Barron London is an antiques and jewelry business located in Mayfair, one of the London’s wealthiest neighborhoods. At first glance its storefront seems inconspicuous — walk past in a hurry and you are unlikely to notice anything at all. But behind this unassuming facade is a private showroom containing a jaw-dropping collection of precious jewels, antiques, and artifacts, many of which date back multiple millennia.

Barron is just one of London’s many dealerships catering to the booming market for rare artifacts and antiques. However, the gallery has found itself coming under scrutiny this month thanks to a pair of ancient Persian earrings loaned to the actress Zendaya for her appearance at the London premiere of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

According to their official listing, the earrings were originally discovered in 1946 near the Ziwiyeh Castle in northwestern Iran and are believed to date back to around 700 BCE. Given this unique provenance, historians have been quick to criticize Zendaya’s decision to wear the precious items on the red carpet. Many have also pointed out the particular irony of an American actress wearing precious items belonging to civilization that her country’s president — just months earlier — threatened to bomb into the Stone Age.

Of course, there is nothing new about the commodification of historical artifacts. Nor is Zendaya the only offender. On the same red carpet as Zendaya, costar Anne Hathaway was photographed wearing a diamond-encrusted watch constructed from an ancient Roman coin. Four months earlier, Margot Robbie attended the premiere of Wuthering Heights in Cartier’s Taj Mahal diamond necklace, which features a heart-shaped stone that belonged to the fourth Mughal emperor, Jahangir, during the seventeenth century.

Away from Hollywood, many other historical artifacts have also been repurposed as luxury commodities. Just down the road from Barron London, showrooms like the Charles Ede and Barakat galleries routinely acquire and sell textile fragments, carvings, sculptures, and architectural reliefs as decorative art objects to ultrawealthy customers looking to accumulate their own collections. Items currently being advertised online include an authentic Egyptian mummy mask that dates to 664 BCE, a Bronze Age idol that dates back to 2100 BCE, and a yet-untranslated cuneiform tablet that dates back to 2027 BCE.

To justify the removal of such artifacts from their cultural context, private galleries often employ a euphemistic language: ancient Persian statues or precious Indian jewels are not being taken from the public but rather “placed” in the secure hands of those best able to care for them. This is a smart defense strategy. But it does not change the fact that this process of “placing” these objects usually deposits them in luxury apartments where they can no longer be properly studied, maintained, or accessed by the inquisitive layman. Is it really better for precious items to sit alongside back issues of the New Yorker on the coffee tables of the ultrarich than to be kept in public institutions like the National Gallery?

Thanks to a booming antiques market led by a young generation of buyers who have recently inherited wealth, the undemocratic redistribution of ancient artifacts in favor of the wealthy has only intensified in recent years. Skyrocketing acquisitions prices are now making it almost impossible for publicly funded museums to stay competitive, particularly as such institutions undergo attacks on their funding and legitimacy. The result is that more and more items of scientific and historical importance are being lost to private collectors.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this trend is the sale of Gus the dinosaur. Gus is the name given to a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, first excavated in South Dakota in 2021. Judged to be the largest and most complete ever unearthed, Gus’s skeleton had been the subject of much paleontological research before he was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $50.1 million. Following the sale, Gus will no longer be part of any recognized museum collection, and as a result scientists will no longer have access to his skeleton — precluding the possibility of many valuable scientific discoveries. As for the public, the dinosaur’s remains will only ever be accessible to them if it is placed on loan to a public institution — a process which is precarious, temporary, and fraught with its own politics.

Under capitalism, it is clear that history, much like everything else, is up for sale — and without regulation, current trends threaten to return us to the eighteenth century, when such items could only be viewed within the private collections of the wealthy. It was in response to this undemocratic system that national museums were first established, positing the radical idea that heritage is the shared property of all people. Today, however, it seems that this vision has suffered at the hands of a more market-oriented understanding of what makes historical objects valuable.

Over the last fifteen years, museums across Europe and America have been the subject of bruising criticism. Many progressive academics have sought to emphasize the entanglement of these institutions with the violence of colonial extraction, and the ways in which such violence has been reproduced in harmful narratives about non-Western civilizations. These are certainly valid criticisms. However, the controversies surrounding the Ziwiyeh earrings or Gus the dinosaur point toward an even more sinister alternative. Indeed, the market for artifacts is rapidly converting historical objects into commodities to be displayed at the whim of the individual. This process represents its own form of extraction and, if left unchecked, will eventually separate the public from their own history. Within this new world there will be no debate about the rightful owners or historical artifacts, only the brutal law of the market that states that anything is fair game to the highest bidder.