> Many of the historic aquisitions by "collectors" were as sketchy AF in the context of the times.

This is the slippery slope that makes most of these cases hard to take seriously. Aside from obvious cases of wartime looting, a lot of the objections are just that the legal approval at the time doesn’t meet modern standards imposed anachronistically on history, or more frequently that the provenance just isn’t known to the degree expected by modern standards.

Some people, like the author of this article, want us to think that everything should be returned unless it’s perfectly documented without any possible objections. Scrap the Louvre and send all those pottery scraps and fragments back to the country they came from because we can’t be perfectly sure it’s all perfectly handled under modern standards that weren’t the historical norm.

It’s tiring. Aside from obvious cases of theft like the Benin Bronzes, the blanket argument that museums shouldn’t be allowed to hold artifacts from other locations and cultures without perfect documentation isn’t really practical.