The lecture is entitled "Who owns beauty?", an absolutely rhetorical and unanswerable question. Beauty undoubtedly belongs to no one, and the aim of the lecture will be to explore this question through the lens of objects - concrete, beautiful objects - that are part of the canon of beauty, and which in any case have the honor of being in museums. Who do these objects belong to? Do they belong to their place of origin, to their communities of origin? Do they belong to the enlightened Europe that appropriated them? What do they tell us about Europe? Should they be restored or not? These are extremely complex questions to which there are no clear-cut answers, but we can try to provide some nuanced answers.
Thanks to the development of digitalization and digitization techniques, it is now possible to create copies that conform to the original work. European museums could then return the works to their countries of origin, keeping only the copies, and explaining around them: "We had the original works, we returned them and we keep a digital trace of them". But there are those who, with a sorrowful spirit, consider that the copy is not the original work and that, in the end, this copy in this place makes the absence of the original even more glaring.