Context Matters: Collecting the Past

I have been associated with ARCA for the last ten years, and its publishing arm, ARCA Press, will be issuing a series of essays later this year.

Context Matters is based on the twenty essays contributed to the Journal of Art Crime over its first ten years. They are supplemented by articles and review articles that were published alongside them. The chapters were written as museums in Europe and North America were facing a series of claims on recently acquired objects in their collections in the light of the photographic dossiers that had been seized from dealers in Switzerland and Greece. They engage with some of the recent debates over cultural property that include the Ka Ka Nefer mummy mask currently in the St Louis Art Museum, and the Leutwitz Apollo acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Two of the essays reflect on the recent and controversial metal-detecting finds in England, the so-called Crosby Garrett helmet and the Lenborough Hoard. The volume contributes to the wider discussion about the appropriate due diligence process that should be conducted prior to the acquisition of archaeological material.

The essays will be grouped around the following themes:

• International Agreements
• The AAMD and its members
• Returning antiquities
• Compliance and due diligence
• Museum curators
• Looting and the market
• Perspectives from England
• Debating cultural property

The book will come out next Fall, but there is currently a Kickstarter campaign on in which books can be pre-ordered.

Please have a look and consider pre-ordering Context Matters …and in the process supporting a good cause, as this campaign seeks to raise scholarship funds.