or so average earnings of people in Europe for a year? You could just go up to a 100 people and buy a year of their time.
It’s not like you can take their time and add it to yours. Mask plz.
You could hire out like four human sized chess boards and pretty good players to play against each other for 8 hours a day mon-friday, for about 11 months. Record every single match and put it on YouTube. A thousand years from now people will still occasionally write click bait about that insanity. TIL someone ran four human pieces chess games at a time for almost a year and recorded it all.
You my friend, have some interesting ideas 🤣.
Yeah but I suck at chess
Gimme da masssssk
In the US, the couple would be told to kick sand. Same for the people of Gabon unless it could be shown it was stolen and not freely given away or sold.
Is france different about purchasing things second hand?
The buyer was a professional, and was by law required to give the seller all information they had at their disposal. If they can’t prove they didn’t know the real value of the mask, they will have to either restitute the mask to the seller or give them a significant share of the final auction price.
It wasn’t an art dealer or antiques dealer, though. It was a guy who had a 2nd hand store. There’s no reason to think he was any sort of professional in 150 year old masks that barely a dozen exist of.
The habit of colonizing is hard to break.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But campaigners insist that the rare artefact instead should be returned to Gabon, in a case that has raised questions over Africa’s cultural heritage looted by colonial France.
The unnamed couple, 88 and 81, who live in Eure-et-Loir, south-west of Paris, had decided to sell their holiday home in Gard, southern France, but needed to clear out bric-a-brac from the attic.
They contacted a secondhand goods trader who bought several objects including the wooden sculpted mask, which had been gathering dust in the loft.
The auction catalogue explained how the mask had been obtained by the man’s relative, “collected around 1917, in unknown circumstances by the French colonial governor René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier (1873-1931), probably during a tour in Gabon”.
A court in Alès on Tuesday heard the case of the retired couple, whose lawyers argued that they should rightfully receive the profits from the auction after handing over the mask to the bric-a-brac dealer for the unfair price of €150.
“One has to be in good faith and honest; my clients would never have given up this mask at that price if they knew it was an extremely rare object,” their lawyer, Frédéric Mansat Jaffré, told French media this month.
The original article contains 678 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Maybe I’ve just seen too many episodes of “Antiques Roadshow”, but you’d have to be pretty dumb to offload anything like this without going through an authentication process first.
Sounds like the shop owner did his due dilligence. The couple did not.
