Mihaela Iacob

Public Cultural Heritage and Private Property Rights: Building Sustainable Community Through Individuality

Material and immaterial culture and both economy and economics are part of one and only reality, contrary to views placing the “priceless” things out of the scope of mundane calculi. What keeps together any community are not only the aesthetic joys or sober rituals, but productive relations within the framework of cooperative division of labour, for culture is not floating into nothingness, but overwrites the material world of scarce resources which is either governed by a critical infrastructure of property rights or gets ungovernable at all. In order to culturally thrive, communities are obliged to discover those very institutions responsible for peace and prosperity which culture (in the “anthropological” sense) prepares, following epoques of social selection, and on which culture (in the “artefactual” sense) roots its desired sustainability. Our thesis, all the more acute in a post-socialist society, is that private property rights link individuals in communities, by giving them sound incentives, information and instruments to create, share and bequeath tangible and intangible culture, that is the offshoot of the freedom of expression, of the freedom to produce and of the freedom to trade.

Cultural heritage markets: are traders traitors? Winners and losers from cross-border shifts of historical artefacts

Abstract The concept of cultural heritage covers the tangible and intangible things bequeathed from the past generations along with a spiritual signification, beyond any other serviceableness. Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and aesthetes are the critical reviewers of the field, while legalists and economists contribute with their own concerns: regulation and evaluation. Be it of tangible nature – i.e., buildings, sites, paintings, sculptures or various other artefacts – or of an intangible one – i.e., traditions, practices, beliefs, literary or musical compositions –, the cultural heritage has challenged the economists urging them to offer sophisticated tools to assess its value, to make cost-benefit analyses with respect to its preservation, restoration or reuse. The supporters of regulation in the cultural goods market justify it through the fact that the market cannot provide in an efficient manner this type of goods, the solution being national government intervention – i.e., for the regulation and finance of cultural/heritage goods – or even international government regulation, in cases when national states’ failure is encountered. A widespread opinion is that heritage is communal, par excellence, this view implicitly adjusting the acceptation that private property has in the cultural realm. The present paper addresses the reality and the necessity of ownership and movement of heritage goods especially in the international markets, considered as a dangerous vacuum for national cultural treasuries.