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Provenance and Price: Autoregulation of the Antiquities Market?

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Abstract

It is becoming common to read that antiquities without a provenance stretching back to before the 1970 adoption by UNESCO of the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property are increasingly difficult to sell because of customer concerns over possible illicit trade in the past and reduced resale prices in the future. This paper proposes the term autoregulation to describe the phenomenon, and presents the results of several quantitative analyses designed to investigate its action.

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Notes

  1. The previous record had been set in June 2007 when a Roman bronze figure of Artemis and the Stag, known since 1953 when it was acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo New York, exceeded its pre-sale estimate of $5-7 million when it sold for $28.6 million (Baugh 2007).

  2. The previous record had been $29 million for a piece by Pablo Picasso (Baugh 2007).

  3. Though as the context and circumstances of its discovery remain unknown, its historical significance is really only a matter for conjecture.

  4. The first million dollar museum acquisition was in 1972 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $1 million to dealer Robert Hecht for the Attic ‘Euphronios’ krater. Several more multi-million dollar museum acquisitions followed before the first object to break the million dollar barrier at auction in 1988, in the sale noted by Borodkin when a Cycladic figurine fetched $2.09 million in New York (Nørskov 2002 : 291–2).

  5. http://lootingmatters.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/toxic-antiquities-sothebys-and-1985.html

  6. https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Guidelines%20on%20the%20Acquisition%20of%20Archaeological%20Material%20and%20Ancient%20Art%20revised%202013_0.pdf

  7. Data from Christie’s London 14 April 2011 were not included because of the quantity of material from the Empain Collection, which had all been acquired sometime between 1905 and 1929, thus preventing a good division of material based on a 1930 date.

  8. http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

  9. http://www.unesco.org/eri/la/convention.asp?KO=13039&language=E

  10. http://www.unesco.org/eri/la/convention.asp?KO=13039&language=E&order=alpha

  11. http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13095&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant agreement no. 283873. The data and issues discussed were first presented in May 2013 at the Vulnerability and Cultural Heritage conference held at the University of Leicester, and thanks are due to Professor Janet Ulph for organising the conference and inviting the author to attend.

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  1. Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street, Glasgow, G12 8LR, UK

    Neil Brodie

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Brodie, N. Provenance and Price: Autoregulation of the Antiquities Market?. Eur J Crim Policy Res 20, 427–444 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-014-9235-9

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