Anna Somers Cocks opines "
Why Italy should sell the 5,000 antiquities recovered by the police" ("Improperly excavated artefacts could be auctioned to help cash-strapped museums"). There has been a lot of discussion of this idea. The Italians are not impressed with her logic: "
La fondatrice di The art newspaper lancia una provocazione". Over in America it is a different story. Peter Tompa
representing the dealers associations is all for it.
Derek Fincham too, and
Francesca Tronchin is enthusiastic. Professor Tronchin's title is symptomatic of the main problem, she ponders "What to do with recovered antiquities?" as if this was a problem for America. The issue is one for the Italians to sort out - on their own terms - and not something Washington (or Rhode College, Memphis, Tennessee) decides for them.
I fail to see what the legal basis underlying this whole concept is. Somers Cocks is suggesting taking "improperly excavated" (that's art-talk for "looted") off the market, sending them back to Italy as stolen goods (as per US law) and then through some transmogrification which she does not detail, the items are released onto the open market for museums, collectors and dealers to profit from as "legal" artefacts.
"choose a small number of masterpieces from the carabinieri’s hoard" [so that] "collectors and the trade would be able to acquire legally validated pieces".
How's that? In any case, as we all know, very soon after coming on the international antiquities market in its current form
most artefacts lose any "passports" (export documentation, transfer of ownership documentation), within a few years. On that form, most of these postulated 'released' artefacts will also pretty quickly lose all documentation of legality.
Tronchin goes a step further. She reckons that if Italy "floods the market" with lots and lots of these "legitimate" artefacts (how many looted and smuggled items does she think are seized each year?), they will somehow push out the "illegal" ones. Again the American does not explain the mechanisms by which this works.
If it were true that flooding a market with lots of cheap originals was a way to limit the illicit trade in antiquities by creating a massive licit trade in them, there would be no looting at all in Great Britain, with 10-16000 metal detectorists ripping stuff out of the ground perfectly legally day after day, year after year and a lot of it turning up on the market. But that is not what is happening. Sites are being illegally raided by night. In Great Britain, there never has been any real "cachet" in owning dugup antiquities, many farmers have the odd polished axe on the windowsill. On the contrary, artefact hunters see digging them up as a "right", and collection-driven exploitation of archaeological sites goes on.
As for "
creating a massive licit antiquities market", I wonder if the Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology has ever seen a dealer offer an artefact labelled "illicit"? By definition, the entire market is a "licit" one to those in it. And it is already huge. Increasing the quantities of material on the market and a consequent dropping of price will only encourage more collectors, thus creating a bigger market. This is what we saw in the 1990s.
Adding more low-price material to what is already circulating will merely dilute what is coming onto the market, not
replace it. This is because looters and middlemen only supply what is
saleable - the rest, for example that duplicating material already
commonplace on the market, is discarded on site (see Atwood's book
'Stealing History',
for example, on this). Merely making some kinds of collectables common
will not stop the search for the uncommon and rare. If the coveted - and therefore profit-generating - material is not available in quantity, then the looting will increase to
meet demand.
I really do not see how Professor Tronchin sees this working, no dealer is going to fill their stockroom with stuff they cannot sell. To get it in their stockrooms for them to then sell for a pittance (as she naively suggests will happen if the market is 'flooded'), the Italian authorities will have to sell at 'dumping' prices, which defeats the object of what she is proposing (to make cash for the state by capitalising on the high market values). The two simply do not make sense.
But the market already seems to have a mechanism to deal with this, we see antiquities from the so-called "Grande Razzia" surfacing only now after decades of storage "somewhere" and slowly released on the markets in order to keep prices up. The same goes for antiquities looted in Iraq in and around 2003. Where are they now? On the market, or still in storage, trickling out? If huge quantities of recovered stolen artefacts are dumped on the market at ridiculous prices, speculators are most likely to buy them up, put them on ice a while and then release them slowly in coming years after the museums have given up trying to flood the market.
Professor Tronchin ignores the issue of motivation. Why would dealers actually go about selling at prices that destroy their own market? While you may saturate the market with "Roman grot" coins (of which there are hundreds of thousands already in circulation without threatening the stability of the market) and greyware bodysherds, that does not affect the market for complete amphoras from wrecks and bronze statues of Hercules. These are different markets, different clientele. Simply shifting more artefacts at the low end of the market does not touch the dealers and their clients at the top.
It seems the American advocates of such moves would benefit from taking a look at the
British Museums Association policy on deaccession. This emerges from precisely such sales (a pottery collection and Egyptian statue). This is in Britain, with its all-too-liberal attitude to antiquity sales. Why should Italian museums be any different from UK ones? What about museums in the States, do they sell off "duplicate" material in their care, much of it donated by collectors for hefty tax refunds from the state? How would that be organized? I want to know what makes the US feel that it can dictate what others should do with their cultural heritage without first installing the same system at home.
Professor Tronchin also suggests that making cheap antiquities available from the items recovered from culture criminals will in some way "bring antiquity to a broader audience". This is a typical American collectors' argument. I really wonder whether people have to possess artefacts at home to "appreciate antiquity" any more than you have to keep a lion on the back porch to bring nature to a broader audience. There are surely other ways than the consumerist buy-buy-buy past to achieve this aim. We used to have things called books...
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