Antiquities and the Public

 

There are a lot of arguments about why we need museums and to display antiquities for public appreciation. These tend to cluster around a group of ideas about "social betterment" that have their origin in the mid-nineteenth century (if not a bit earlier) and were current until the second third of the twentieth. A lot of people writing about "heritage": seem to be trapped in that time-bubble and not emerged from it to look around. That includes the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 'encyclopaedic museum arguments of Cuno and his pals).

They would be lost in the real world however. Look at this from social media:

Now do an image search to try and find out which collection it is from and what the proud exhibitors of this piece of hacked-out trophy art say about its origin. For those superficial folk unwilling to use the mouse to click - you get a plethora of results of many many other web "resources" saying (usually in the form "only asking questions, whether") it shows a laptop computer. Too many. Yes, among them you might spot the occasional attempt to use it as an example of Hellenistic funerary sculpture, and even an occasional one that addresses and discusses what this shows (note that one of the the best has been up since Feb 8th 2016, yet nobody "asking these questions" has been able to find it - a MOUSE CLICK AWAY - Aristotle Koskinas ' Ancient Greek Laptop explained' at "Aristotle, Greek tourist guide: An insider's look into Greek history, archaeology and life by a Greek Archaeologist and Tourist Guide" (excellent site in general, BTW).

The facile argument "people are stupid" really gets us nowhere (that's obvious, in most regions of the world, half the population is below the average IQ for that population, we see them on the roads, in the shops, in a Brexit referendum, at Trump/Truss rallies).

What else is happening here?

The main one is distrust/disdain of expertise. It is no longer the first reaction of many people on seeing something that seems puzzling or challenging to "look it up" and see if there is a simple explanation out there. Today anyone with a smartphone or laptop can have that information instantaneously - if they ask for it, they get it ON A PLATE, no real effort. That is not for many the first response, however. Why?

We come down to that vacant protest "Ooo needs experts, eh? Wot do they know? Jus' because they've been to university don't mean their better than me". For the people with that approach it is "commn sense" ("life experience") that counts. For them a principle tool for understanding the world seems to be "it looks like". There is no need for books to see if a wooden writing tablet or jewellery case also "look like" that in ancient Greek art. It's enough to say it "looks like a laptop" and that's that. The lure of the triumphant "so-called-experts-(not-as-canny-as-me)-got-it-wrong". Here it is not actually about understanding the past at all, but boosting their own self-esteem (by doing somebody else down); it's what Internet trolls do, its what all pseudoarchaeologists do.

So, how to deal with this? Just ignore it as a social phenomenon, pretend it does not exist and is no way a context to our own activity that we should take into account?