Collectors' Rights and Ancient Art

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"First she crushes the glass with a meat axe. Then she penetrates the canvas with a sharp object. First a short slash, then long slashes placed with extreme precision. This new artistic strategy is a settlement of accounts with the tradition that has dominated painting since the Renaissance, in which illusion or trompe l'oeil is used to create spatiality. Mary Richardson does not wish to paint the illusion of space but to create real spaces. By shattering its framework she has given painting a third dimension".

Further to my comments on Ai Weiwei's "artistic" vandalism of ancient artefacts, Peter Tompa disapproves my expression of my opinion ("Archaeoblogger Paul Barford has now become an art critic"). Tompa seems to see this vandalism of ancient artefacts as part of "a long artistic tradition of transforming the old into the new", and apparently disapproves that "Barford will have no part of it".

How oddly this sits with the coiney mantras that if they did not buy dugup coins no-questions-asked, they'd all be melted down into tourist trinkets. Is that not "transforming the old into new"? How about heavily tooled coins, collectors are very disapproving of this, but again, its "transforming the old into new". Perhaps we could see some 'hobo-denarii' moder coin-toolers carving imperial portraits into amusing caricatures - "transforming the old into new" (like putting a fez-like hat on an emperor on a contextless coin). Then there is the wearable ancient coin jewellery ( "transforming the old into new" - there is an ACCG board member who has a family business doing just that). What about an Authentic Third Intermediate Period Mummy cases turned into drink cabinets for a Beverly Hills mansion ("transforming the old into new"), or the lopped off foot of a mummified human cadaver from an Egyptian tomb transformed into scary something to frighten the neighbour's kids with?

Then there's transforming a Roman cameo glass vase into a pile of glass sherds, but the British Museum did not see this as an artistic act and reconstructed the Portland Vase. Michaelangelo's Pieta has its nose back after an artist hammered it off, those Papal stiffs at the Vatican simply do not respect artistic expression. The Rokeby Venus has had the transformative slashing repaired - obscuring the artistic expression of suffragette Mary Richardson . More recently Rembrandt's "Night Watch" has had traces of attempts to artistically "transform old into new", once by slashing with a bread knife, a second time by spraying with acid, removed. Then there was the simultaneous slashing and acid attack on another Rembrandt, his Danae, a foiled attempt at transforming the "old into a new". Or if we are talking of 'ready mades', we could dwell on what happened to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which perhaps Tompa would prefer to remain as seen in Nimes in 1993 after an act of expression involving the item's original function? Tompa thinks this sort of thing is not vandalism but "art". Most museum curators tend to disagree with this "collectors' rights" advocate on that point, as do I.

I thought collectors prided themselves with being mere custodians, looking after the past, stewards? That by collecting them they are "protecting" the objects? Is that not what they say? And yet "collector's rights" activist Tompa considers the smashing and defacing of artefacts merely as part of "a long artistic tradition of transforming the old into the new".

Tompa asks (I think he means it to be rhetorical):

isn't Ai Weiwei's transformation of the old artifacts in some ways better than letting such common artifacts gradually turn to dust in some forgotten storage facility?

He asserts that pottery "in the supposed care of the archaeological community" in excavation archives and museum storerooms "turns to dust" anyway, so better let Ai Weiwei have it to create "art" with. Tompa seems unaware that thermally fused silicate material such as ceramic is extraordinarily stable in normal (and even abnormal) storage conditions. Not only is it not turning into dust, but very little material in the care of the museum community will be getting dunked in brightly coloured enamel paint, or ground up into dust packed into IKEA jars just for the shock value of it. But of course we can assume that Ai Weiwei did not obtain these pots on loan from a state museum, instead we assume he'd have bought them on the antiquities market and presumably therefore they come from the looting of archaeological sites (the complete pots coming probably from cemeteries and tombs). It is notable that US antiquity collector Tompa has absolutely no qualms about this "property" from the antiquities market being treated by its "owner" in this way, after all, he says these are "such common artifacts" which presumably means that it simply does not matter.

So not only do I find myself in disagreement with dugup collectors about what is "ancient art" but now what is "art" generally in a modern context (or is this Tompaism more related to the post-modernist excesses we see expressed in other areas of coineydom?) .

Photo: The Rokeby Venus' back "transformed into something new". I am not as sophisticated an art critic as Peter Tompa and his Washington socialite buddies, it is true, but to me this is not the right way to treat a precious survival from the past.