A few posthumous items are coming out lately and the same comment keeps coming up: it's ok to have conflicting feelings.
We can acknowledge we'd like to respect the artist's wishes and yet, they are gone—and I think it's ok to delve into their hidden lives, as long as no-one living is going to be put to shame.
Another unworkable posthumous wish was Albert Barnes, who was a patron of many impressionist painters around the turn of the last century: Renoir, Matisse, Degas, etc.
He bought thousands of famous works and arranged them to his taste, tightly packed on the walls in a tiny building in Merion, PA, USA. The good news is the foundation could bring out now priceless masterworks on easels to compare close up for art classes--my grandmother attended one--a rare opportunity anywhere, and anyone could tour for free.
The bad news was his will stipulated the works needed to stay as he arranged them, in that building, where there was only room to display around a tenth of his collection; the place was cramped, difficult to view the works, difficult to secure them, and probably a fire hazard for the works and the visitors.
Ultimately, after much debate and lawyering, the collection was moved to a modern facility down the street from the PMA in Philly. The letter of his will was overridden, but the intent--clearly public access and education--was followed.
The documentary, "The Art of the Steal", which discusses the move of the art, did not portray the people behind the move in a very flattering light. My recollection is that some called it the biggest art heist of all time.
An "evil genie" type can find all kinds of loopholes in a wish. I'd disassemble the building, move the pieces of it inside a larger museum with better public access, and affix the old walls to "structural remediation", which is to say that the pieces of the old building would be held up with steel beams and cables instead of each other. The "storage facility" for the other 90% of the collection would--entirely coincidentally--be arranged nearly identically to traditional museum viewing galleries.
Then I'd tilt some of the works askew by a few degrees, just to irritate his ghost.
The Earth belongs to the living. I would support a new rule against perpetuities that would limit the control a dead person may exert over their legacy to no more than 20 years beyond their own death--to include copyrights and patents.
Wholeheartedly agree. Once you're dead, you're dead. One's last wishes should definitely be respected to the first degree. That is, whomever you will your money, possessions, or property to should get those things. There should not be any strings attached beyond that, to the extent that a living person could not tie those same strings (or choose later to untie them)
I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not sure. I imagine it would go to the state? Or you could specify the most extravagant funeral ever and be laid to rest in a diamond-encrusted gold coffin.
Property without heirs escheats to the state/crown. Wealth buried in your mausoleum goes to grave robbers, eventually.
You could pull a Goldfinger, and irradiate a bunch of gold bars, or otherwise render your wealth unvaluable or unspendable, but that just decreases the wealth supply and makes everything else in the economy a tiny fraction more valuable.
Even if you bought an extravagant Viking funeral, and burned your grave ship, and sank all your treasure to the bottom of the ocean, the world still turns without you. The value of money, goods, and services still depend mostly on the active participants in the economy. When you destroyed the representational tokens for the wealth in the economy that you controlled, their value was immediately redistributed to all the other tokens in existence, and those with the information about the destroyed tokens can theoretically earn arbitrage profit by spreading that information around.
The best you can do is to write a program that spends your estate after your death, give it to your lawyer to compile and execute on the legal mainframe, and hope no one can hack it before it accomplishes your intended goal.
> The best you can do is to write a program that spends your estate after your death, give it to your lawyer to compile and execute on the legal mainframe, and hope no one can hack it before it accomplishes your intended goal.
Definitely. I'm comfortable with this conflict. I don't believe in an afterlife so I know the artists don't actually care, it's more of a respecting the memory thing. I'm happy to finally be able to access these unearthed works, but part of me always silently apologizes first.
We can acknowledge we'd like to respect the artist's wishes and yet, they are gone—and I think it's ok to delve into their hidden lives, as long as no-one living is going to be put to shame.