I watched with amusement the way that the controversy over Beauty Gonzales’s jewelry at the GMA Ball unraveled, with the call-out coming from a member of the academe, Marian Pastor Roces, angry and seemingly shooting-from-the-hip, done via a Facebook status. On the one hand, understandable, if one were living in the bubble of one’s algorithm, where such righteous indignation would get the expected likes and shares and comments of support. On the other, a real missed opportunity to engage in what could be a teaching moment, on a public platform, where a call-out could be phrased in a way that is calm and collected, an opening to a discussion instead of a door slammed shut on one.

Were there less anger about the gold Beauty was wearing, we could’ve started a discussion about the manner in which artefacts from our dead are excavated and brought into private hands. How does that even happen? Is it always about greed outweighing respect for collective heritage? Is it greed and the wilful disregard of the law? Or could it be an utter lack of knowledge about what exactly to do with artefacts of our past?

This was of course layered with the non-discussion on those artefacts being ear and eye covers for the dead. But at a time when we have been culturally changed by six years of a leadership that thought nothing of dead bodies, at a present where everyone with a modicum of power (including those in the arts and culture and heritage sectors) can be seen “flaunting excess”, don’t we know of more grotesque — “odious” — things?

Someone tell this woman that the orifice covers she is paying “homage” to are grave robber stuff. Because if these were legally excavated, the pieces would belong to the National Museum or the Bangko Sentral.

Or: if the pieces were excavated decades ago and therefore privately owned by sensible collectors before current restrictions, the question still remains: why death masks as necklace?

Sure, the owners have been dead for a thousand years. BUT. This fashion victim is wearing mouth and eye covers: around 10 of them. Which is to say that the necklace was fashioned from excavations of many individuals. That is an astounding number of desecrated graves!

How on earth is this an homage, exhibiting impunity and crassness? Wearing archaeological gold death pieces, flaunting excess, is odious.

Ignorance (blended with arrogance) can’t possibly be fashionable.

GMA: shame on you. (Marian Pastor Roces, July 25 2023, 1:25PM, public Facebook post)

One acknowledges how easy is it to go ballistic about heritage gold being used to make a fashion statement. But imagining that there is only two ways this could go — legal and illegal, and either way Beauty is at fault — closes the discussion on the diverse possibilities for this narrative to have unfolded. In reality, there are whole communities that live with these artefacts, that live within “unofficial” i.e., undeclared heritage sites, and ultimately see these objects — gold, pottery, beads, etc. — as no more important or valuable than Beauty did. In this landscape, a source of livelihood for the community, could be a fashion statement for beauty. It is only “odious” when we presume her guilty, instead of trusting in her innocence.

The argument that this was disrespectful of the dead would’ve been made more complicated by the acknowledgment of this possibility: that this gold was not connected at all to legal vs illegal as imagined by Pastor Roces, but that it is a by-product of an informal, maybe underground, economy that has communities selling these artefacts. Sure, it may be seen as proof of a lack of cultural knowledge; but it’s entirely possible that it is, in fact, a matter of survival.  In which case, do we blame the ones who take this gold off their hands, i.e., whatever money brought Beauty that gold? Or do we blame the ones who sold them the gold to begin with? Or do we blame a system that is so flawed, so dysfunctional, that these heritage artefacts are seen as nothing more but objects to be sold?

That these questions can also be asked of other heritage and ancestral objects is just as important to highlight here. Because here’s the thing with calling out people for collecting these artefacts: you cannot decide that gold and jewels are a bad thing, but “other” artefacts like paintings and weaves and documents are fine. There is not a lot of grey areas here: it’s either you stand against the private ownership of historical artefacts and demand that these be returned to the public; or you agree that these artefacts — paintings and documents, gold and pottery, beads and textiles and weaves, etc etc — are better-off owned by private individuals who might care for them better. The former comes with demanding that government make archives and museums and libraries a priority; the latter encourages private ownership of objects of our history.

And this is where the call-out of Beauty and her gold becomes questionable. We are at a time when historians boost art auction sales by using their names to justify the private ownership of documents and paintings that should otherwise be in the public sphere. A time when people like Pastor Roces put their names on a creative industry law that is built on the premise that culture is solely about trade and industry, i.e., earning from culture, heritage, the arts. A time when culture and the arts have become nothing more but another kind of product, an object, an advocacy, that is used for nothing more but political mileage and cultural capital. I mean, aren’t these just as “odious”, just as “crass”?

This where the display of anger against Beauty was ultimately interesting: it reveals so much about the ones who were raising a fist and calling her out, as they sit on their high horses, looking down on the rest of us who didn’t think much of ostentatious display of jewelry at a ball, in the midst of an economic crisis. This high horse is important because at this point, an angry call-out from that position is primarily tone deaf. Anger is a bus that has long left the station, now only reconfigured into anger as articulated by people like Maharlika, or Darryl Yap, who have the (cultural) capital, a public, and the content to attack as they might, often with a dollop of good humour and tons of sarcasm. The May 2022 campaign should’ve taught us that the tone and tenor of self-righteous anger is wont to be dismissed as the holier-than-thou space that elitists take, the ones who look down on the masses, their pop culture, their politics, their choices.

As such, that Pastor Roces got backlash is expected. And sure she might not care for those comments sections, but it doesn’t bode well for academics and policy makers in culture, when what is a valid perspective on artefacts and heritage gets muddled in the anger and quick call-out. Closing a door on this discussion by saying that there is one person who holds the truth about it — and then utterly failing to flesh out that truth — is the worst we can do for culture, arts, and heritage. It means losing out on an audience that — regardless of what the elitists among us think — might in fact want to learn more about heritage and culture, artefacts and antiquities, and the histories and realities that are brought to bear on these.

But maybe the other reminder is that these lessons will not come from people like Pastor Roces. ***