Stocks or Art?

Kersel’s essay proves what Aristotle knew to be the case in the 4th century b.c.e. and what we, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, have painfully relearned: the financial market, as a mechanism for producing profit, is ethically problematic. Her argument for the complicity of the market in the theft of artifacts offers a refinement and a confirmation of a broad, well-established, popular suspicion of the art market. In February, 2009, National Public Radio sponsored a debate entitled “On Ethics: Is the Art Market Worse Than the Stock Market?” Before the debate the live audience was almost equally divided among those in favor of the motion, those opposed, and those undecided. At the end of the debate, the majority had been persuaded that the art market was indeed less ethical than the stock market.—Archaeology, Bible, Politics, and the Media, page 84