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This is a museum, not a Goodwill

34 Precious Items and Priceless Artifacts Someone Treated Like Thrift-Store Detritus

March 25, 2024

If you’re being trusted with a priceless historical musical instrument, the least you can do is not smash it to pieces.

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Smoking weed older than Jesus At the peak of the cool and disrespectful crossroad is the following conundrum: You get your hands on some 2,700-years-old Chinese kush. What do you do? Do you preserve it under high-tech conditions in a museum or lab, or do you blast some early Black Sabbath and just chill on the couch? Yes,the song would be Fairies Wear Boots. CRACKED.COM — Source

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The Louvre

Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts DAVID CANTES The other, secret Louvres The Louvre being such a respected, classy, high-end museum, even its leftovers stash must be cool, right? In fact, the stuff they don't consider worthy of showing is in underground storage all over Paris. It looks like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but with masterpieces. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts The ancient city of Babylon (brought to you by Saddam Hussein). Hussein restricted access to Babylon for 30 years to rebuild it in his own image. Now, Hussein was not cool. What is (ironically) cool is destroying a 4,000-year-old city by cheaply building everything back with messages saying how awesome and non-narcissistic you are. Kanye and Elon wish they had this level of unearned entitlement. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts 28 30 29 n 37 30 K de 22 Trying to clone a Stone Age puppy Out of the Russian permafrost sounds like the premise for a horror movie, but they actually found a cute Stone Age puppy. South Korean scientists want to clone the 12,400-year- old good little boy, along with wooly mammoths and cave lions. Yeah, science is cool, but this is also disrespectful because these people learned nothing from Jurassic Park. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Landmarks

Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Skateboarding over the Great Wall of China The Great Wall is really old, so it has been really really neglected. But cool disrespect got truly post-modern in 2005, when Danny Way became the first person to jump it on a skateboard. Did China condemn such Western decadence? Nope, they televised it, and the Ministry of Culture gave him an actual chunk of the wall. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Monkey Jesus Around 1930, Spanish artist Elías García Martínez painted the unremarkable Jesus portrait Ecce Homo. In 2012, untrained amateur artist Cecilia Giménez just said to herself, Sure, I can restore it, how hard can it be? Such childlike obliviousness gave US the artistic monstrosity our godforsaken age deserves. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Partying at Stonehenge Surely Stonehenge has always been treated with solemn respect, right? Ifrespect means late-night drug-fueled orgies, then yes. Alright, we might be exaggerating, but the site only went to the British government in the 20th century. When you have centuries of crowds bringing music and food, you know there were also drugs and orgies. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Shakespeare

Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Hate for tourists beats love for Shakespeare Reverend Francis Gastrell purchased Shakespeare's final home in 1753, but there was one problem: friggin' tourists. So he went and cut down the large mulberry tree Shakespeare himself planted and loved. Then he escaped the angry townsfolk, but as he was still forced to pay taxes, he went full Joker and burned the place to the CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Stealing dead musicians' teeth In 2012, weirdo Ondrej Jajcaj Jr. bragged on YouTube about desecrating graves for the teeth of decomposing bodies in Vienna's ancient cemeteries. In particular, he had stolen composers Johannes Brahms and Johann Strauss ll's, erm, teeth. The cool part here is that Brahms and Strauss rock, while the disrespectful and lame part is Jajcaj's attempt at edginess. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Memes out of poor Pompeii man Today, Pompeii is solemnly remembered as a symbol of man's hubris over natu-just kidding, it's all about dank memes. One particular Pompeiian man briefly became a memetic icon for the giant boulder right on his head. Archaeologists are still debating whether the Road Runner mocked him and ran off leaving a dust trail. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Troy

Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Blowing up Troy Bombs are cool, the remains of the ancient city of Troy must also be cool, but they are not cool when put together. 19th-century grifter archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann found nine ancient cities in 1873, all layered on top of each other. Не then blew them up one by one to get to Troy-b but blew up the actual city. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Using a mummy's hand as a sci-fi prop In 2013, customs officials at the Los Angeles International Airport found a very realistic prop in a batch of old sci-fi props coming from France. It turned out to be the hand of a 3,000-year-old mummy. The smugglers were arrested, and the hand was returned to Egypt (sadly, with no involvement of Brendan Fraser). CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Coolest bathroom decoration ever After Leonardo's death, the Mona Lisa was acquired by his benefactor, King Francis I. The French king hung it in his bathroom at the Fontainebleau palace, where it stayed for a bit until the French court was moved to Versailles. Of course, bathrooms were way different, bigger, and classier if you were a French royal. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Playing soccer with Jeremy Bentham's head The Enlightenment philosopher came up with Utilitarianism, the panopticon, and having his taxidermied corpse on display at a local university. Eventually, though, his head looked too Freddy Krueger-ish to display, so it was substituted with a wax replica. The original head became a prop, getting stolen by a rival college and kicked around in matches. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Disrespectful uses of priceless artifacts Kurt Russell smashed a unique guitar on camera. The Martin Guitar Museum thought they could trust Quentin Tarantino with a priceless guitar from the 1870s for The Hateful Eight. But then a series of wacky misunderstandings ensued, and Russell ended up destroying it on camera. Jennifer Jason Leigh's reaction in the scene? That's real. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2012, an Australian art gallery visitor couldn't resist planting a big kiss on a sculpture's butt. The statue of Narcissus was sculpted in the 19th century, before Australia was even a country, and this was its fate. CRACKED.COM — Source

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The developers of the cryptocurrency Ether tried to protect it from mass-scale theft with a patch. But the patch was buggy, and in 2017, one developer accidentally used it to give themselves control of every Ether wallet, worth $300 million in total. Panicking, they tried to delete the code that led to this, but that just permanently locked the wallets, and the money was lost forever. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2012, Russian tycoon Dmitry Stroskin ordered an outhouse on the estate of his French chateau demolished while he was in Russia. When he came back, everything except the outhouse was demolished, and the villagers living nearby were livid. Stroskin committed to rebuilding the chateau, but the authorities clamped down on him so hard, he wound up with a fine and suspended jail sentence for using the wrong insecticide. CRACKED.COM — Source

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When a da Vinci sketch was found in 1998 among drawings by Italian artist Stefano della Bella, restorers got to work on it. (A portrait of da Vinci, not the sketch) They screwed up spectacularly, by dropping it into an alcohol and water solution that erased da Vinci's fine vegetable-based inks. They didn't even bother to test the technique on a small area, as is standard protocol. All that art historians were left with is the hope that one day, high-tech methods can bring back the sketch. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2013, when a Belizean construction company needed limestone to build a road, they helped themselves to a nearby Mayan temple. CAT Archaeologists saved a few artifacts, but the 2,300-year-old structure was demolished. A prominent Belizean archaeologist said that hearing about it was like being punched in the stomach. The company's fine? All of $24,000. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2012, seven paintings by artists like Picasso, Monet, and Matisse were stolen from a Rotterdam gallery. Some of the stolen paintings The thieves couldn't find a buyer, so their leader gave them to his mom, who buried them in a cemetery near where she lived. When the cops started getting close, she dug them up so she could burn them in her oven. She later claimed she didn't burn them after all, but 19th-century paint pigments were found in the oven, making it a pretty open-and-shut case. CRACKED.COM — Source

13

In the 18th century, Shakespeare's last home drew hordes of tourists, driving its owner crazy. مع A 1737 sketch of the house One of the biggest attractions was a mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare himself, and the owner, Francis Gastrell, chopped it up and used it for firewood. The townspeople chased him out of town for that, but demanded he keep paying taxes on the house. Out of spite, Gastrell razed the house to the ground. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2019, a priest from the Basque town of Estella asked a local arts and crafts teacher to restore a 500-year-old wooden carving. It sounds like a sitcom setup, and it led to a sitcom result: the carving became a spaced-out cartoon character. The Spanish Conservationists and Restorers Association was furious, and urged the courts to prosecute this as a crime for damage against objects of cultural and historical value. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Brimham Rocks

Yorkshire's Brimham Rocks formed over 320 million years. Before After Until 2019, when some teenagers goofing off ended up pushing one of the boulders over a cliff, smashing it to pieces. Professionals were sent to see if the damage could be repaired, but it's kind of hard to patch up something 320 million years in the making. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Churchill hated his official 80th birthday portrait because it showed him as he was (not as he wanted to be), and he kept it in his cellar. Soon after Churchill died, his widow had her secretary's brother take it to his house and burn it in his backyard. So the only image of Churchill as a man, not a myth, painted by Britain's official WWII artist (yup, that was his title), perished in a backyard fire. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2013, when contractors at the Indian Museum in Kolkata broke a priceless lion sculpture from 250 В.С., the museum kind of just shrugged. They tried to put it back together using chains and pulleys, instead of modern equipment (which was how it got broken in the first place), leaving visible cracks. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2010, an adult and a minor went paintballing on a sacred Native American site. Paintball splatter Petroglyph They splattered paint all over the site's petroglyphs (designs on rock faces), ruining a total of 38 areas. In his defense, the adult tried to claim that he thought rain would wash away the paint. It would, if he had bought biodegradable paint rather than the cheap stuff. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2002, the TSA decided that famous Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman's custom Steinway grand piano was probably a bomb, because its glue smelled like a bomb to them. So they promptly demolished it. Zimerman then shipped his pianos in parts whenever he toured the U.S., but tried shipping a whole one in 2006-the TSA held it for five days, ruining his tour schedule. All that turned Zimerman into a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy, and he now refuses to play in the U.S. CRACKED.COM — Source

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At the Milan city council's 2013 Christmas party, one guest got kind of careless. Roberto Cassago Opening a wine bottle, council official Roberto Cassago aimed it at pretty much the worst possible spot - an 18th-century painting. The cork ripped an inch-wide hole in the canvas. Before experts could get their hands on the painting, the hole was covered with tape- an idea that sprang from the same level of judgment Cassago showed. CRACKED.COM — Source

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A selfie attempt ruined two Portuguese national monuments. MAJOS In 2016, a man climbed up on the 126-year-old statue of King Sebastian at the entrance to Lisbon's Rossio train station (itself a historical landmark) to take a selfie. The statue fell apart under the weight and crashed to the floor. Не ran, but got quickly caught by the police. No word on if the selfie was worth it. CRACKED.COM — Source

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Museum Mishaps

In 2014, a French museum guard who needed a break sat down on a nearby folding chair. It was a 200-year-old chair used by Napoleon himself. Was, because the guard broke the leather by sitting down. Although the chair was later restored, the guard got a disciplinary hearing (during which he was told very carefully where to sit, presumably). CRACKED.COM — Source

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For 300 years, the Tree of Tenere was the world's most isolated tree, with 250 miles of unbroken desert around it in every direction. It even appeared on military maps at 1:4,000,000 scale, and locals had a taboo against harming it. And even though it was the easiest object on the planet to avoid, it got hit by trucks at least twice. The last hit, in 1973, killed the tree. CRACKED.COM — Source

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In 2015, a Taipei exhibition of super-valuable artwork let visitors get very close to the art. The hole At one point, a wandering kid slipped, fell, and caught himself on the closest object - a $1.5 million painting, which his fist promptly tore a hole in. When the curator heard, he couldn't speak for a few minutes. After that, the exhibition didn't let anyone get close anymore. CRACKED.COM — Source

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War photographer Robert Сара was with the U.S. troops on D-Day, and took 106 up-close pictures of the battle. Не handed the negatives to Life magazine, where an overeager 15-year-old assistant turned the heat up way too high while developing them, destroying 95. The heat gave the 11 surviving photos a blurry, haunting quality that helped make them memorable, so ... at least there was that? CRACKED.COM — Source

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