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October 18, 2024 14 mins

Tracy shares her efforts to make sure the information included in our Unearthed! episodes is up to date. Talk also turns to the many works of art that have gone untracked in the world.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy d Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. This was Unearthed time. Sure was. Yeah. As
I was planning out the calendar of when to do

(00:23):
this normally, what I have started trying to do is
when the quarter ends, the first recording session we have
after the end of that quarter is when we record Unearthed.
That made the timing a little bit awkward because we
record the podcast in most cases on Tuesday, which meant

(00:43):
that the last day of the quarter was the day
prior to soa recording, which did not leave a lot
of time for the last two days of the months
to lock of stuff. It just feels like to me,
it winds up coming out way late in the month
if we don't schedule at that. And so this morning,
after I had already like, I had written the whole outline,

(01:04):
I had sent it to you, I had done all
of that, this morning, I was like, I should probably
make sure that nothing really monumental happened yesterday afternoon that
I need to wedge and hear. Nothing came up in
all of my various feeds that needed to be discussed
after having already written the episode ton Ton, Yeah, I

(01:27):
like that. There's always more voyage manuscript. Yes, I really
liked that there was voyage manuscript. That was Again, I
think this is the second time fairly recently that we've
had some kind of something that was not about someone's
attempted to code it. That was what was about, like
other stuff. Yeah, studying it in other ways, Yeah, because

(01:48):
there's other stuff that is that is great also to
just you know, learn about the actual document and the
actual object and all of that. Yeah, it's very cool.
I mean, you know, we're all fascinated with it. We'll
never stop being fascinated with it. We cannot help it.

(02:08):
I can't help it. I love it. Yeah, I still
want to make and have never done it, even though
I've threatened for years now to make a fabric print
using some of the imagery from it, because I think
it would be cool to make a dress. That would
be cool to make a dress. It'll happen. It just
might take a minute. Yeah, this might take a minute.

(02:28):
One of the things that kind of tickled me it
I was thinking about it when we were talking about
some of the art pieces that just kind of vanish
from the historical record. And you know, on Criminalia we
did a season of art heists, which we're in the
selves illuminating because we discovered in our research how often

(02:51):
it was super easy to just take something off a
wall and walk because the alarms didn't exist, or did
exist but weren't functioning and they hadn't fixed them, or
they worked just fine, and nobody regularly turns them on. Like,
there's so many instances of that. I think nowadays it's different,
but like in the throughout the twentieth century, shockingly late
in the game that was still happening. But also how often,

(03:15):
you know, we talk about art going missing in terms
of an art heist, but there are so many instances
historically where art didn't get stolen. It just kind of
like somebody dropped the ball in tracking it. And I
marvel at how many pieces are floating around in the
world that were like, we know, this guy painted more stuff, right,

(03:36):
Nobody seems to think it got stolen, but we don't
know where it is. Yeah, and there's also a lot
of art that like isn't by a famous artist, that's
passed down through you know, family collections. Folks might think
of it as you know, just a family heirloom or

(03:57):
just a painting that they heard that they're great great
parents bought when they were in Ireland or whatever, that
aren't necessarily something that someone would keep up with. And
especially as you know, over the last few decades, there
have been efforts to learn more about artists who were overlooked,

(04:18):
like women, artists who didn't necessarily make a huge name
for themselves. But somebody has realized, oh, this person's work
was actually really influential in their artistic community and we
didn't realize, and it becomes time to try to like
trace their surviving artwork. It's like, oh, we never catalog that. Yeah,

(04:39):
it was never in a catalog. It was never in
a museum. It was something that maybe, you know, the
artists sold to make enough money to buy their groceries
that week or whatever. I also just think, you know,
whatever art that you like, that's great. Yeah, for sure.
There's that art assessment valuation of art, which puts a

(05:01):
price tag on things, which is fine, I guess, but
like I'm with you, like it's to me, the greater
value is like someone's emotional response or attachment to a
piece of art. Which is hard to monetize, so I
understand why nobody's interested in it, but it does fascinate

(05:26):
me how much art has been sitting in places lost.
I mean, there's still art pieces, you know that we know,
for example, we're taken that haven't been recovered, and I
always wonder, like, in some cases they probably are gone forever, right,
they got trash, Like there's a Dolly that was on

(05:49):
Riker's Island and got stolen, and that probably got trashed
by the people that stole it. There are also cases where,
like I mean, if you think about why would you
steal art in the first place, it's presumably to sell it,
and that means they're private collectors that just want it.
They don't want anybody to know they have it, They
just want it. And I wonder how many things are

(06:11):
sitting in someone's private little gallery that we hope one
day are recovered so other people can see that beautiful art. Yeah.
I have not looked up the latest latest on the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. We have had some updates
about the case over the years. Yeah, but one of

(06:33):
the fears with that is that like at this point,
those artworks are just gone. We don't know for sure
that they're just gone, but like it is a possibility
that the works were stolen. People realized, oh, I can't
actually sell this because oops, there's a gigantic news story
about these missing paintings, right, and so then what happens? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(06:57):
wild wild. Every time we say anti Kittha, now I
think of Matts Michelson saying a Dikedeta, and I just
I'm in my own head at that. Yeah, I'm gone.

(07:18):
I'm on a lost little tangent where I'm just thinking
about Indiana Jones movies. Yeah. I can't remember if I
have talked about playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and every single
proper name that we've ever sad on the show is
pronounced much differently in that video game, because a lot

(07:40):
of it is like more of a a like a
Greek influenced pronunciation, right, And so when I was playing
that game, there would be times when I would just
my brain would kind of reset for a second because
I would hear a voice actor from the video game
say a name one hundred percent different than I, differently
than I have ever said it or heard it said,

(08:02):
which was always funny to me. I was particularly delighted
by the image of using a tennis ball on a
stick to apply a cleaning solution to a cannon. It's
pretty good. Tennis balls on sticks are very important. Yeah,
you can use them to train animals, you can use
them to you know, keep your walker from sticking on things,

(08:24):
and you can use them to clean cannons. I was
going to say, you can use them to give somebody
something to look at when they're recording on a green screen.
Also great, Also great mass of options for the tennis
balls on sticks out after the tennis falls on sticks
the unsung heroes of humanity. Yeah, yeah, I am not

(08:44):
completely sure if they figured out exactly what the mechanism
was on, like the prior chemicals that had been used
and the exact chemical composition of the cannon. There comes
a point in these Unearthed episodes were like, I have
to stop getting further detail or I will be out

(09:05):
of time. Right, And in this particular case, I had
a commitment that required me to leave my desk at
a specific time, so I did not have there was
no wiggle room to be like, oh, if I spend
half an hour extra trying to figure out some backstory
on this. I'll just work a little like, no, that

(09:27):
was not an option, maybe like stop reading about the
tennis ball, but it's so fun. And then my question
is like, how do you know there's nothing harmful in
the finish of the tennis ball? Yeah, I don't know
how that how that was arrived at as like the
best way to do it, I don't know anyway. As always,

(09:51):
I also have a gigantic list of things that were
maybe maybe we might talk about, but there was not
enough time for them. Coin hoards your favorite. Yeah, no,
no coin hoards. I did think of you recently when
I ran to London for a brief trip and we

(10:11):
went to the British Museum and there are lots of
coin hoard displays and yeah it's Tracy's nightmare. Yeah, no,
no coin hords. So some of the things that we
talked about are things that were auctioned. That was part
of what we discussed, But there were a lot of
reports were like the only thing that was really notable

(10:34):
was that this thing was being auctioned off. It wasn't
a thing that had been found unexpectedly or something. It
was like, this thing is up for auction, and I
did not find that as interesting as this thing was
found in someone's attic and then it was auctioned. A
couple of them were headlines about things that had been

(10:55):
discovered on Antique's road Show to be something notable, and
I originally had one on I think maybe the artwork list,
and then I sort of was like, this is really
the whole point of Antiques Road Show, though I only
watched that show typically if I am visiting my parents,

(11:17):
but like, that's sort of part of the whole idea
of antiques rayhow So, I also did not include any
of the Antique road Show headlines. I mean, it is
the idea, but how often do they actually find like
something real. We talked about one recently, right that was
like a missing painting by Richard Dad, Is that right?

(11:40):
But I mean I do think like it still has
merit because they don't often go, oh gosh, this is
a painting of a master that's been missing for two
hundred years. Yes. I also had two headlines that we
did not wind up talking about because there were people

(12:02):
who damaged things. One somebody who wet down some cave
art so that it would look better in a picture
they were taking, and the other somebody who carved his
initials into a wall at POMPEII, And I would just
like to say, please don't do that. Please do not

(12:23):
wet down cave art, Please do not, please do not
deface things. I know there's plenty of graffiti already at
POMPEII that is from hundreds or thousands of years ago.
We do need to add additional to that. It's weird, right,
there's that strange impulsive thing that people just step outside
of like context and think, uh huh, I want to

(12:45):
do this thing. I'm going to do this. They're not
even thinking it, they're just doing it. It's bypassing any
kind of like reasoning going on in their prefrontal cortex.
They're just it's like their hand is reaching out and
they're already doing it. And I wish there were a
way to stop that. That did also happen with a
child in one of the like an actual small child

(13:07):
who knocked over something. Prefrontal cortex not done yet, not
still cooking like a small child. So anyway, if you're
an adult person, just so you don't don't deface the artwork,
don't knock down, don't knock down cool rock formations like
just don't just don't do any of that. Don't eat
bog butter, don't eat the bog butter unless you're a

(13:31):
trained scientist who presumably has help standing by in case
something goes awry and hopefully access to good medical care
in case there's some microbes in there that are a problem. Yeah.
I mean, the whole point is the bog helps preserve
the butter. But still, that's a long time. So anyway,
whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it's a lot

(13:54):
of fun. Maybe you've got some cool museum stuff on
your radar. Whatever it is, I hope it's it's great.
We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow, and
we will be back with something brand new on Monday.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(14:15):
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Tracy V. Wilson

Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

Holly Frey

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