The top selling piece, a Roman bronze lamp stand with a youth (lot 131), went for $1,142,500. It appears to have surfaced in an anonymous Swiss private collection "prior to 1980".
G. Max Bernheimer, International Department Head of Antiquities ...: “These results reflect continuing strength and depth throughout the Antiquities market. The top end of the market continues to perform exceedingly well.”
3 comments:
And to think, all that money spent just so so-called "elites" can own decontextualized pieces of the past and then pretend like they actually care about and "study" the Classical World or general prehistory. Thanks for demonstrating your flagrant irresponsability again, Christie's!
"The trick with pulling out pictures from the Medici archive just days before they were being put to the hammer did not really work".
I am not sure "trick" is the right word. Mr Fehlmann however hits the nail on the head by pointing out that most of the items in that same sale had the same shallow "provenances" but were not pictured in an infamous archive.
I think rather this is the question, it is not just "Mr Medici" that is the problem, but where ALL this recently "surfaced" material is coming from. The fact that in the (just) three cases we knew something about where they had been before what Christie's tells us begins hints that these may not be isolated cases of objects with questionable origins in this sector of the market. Many other dodgy dealers probably do not /did not maintain an archive to be found in a lucky police raid. That does not make any of the stuff they peddle necessarily any the more licit in origin.
The staff of a New York auction house may congratulate themselves that their sector of the antiquity market is doing well, but has at the same time revealed clearly on what that success depends.
While the market is dominated by could-not-care-less collectors and dealers who can count on that being the case, the looting WILL go on. It is the indiscriminating collector that is the realcause of the looting.
As someone who quit an archeology phd program (abd) I have a comment. I read about all the concerns about antiquities without context, but realistically, what institution has the money to publish what already has been studied? There are excavations from the 1950s that have not been published, the professors are dying before publishing anything. Universities are cutting the budgets. Why ae all the comments about context always placed within an idealized world where every excavated work will be published and that most people will even read those publications. I find the state of funding for humanities declining in light of record deficits -- like Greece. Where is the sense of reality?
The lack of job opportunities is staggering -- tenured positions are disappearing, to be replaced with permanent adjuncts.
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