Irreconcilable Differences? Problems with Unprovenanced Antiquities

In 1995, Geraldine Norman, then art market correspondent for the Independent newspaper, contributed a short chapter to the volume Antiquities Trade or Betrayed: Legal, Ethical and Conservation Issues entitled "Bad Laws are Made to be Broken".The laws to which she refers are national patrimony laws and export control legislation by which many source countries endeavour to protect their cultural heritage.She suggests that the laws "run counter to human nature and are therefore bad law".She elaborates on this concluding that "If the laws were internationally perceived as fair, upright people would not break them".She states that "In twenty years as an art market correspondent, I have never met an antiquities dealer who did not happily handle smuggled goods".It is her contention that "the laws in the countries of origin make no sense" (Norman 1995: 143-4).The arguments that are used by dealers and collectors to discredit source country legislation will be familiar through Brodie, Doole and Watson's (2000) report entitled Stealing History: The Illicit Trade in Cultural Material and more recently through Mackenzie's (2005) Going, Going, Gone: Regulating the Market in Illicit Antiquities, among many other publications.For this reason, only some of these issues will be touched upon here.How such thinking is rationalised is explained ably by Mackenzie in his exploration of the "Sociology and Psychology of the Art Market".He draws on Sykes and Matza's work that "documented five techniques of neutralisation […] denial of responsibility; denial of injury; denial of the victim; condemnation of the condemners; and an appeal to higher loyalties" (Mackenzie 2005: 203).

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