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16 Artifacts and Emotion Kathryn Walker Tubb The discussion surrounding the trade in antiquities is heated and highly politicized . That much is plain to anyone who ventures into this field. It is also obvious that the arguments are polarized with entrenched positions that appear to be intractable. And yet it is clear that destruction of archaeological sites and monuments, which all parties profess to deplore, continues at an unabated rate. Cultural heritage is not being served by those who purport to be interested in it. Some common ground needs to be identified and acknowledged in order for the dialogue to continue with the hope of an outcome that may enhance the protection and preservation of this resource. Thesubject ofcontentionistheartifact, andall that isattachedto it byadherents of the opposing camps. One of the most salient features of the engagement is the emotional involvement of the participants. The power of the sentiment suggests that an acceptance of this passionate attachment might serve as a point of agreement and a basis for renewed debate. Ultimately the hope, currently so forlorn, must be that some form of reconciliation can be discovered before the archaeological resource is exploited to the point of extinction. Little would seem to have been written about emotion in the context of archaeologists , archaeological conservators and scientists, curators, and dealers. This is certainly not true when it comes to collectors and collecting, where the motivations driving such activity have been scrutinized from many different perspectives, all of which acknowledge feeling as a constituent impulse. The emotional content ranges from the visceral to the cerebral. For example, Ruth Formanek (1996: 335) concludes, from analysis of a questionnaire put to collectors from a psychoanalytic approach and designed to assess the motivations for collecting, that “what is common to all motivations to collect, and what appears to be the collector’s defining characteristic, is a passion for the particular things collected.” Souren Melikian, arts correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and private collector, has written eloquently and with considerable feeling of the extreme pleasure to be derived from living with an object: “Collecting alone can preserve the intimate knowledge of art that living with it generates. It is the basis of connoisseurship, and visual knowledge is as essential as the conceptual approach of academe. . . . Private connoisseurship is the crucial Artifacts and Emotion /  element that paradoxically guarantees the freedom of looking at art other than by institutional decree, in an environment, lighting and presentation included, that is not predetermined” (Melikian 1998). Insights into the motivations of private collectors can also be gleaned from exhibition catalogues. One such example concerns the Fleischmans, who gathered together objects of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman origin for their home and who allowed their collection to be exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum and theClevelandMuseumofArt. TrueandKozloffwrite that “fortheFleischmans, collecting is not an act of accumulating trophies or private treasures. It is also neither complicated nor scientific. They collect on the basis of instantaneous emotional response to the object’s aesthetic appeal and its historic interest for them” (True and Kozloff 1994: 7). In an exhibition catalogue written to accompany a display of some of his collection of antiquities and ethnographic objects that was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, George Ortiz includes an essay in which he muses about his motivation for collecting, stating: “The vision of certain objects struck me viscerally, then they came to fascinate and move me, I let them speak to me, I let their content and spirit nourish me” (Ortiz 1994: 6). Curators involved in acquisition may display obsessive tendencies that are more usually associated with private collectors in pursuit of a particular object. See, for example, Thomas Hoving’s (1981) King of the Confessors, chronicling his quest as a young assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a mediaeval ivory cross; it was written much later in the style of a “boys’ own” adventure story. Dealers, too, may enjoy the excitement involved in such transactions. Felicity Nicholson, former director of Sotheby’s Antiquities Department in London, is reported as having professed in an internal memorandum that she found “the shady side of the antiquities market not uncongenial ” (Farrell and Alberge 1997). As a further example, this time in the fine art branch of the trade, Philip Mould’s (1995) Sleepers addresses the rediscovery of lost Old Masters; as noted on the dust jacket, “he describes the high-risk, highstakes game of art dealing—a game of hair...

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