Response to John Ray's How to Own An Artefact

Professor Sir John Boardman (Ashmolean Museum) has recently castigated the "small and unrepresentative group of professional archaeologists, mostly pre-historians", whose hatred for collectors is such that they are conducting a "witch-hunt" against any who disagree with them, "bullying collectors and museums in what seems  an almost paranoid attack on people and objects" -- all of which reminds Sir John "of the worst excesses of the animal-rights fanatics" -- and meanwhile "feeding the public a biased propaganda of the politically correct character familiar in the political scene of today". Meanwhile,  the American Council for Cultural Policy has exposed the figures these archaeologists use -- about the scale of the illicit antiquities market -- as entirely fraudulent, although they still persist in using them.

I take Professor Ray's review of my book as paradigm of what Sir John has in mind. Ray offers no substantive argument against me (except a minor niggle about egyptian car-mechanics) but produces a mean-spirited sneer that verges on meretrice. His intention is to make me such a figure of ridicule that nobody would actually bother to read me. And that is a form of censorship.

Unfortunately for him, he seems to have misunderstood the argument, as the example of his favourite Monet shows.  My book is a general defence of market mechanisms, not private collectors, so I am delighted for the Courtauld to own 'his' painting, as long as they paid the correct price for it. But I wouldn’t want it returned to France merely because Monet was a Frenchman, and France was to claim his paintings as part of her inalienable 'cultural heritage', which necessarily had to be inside France. And I wouldn’t want France passing legislation to that effect, then wresting it back by moral blackmail.

If Professor Ray feels this is one of my "dashing caricatures", I'd remind him that the French have just prevented their legitimate owners from exporting (to Italy) a collection of drawings by Italian masters, a Yuan-Dynasty vase, and a painting of a Turkish scene by a Swiss artist -- all on the grounds that these form part of France's "cultural heritage".

If these absurdities abound for modern artefacts, how much more absurd for antiquities, whose original makers -- their culture and even their race -- no longer exist, or have been deliberately destroyed by the very people whose descendants are now so boisterously claiming 'their' cultural heritage? As I mention in my book, Rescuing the Past: The Cultural Heritage Crusade, the modern Italians claim Greek vases stored in Etruscan tombs as Italian patrimony, even though -- as Boardman has recently noted -- their sojourn in Etruscan tombs "was by far the least important thing about them" (2%, he suggests) -- and the Etruscans themselves were obliterated by the Romans, whose mantle the modern Italians so assiduously embrace. I doubt that the Etruscans would have appreciated the joke.

And, yes, UNESCO has achieved much that is splendid. But it has also been infected by the same intemperate ideology, with what Professor Merryman (Art Law, Stanford) agrees is a Crusade against any form of trade in antiquities, however meticulously conducted. Ask Dr. Bucherer, the Director of the Afghanistan Museum in Switzerland, which was "started at the request of all the parties in the Afghan Civil War" as a safe repository for the Afghan cultural heritage. He holds the letter by which UNESCO finally gave permission for the removal of Afghan antiquities to safekeeping. Unfortunately, it dates several months after the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the treasures of Kabul museum were smashed into fragments with sledge-hammers -- because they were Jahilliya, please note, Professor Ray---and several years after the Director of Kabul's Museum, Dr. Omara Masoodi, warned UNESCO that the Taliban was likely to destroy his collections, and pleaded for their help in removing them to Switzerland. UNESCO's reply? That it was "not in the business of removing art from any country that was part of its cultural heritage".

But Ray’s real concern -- and he almost lets the cat out of the bag -- is that my book is not a good way of "furthering scientific [sic] dialogue" between archaeologists and the Egyptian Authorities -- and will make it difficult for archaeologists like him to renew their site-licences.  With hindsight I could have been more anodyne, but three years spent incarcerated for a 'crime' against political correctness does rather strain one's patience.

Jonathan Tokeley

PS. Professor Ray also seems confused about my 'crime'. His first paragraph suggests that my counterfeit 'Pharaonic' Head---which the British Museum mistook for genuine, and returned to Egypt as a national-treasure -- was the subject of my indictment and conviction. Not so. The House of Lords had already declared my 'smuggling' of it into the UK perfectly legal. I was actually convicted on a technicality (the purchase of two air-tickets), but that’s another story...