Souren melikian biography sample
Souren Melikian on collectors coming to the rescue in preservation crisis: The International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art's London Conference
I would like to stress the contradictory nature of, to me, two equally cogent necessities. One is the importance of collecting and the other is the importance of preserving the buried treasure of history in its unwritten form — the history that precedes the texts of early civilisations, and even history at the time when the great ancient civilisations started to write it down.
We all know that in order to know a work of art, one has to live with it. If you walk into a museum, as we all have done — as I did from the age of ten — and gaze at a bronze deferentially, you raise your hat to it or you broaden your store of information, visual and historical, but you do not really get to know it even in visual terms — perhaps above all in visual terms. For that you need the right mood; you need different lights; you need to handle the work.
I would further suggest that the hunt for an object develops reactions, encourages a liberty of judgement as well as a promptness in searching and comparing that often gives the collecting and dealing world such a tremendous edge over a academe when it comes to seeing.
May I add as a footnote that museums can be incredibly destructive. I have been in many museum stores, and I have seen even the most famous museums damage, sometimes destroy objects. The private collector is often more protective of his pieces.
Having said all these nice things about collecting, we must now consider the other side of the coin, which is a degree of destruction in certain areas of the world that even the most informed antiquity dealers and collectors do not always consider.
I would like to stress that the nature and the intensity of the problems vary enormously depending on which part of the world is involved. In the Iranian world, mainly Afghanistan, the extent of the destruction caused by plund
Souren Melikian (provides "unique coverage of the art scene and market from the view of a collector who is also a cultural historian") has written a feelgood article for the New York Times which would like to persuade us all to think that antiquities collectors are not such a bad lot, that provenance matters to them ("Antiquities, With a Proven Record, Drive Auction Market", NYT ), and slowly, but surely, the dirty antiquities market is cleaning itself up. In fact it would seem he's saying that we need not feel any angst about the market, we need not do anything about it as the situation is righting itself:
The market for antiquities from the ancient world is undergoing an upheaval that sends some works of art skyrocketing to unimaginable heights while scores of others are effectively becoming unsalable. The reason for this discrepancy lies in the Unesco convention adopted in1970 [...] the convention is effectively being implemented by international institutions and, increasingly, by prudent collectors and dealers, fearful that the legitimate ownership of their acquisitions may be challenged in the future. As a result, important works of art that can be proved to have reached the market before 1970 shoot to vertiginous levels, while those that cannot fail to sell with increasing frequency.Would that it were true, and of course it is not, not by a long chalk. The problem if anything is getting worse. (He's done this before, too: "How UNESCO's 1970 Convention Is Weeding Looted Artifacts Out of the Antiquities Market" PACHI, Saturday, 1 September 2012). Donna Yates is not at all convinced by his anecdotal evidence, based on her study of several thousand Pre-Columbian pieces, that is not a pattern that can be confirmed by hard figures ("No, NYT, listing a couple of lots doesn't prove that antiquities buyers care about provenance!" June 14, 2013. She calls the article "dumb and wrong".
the listing of a couple of random lots does not prove thatA stunning Shang Dynasty tripod, designed as a ritual food vessel, went for $86,500, well above the $30-50,000 estimate in March. Courtesy Christie's
"... For those who want to collect masterpieces on a truly large scale, Chinese art is the most rewarding, not to say the only hunting ground.
It may sound like a paradox, given the exponential rise in the number of collectors, both in mainland China and in the overseas communities. So far, however, the impact of their presence in the Western markets has chiefly made itself felt on the later periods of Chinese art, from the Kangxi reign (1662-1722) to the early 19th century. Add that anything provably linked with the Palace — as demonstrated, for example, by certain reign marks painted underglaze on porcelain — triggers wild competition among Chinese bidders.
From the perspective of Western (and Japanese) connoisseurs, all this leaves aside much of the greatest in Chinese art. Sublime pieces could be acquired this past season, ranging from Shang bronzes of the late 12th and 11th centuries B.C. to Tang and Song pottery and porcelain from the late 7th to early 13th centuries.
The most stunning pieces surfaced in New York on March 18, as Christie’s dispersed large consignments from collections formed long ago. This made them particularly attractive because the 1970 cutoff date, established by the UNESCO Unidroit Convention, is increasingly seen by experienced market hands as a time limit beyond which the acquisition of works of art exported from the country of origin without official permit is fraught with long-term risks. Restitution claims might be made in the future, particularly concerning early bronzes and ceramics illicitly dug up from underground caches, which are never accompanied by any permits. These are in real danger of being branded as "stolen goods," with the additional opprobrium of having involved the irreparable loss of the archaeological context, thus destroying the unwritt
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