Peter Tompa on Unpopularity

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I wonder how much more pathetic the no-questions-asked collectors' lobby can become. Peter Tompa now notes:

Italy's continued success in gaining such returns of artifacts that are suspected of being stolen from archaeological sites again suggests that there is no need to continue the unpopular US State Department ban on the import of unprovenanced Italian artifacts.

"Unpopular" with whom? The lawyer should note that it is not the lack of provenance that is the issue in the MOUs, but the lack of documentation of legal export, a completely different thing. Surely the fact that so much stolen and illegally exported material is being found is all the more reason for the US to make sure it is not its citizens that are being stung by those who buy such material. Then with reference to his own brag that he has served" (sic) 50 000 readers, He then goes on to whinge:

Speaking about numbers and averages, I was a bit surprised to see that my blog thanking Cultural Property Observer readers for their 50,000 plus visits has apparently helped prompt Messrs. Gill and Barford to brag that their own blogs have more visitors [or was it just Gill's 3rd anniversary?]. Good for them, but to the extent anyone cares, one might consider the relationship between the number of "hits" and the number of posts. And let's not forget the role Prof. Gill's mysteriously funded PR Newswire releases must have in directing traffic to his own blog. I only wish I had the free time these two individuals apparently have to devote to blogging, and the funding for such an effort.

Well, to the same degree some of his 50 000 hits have been from from the author of and readers of this blog. When I discuss something that Peter Tompa says on his blog, I always give a link, directing traffic over there. When Tompa discusses something we say (the present post is a case in point), he seldom does. I personally have no problems with people reading Tompa's "observations" alongside mine and deciding for themselves who is writing crap, me or him. Mr Tompa demonstrably seems not to have such courage of conviction (this goes for Sayles and Welsh and the other ACCG hangers-on too and other artefact hunters and collectors who rarely link to this blog).
Mr Tompa, the collectors who do not want US customs stopping illegally exported antiquities from entering the US are a minority of the citizens of the US. I am sure most US citizens who are aware of the problem do not want their country to be the hub of the illegal antiquities market. That is why normal people read the SAFE blog and Looting Matters rather than the all-excuses (or "I'm-being-repressed/victimised" whingings) of the collectors' blogs. It is interesting to note that the naysayers are a minority among coin collectors too. There are allegedly 50 000 collectors of ancient coins in the USA (ACCG Executive Director Sayles' estimate), but the ACCG has only 5000 or so affiliated members, so that is about 10% of the collectors. Ninety percent of them do not belong to the ACCG, and if 45000 ancient coin collectors were to even once look at the Cultural Property Observer blog to see if it has anything of interest, Tompa's "hit" figures would almost double immediately.

The point is that the no-questions-asked market in antiquities is fighting a losing battle, everything shows that their position is becoming increasingly isolated from what is acceptable to the majority of the right-thinking members of the public, and the sooner they recognise this and take forward-looking active steps to clean up the market instead of resisting taking such steps, the better.

UPDATE: David Gill has developed this theme on his Looting Matters blog. In a post called 'Reflecting on Readership' he presents a histogram which shows the differences in readership through RSS subscriptions of various cultural property-related blogs in English (better resolution on the original site):

Looting Matters and SAFECorner lead by a good margin, and my blog has the longest name :>), but more interesting is that the coineyranters as a whole (Tompa, Sayles, Welsh, Lueke, De La Fe, McGarigle et al.) score particularly badly. There is a very clear pattern here. Nice to see the currently intellectually bankrupt PAS down the bottom there too. That's how it should be now they have been declared as being in "partnership" with the collectors.