The False gods of the Antiquitists

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Collector Kyri criticises me for using, in my blog post  "New York Times on Mongrel Artefacts", the term "mongrel" of artefacts with no proper pedigree ("I hate these labels of orphan, toxic or mongrel, when talking about ancient works of art") but surely that is exactly what we are dealing with. Like dogs, racehorses and members of the British aristocracy, an object without any kind of proper pedigree certainly differs in today's antiquity market from one that has a verifiable kosher collecting history. he continues:

As for the antiquities themselves, well, here is a nice quote: "our museums are full of objects that speak for themselves, to the public and to scholars, without knowledge of their full, or even any provenance. To claim an object without context is worthless is pure nonsense." Sir John Boardman*, now who are we, mere mortals to argue with a demi-god like Boardman?

Hmm, but if you read the quoted fragment in the context of the rest of the text you see that the "knowledge" of which Boardman speaks is knowledge about the object, based on how it looks, and building on 'non-source-based knowledge' (as the Polish theoretician of historical sources Jerzy Topolski has it). I am not sure which arguments he is referring to when he says people claim that a Greek vase is actually (rather than metaphorically) "worthless" because it has no collecting history. It seems to me that this argument may be changed by the factors discussed in my post, that an object might be intrinsically "worth" something as an antiquity, but conditions on the market are perhaps changing so the people who have so carelessly bought them will soon be faced with a situation caused by changes in public attitudes where they cannot get rid of them of they have no documentation showing them to be untainted (I think that is the work Kyri was looking for instead of "toxic").

On the contrary, I think some museums contain objects which are in themselves not terribly "informative" unless you know you are looking at Gandhi's glasses and food bowl, Washington's walking stick, or Nelson's perforated uniform. In May I was in Berlin and what was intended to be a brief visit just to see the Libeskind building of the Jewish Museum there was prolonged due to the nature of the exhibition. First of all the number of "objects" needed to tell ("experience") the story was in fact minimal. The section "Paths of German Jews: The Underground Axes" made a great impression on all of us, each showcase contained a single object, wholly mundane, a teacup, a candlestick - but what made them so arresting was the detailed story attached to them.

In this museum, a German teacup of the Interwar period such as can be picked up on any fleamarket is a valid museum object BECAUSE OF the context, and that context can only come from knowing where that particular items came from. And how many stories have been lost by all the fleamarket teacups that are sold anonymously? Yes, by collecting old porcelain, we can see what an early twentieth century teacup looks like, see what kind of flowers painted on the side some housewife found attractive. That is only superficial "knowledge", but that information from "acute analysis of form and content of figure work, such as is commonly practiced on collection and museum objects" tells us nothing about those tastes in space and time and social context unless we know more details than "surfaced in a Wrocław in January 2011".

Boardman may be a demi-god to collectors and vase afficionados, though I doubt whether such a broad (and yet at the same time narrow) generalization really can stand, even if we focus attention on "objects d'art". When however we see dugups as archaeological source material, and especially when we extend that view beyond addressed sources (those that were created specifically to impart information, for example by putting pictures and writing on them), the glib statement quoted above ceases to have any broader sense or application.  

And even if it did, would it diminish the artistic, aesthetic, emotional - or whatever - values of an object treated as a "work of ancient art" if we had fuller information about its collecting history and source? I think many collectors would argue that this is NOT the case. One very well might suggest that in fact the only reason why it is 'traditional' to ignore this is because it would reveal how many of these "art objects" bought by these collectors and traded by these dealers have in reality surfaced (from 'underground') on the market recently by less-than-legal, and less-than-ethical means. That is, one might suspect, the real reason why dealers and collectors have collectively and consistently been so careless about asking questions about precise origins and curating the documentation of the answers.


* J. Boardman, Archaeologists, Collectors and Museums, in: Whose Culture? The promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities, Ed. James Cuno, Princeton and Oxford (2009), S. 107-124.