Somebody posing as Bill Pearlstein "graciously consented to [Peter Tompa] publishing his comment" on the Cultural Property Obfuscator lobbyist-sniping blog:. The commentator suggests that: trying to retrofit a requirement for documented provenance onto the reality of a market where nothing was ever documented is disingenuous, and creates the Orphan Problem without solving the looting problem.Hmm, where does the UNESCO 1970 Convention talk about solving the looting problem? Rather I think its the US lawyer's own argument that is not a little disingenuous. Where does the Convention or the US CCPIA talk of documenting "provenance"? It does not. Pearlstein blunders deeper:
let's face it—the 1970 Rule does not reflect a fair reading of UNESCO. Moreover, It's silly to pretend that every unprovenanced piece may have been recently looted. Some objects have come down through antiquity without being buried. The likelihood of privately owned Orphans that were never buried and never looted is simply outside the conceptual box of the 1970 Rule.Probably because (watch the lips), the UNESCO 1970 Convention is not designed to address the looting problem. Look at its title, look at its text (all the articles). To say otherwise is a US-specific reading of its text, inserting ideas that are not there in the original - no matter how Pearlstein may want to argue that it has been "badly translated". Inasmuch as the 1970 Convention does not mention the notion of provenanced versus unprovenanced artefacts then if there is anybody being "silly" about what it allegedly says about "unprovenanced piece", it is the North American polemicist.
As for "some objects have come down through antiquity without being buried" they mostly have names like "the Pantheon" and "the Colosseum". I really do not follow "the likelihood of privately owned [objects] that were never buried and never looted is simply outside the conceptual box of the 1970 Rule", what on earth is he on about? Unless they were kept in antiquity in Maryland and passed down among the Nephrites to arrive in a modern collector's hands today, they'll still need an export licence to get to the US (UNESCO 1970, art 6, art 7). I suggest also that Pearlstein re-reads Article 1 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention.
Finally that twee label "orphans" dealers use to denote artefacts they are trading which have somehow "lost" all trace of where they came from. Any dealer buying any goods for resale should know where they come from. That they are unwilling to pass that information on to the buyer is justified by them in a variety of ways, the rest of us may well suspect that the real reason for this is the unspoken one. Items where the pedigree is deliberately discarded are not being "orphaned' of their collecting history, they are being abandoned.
UPDATE 23.10.2014
This is not, Mr Tompa, about "control", this is about common decency and responsibility qualities many of my readers will observe are notably lacking in certain circles. It is not a sign of abnormal "cleverness" to read the text of the Convention and understand what it does and does not say, though many US collectors demonstrate themselves incapable of that.
6 comments:
Indeed, wading through the endless “considering’s” of UNESCO 1970, it’s not easy at first to discern just what problem the Convention is trying to solve.
But here’s the key paragraph:
“Considering that it is incumbent upon every State to protect the cultural property existing within its territory against the dangers of theft, clandestine excavation, and illicit export,…”
So, contrary to what you maintain, the Convention is, at its heart, concerned with the prevention of looting of cultural goods, from both ordinary sites and also museums and other collections.
It does this through documentation requirements covering the export and import of cultural goods, which are of course concerned with establishing where the goods were at certain relevant times. I.e, again contrary to what you said, the Convention is in fact very much concerned with “provenance”, as the term is commonly understood.
Mr X.
You don't think, do you, that the "Considerings" of the Preamble might refer to some OTHER previous statements from the UNESCO stable? (Delhi 1956 for example?)
I would take issue that the phrasing of the preamble is what is "at the heart" of the Convention, it is clearly the background against which it is formulated. The core issues of the Convention itself are contained in its numbered articles and defined by its title. If you look at article 1 (a favourite with collectors) you will see that the Convention is about sundry types of cultural property, not just dugup archaeological finds.
"documentation requirements covering the export of cultural goods are concerned with establishing where the goods were at certain relevant times" No, no they are not. They are connected with the issuing authority determining whether their removal from the country is to the detriment of the national and cultural interest of that country. How they do that varies from country to country - but what the Convention establishes is the right of sovereign states to adopt whatever standards they want.
At the most, some procedures (the US CCPIA for example) require us to declare when the item left its source country if it is being imported through another one. That is not 'provenance' but establishing date of export to prevent items being 'laundered' by - for example shipping Syrian antiquities straight from the ground to the US market with a stop-over in Dubai just long enough to issue an export licence from there.
I suggest you read that Convention again (and don't confuse it with the CCPIA).
"At the most, some procedures (the US CCPIA for example) require us to declare when the item left its source country if it is being imported through another one. That is not 'provenance' but establishing date of export to prevent items being 'laundered' by - for example shipping Syrian antiquities straight from the ground to the US market with a stop-over in Dubai just long enough to issue an export licence from there."
Well I would have thought that properly establishing the date of export would amount to establishing provenance.
I say properly because a mere "declaration" by an importer or exporter will quite often not satisfy a competent customs service - they will want independent verifiable evidence, i.e, they will want a real provenance.
But THAT (watch the lips) is not what the Convention says. AS I said, do not confuse the Convention with the CCPIA which is a just-one-country-specific system tacked onto (in fact replacing) the Convention and ignoring its main principles (art 3, 5, 6, 10 and so on).
In addition, the measures you speculate are extra-legal. The CCPIA stipulates very clearly what documentation is required, it mentions nothing else. If what you say were true, the Ka Nefer Nefer mask would never have entered the USA.
I am fully aware of the difference between the Convention and the measures which implement it, like the CCPIA and EEC Regulation 3911-92. (For example, many (most?) source countries don't actually require export certificates for common cultural items).
It's true that where there is a requirement for documentation of some sort, in practice these requirements usually derive mainly from the implementing regulations of the importing country, rather than the Convention itself. Even so, these requirements are still ultimately designed to implement the Convention, so it is simplistic to insist that the Convention doesn't require provenance of some sort (provenance here meaning documentation or evidence that makes a particular item legally importable into an importing country).
Regarding the "extra-legal" measures, you are again reading the regulations (the CCPIA here) too narrowly. Are you suggesting that U.S. customs has to accept at face value and without question any declaration by an importer simply because it meets the formal provisions of the regulations?
I doubt that you could rely on the courts to accept that idea in general.
We are, though getting off the topic of the text to which this is supposed to be a comment (which is about the Convention and not how it is administered in just ONE country).
You are twisting the definition of "provenance", maybe this is where Gill's insistence that we refer instead to collecting history would be more useful.
I am reading the CCPIA regulations as they are written. If US customs (and US courts) want to read into it something that is not there, it's extra-legal).
Tell you what, why not start up your own blog (under a real name)and write away to your heart's content about all sorts of off-topic stuff and how we are all wrong?
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