A Communication Gap?

.

Over on her Culture Property Law blog, Kimberly Alderman reflects on "the repatriation debates" in the post Who’s On First? The Communication Gap in the Transparency Discussion. She mentions Barford’s “More Conspiracy Theory: Gill and the Medici Files” (contrasting it with Derek Fincham's "well-tempered one"), as an example of an ("interesting" sic) reaction to what she refers to as "the sharpness of Pearlstein’s comments" in an earlier post (Is Italy asking too much...?) on her own blog. Well, that is not actually so, my post is about coiney ANS staff member Rick Witschonke hounding David Gill about why he (Swansea University researcher David Gill) does not publish the photographic evidence being used in ongoing investigations by the Italian authorities.

In reality there is no "dissatisfaction expressed" in my "responses to Pearlstein’s comments" (Ms Alderman misses one). As I said, I'd like to see more than just Mr Medici's business records available for scrutiny, but recognise that there are good (including legal) reasons why this dream will be unfulfilled for a while.

I think Ms Alderman is getting confused between repatriation issues in general (see her own Ethical Issues in Cultural Property Law Pertaining to Indigenous Peoples discussing that wider issue) and investigations of recently looted and illegally exported material. The issues arising from the Medici case are a different kettle of fish from the Parthenon marbles, the Rosetta Stone or the Koh-i-Nor, or human remains/sacred objects in ethnographic/anthropology collections. This seems to me to be a potentially confusing imprecision of terminology in the "heritage debate" that needs sorting out.

Finally Ms Alderman notes that "The simple fact is that in a capitalistic system, it is unreasonable to expect a business to cater to highly variable moral values". This is actually not true, we do it all the time when environmental issues are involved. BP needed no US court case to begin financing the coastal cleanup in the Gulf of Oilslick for example. A lot of developer-funded archaeology in the UK (among other places) is based precisely on the same "polluter pays" premise which is not backed up by any useful laws.

Yesterday I was talking to a senior lawyer connected with the state sector of the fuel business and whose professional interests lie in the environmental issues. I told her about the Christie's sale which was going on "at this precise moment in New York". She looked at me uncomprehendingly as explained why the objects were not withdrawn from the sale and simply asked "but why are Christie's not afraid that this will damage the reputation of their firm?". I really had no answer to that, except that this is "the way the antiquities trade is" and that it obviously does not bother the clients of these dealers.

Yes, Ms Alderman, there are legal issues and ethical issues, two quite different things. But the ethical ones are the ones the public sees and judges, and it would be a foolhardy businessman who would ignore that and the power of the media in guiding public opinion. Hence we see the collecting lobby (in the UK aided and abetted by the PAS) courting the media with rosy views of how socially "beneficial" artefact collecting is and the attempts to convince anyone who will listen that anyone who says otherwise is a"liar" (like here and here for example). It is public opinion that guides what laws are made and upheld in future.

UPDATE: Kimberly Alderman subsequently edited her original post to take into account the above comments, which therefore refer to what I read originally.