The article isn’t really about how museum items go missing - There’s only a brief mention of one curator who stole objects. That anecdote is used as a bridge to the author’s real motivation, which is arguing that museums shouldn’t hold items from other countries or cultures or locations. It’s a concept similar to “cultural appropriation” applied to the existence of museums based on their location.

The author thinks the story of a single museum staff thief undermines the entire concept of museums holding items from other countries or cultures:

> The irony here is palpable: An institution infamous for displaying looted colonial artifacts had objects stolen by a staff member.

> One of the principal justifications museums often give for denying the restitution and repatriation of cultural objects is the purported need to safeguard the material within the institutions. The recent thefts contradict this argument

I have some friends with history degrees who have spent their careers in museums and museum curation. There is a lot of consensus that museum items with obvious history such as art stolen by Nazis should be returned to right those historical wrongs. That’s not a hard argument to make.

However, some people take the argument much further like this author hints at, believing that museums need to return everything that doesn’t match the historic and cultural heritage of their location. The only items allowed to remain would be perfectly documented acquisitions that nobody could find issue with.

So dismantle the Louvre and other museums and send everything back to countries it came from, preferring to right some historical injustice over preserving history in a museum. If someone wants to see the history of that country, they’d have to go there themselves and travel to each museum (assuming it exists).

It’s not a realistic goal, which has created a stalemate where the proponents of this idea are more about discussing these injustices and making them the central issue of museums, often equating high profile cases like art stolen by Nazis as morally equivalent to a display of 1000 year old pottery fragments. It’s tiring and detracts from the real work that museum staff do.