Antiquities in the Media: How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

The use of antiquities in films and television shows, as well as ads, etc. has been something that I have been thinking about for a few years. Stemming from a discussion I had with my MPhil supervisor, I've been both noticing the artefacts and trying to figure out exactly what they are meant to project. I guess it is pretty straightforward. For the most part, antiquities cameos tend to be Greek/Roman/Egyptian to project the standard pop idea of wealth display or decapitated Buddha heads for a more modern, worldly, wealth display. Latin American antiquities usually don't get a lot of play, perhaps because most people viewers wouldn't instantly recognize them. A rare exception that I ran across yesterday was the 1953 Marilyn Monroe/Lauren Bacall/Betty Grable romp "How to Marry a Millionaire".

Hard to see but there is a Latin American  stone sculpture in the background at the far right

The basic premise of the film is that the trio rents a lush furnished flat in New York as a launching point for their collective goal of marrying millionaires. The place is decked out, top to bottom, in Latin American antiquities. From pots to stone sculptural pieces, the apartment's style is ancient Americas.

The question is, of course, why? Why does collecting Latin American antiquities = being a millionaire? Two words: Nelson Rockefeller.

In 1954, a year after the film was released, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art and donated his antiquities collection to it. Housed in a townhouse on West 54th street, the museum opened to the public in 1957 and shut its doors in 1976 when the collection was transferred to the Metropolitan Museum. "Primitive Art", of course, is defined as the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Rockefeller was particularly interested in the Latin America part of the "the Americas".

The ladies in the film specifically say they would like to marry "a Rockefeller"; THE Rockefeller was openly and happily collecting Latin American antiquities, presumably displaying them in his home(s); and the designers of the film set were projecting a sense of new, hot, New York City wealth by putting "Primitive Art" on display. No stuffy old Greek stuff, these girls were set against the backdrop of the "new" collector.

I couldn't find very good stills but check out above the fireplace.

I found myself wondering if the objects in the film were real antiquities. Was there much of a fake industry for Latin American stuff in 1953?

I'm Moving to Glasgow (visa gods willing)

As I have received an official-ish email from the kind HR department I feel that I can probably now tell all you blog readers that I am moving to the University of Glasgow to become a postdoctoral research fellow. I will be adding some Latin American flavor to the big ERC-funded illicit antiquities project that everyone is all excited about. That is, if the visa comes through and all that.

An aspect of this applying for my own money to do my own things (think more law stuff, on the ground ethnography, with a little comparative criminal networks for the fun of it, all in South and Central America). I'm working on a Leverhulme fellowship application and I have a few more funding bodies on the docket. That said, if anyone out there has any ideas about where someone like me should pitch my project, please do get in touch.

Actually, get in touch no matter what. I like hearing from folks with an interest in this sort of work.

This is all very new and exciting. I can't imagine anything I would rather be doing. This is a dream (and a relief)! 

Hopefully I will be working quite hard towards this in the next couple of months (I have a few papers to write, etc...but could always write more if any of you folks out there are looking for contributors!). June 1 is the tentative start date.

"Infotrapping the Illicit Antiquities Trade": Shawn Graham at Carleton University

Dr. Shawn Graham, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Carleton University in Canada has posted something wicked cool on his blog. Looted Heritage: Monitoring the Illicit Antiquities Trade,

"monitors various social media and regular media feeds for stories and reports about the trade in antiquities, which then get mapped. The more such things are made visible, the better our chances of spotting important trends and developments. It also maps academic work on the problem of the illicit antiquities trade."

 Map! Check it out, check it out!

As can be imagined, this week the biggest of the red dots is on Greece.

Dr. Graham posts that he originally included data from ebay into that map but it just got to be too much. Yet, if there was too much traffic on ebay, I would like to see a visual of that traffic. I feel that being able to detect volume and content changes when it comes to online auctions might be useful in the "hey where is all this Nicaraguan material suddenly coming from" sense. I look forward to seeing what Dr. Graham comes up with there!

Three cheers, Dr. Graham, this is a very interesting idea and I look forward to seeing more!

Illicit South American Antiquities being sold on ebay...to support Oxfam?!

Every once in a while I troll ebay just to horrify myself a little. Almost every South American piece I see on there is a clear fake being sold as "real" but it is depressing none the less. I've been doing this for years and it always sucks....however I think I have just had the most depressing Ebay experience yet.

I came across this listing for a "Pre-Columbian Art from Peru Moche Gold Nose Ornament ca 100 B.C.-100 A.D. RARE!" yours for $4650. Fake? Maybe. Or not. Who knows? Sad in its own right. But look a little closer:

"A part of the proceeds from this auction will be donated to Oxfam America and funds will go toward helping the people suffering in East Africa.   Please check out my other auctions for quality Ancient art."

You have got to be kidding me! But, yes, it is true. Note the official Oxfam "Ebay giving" deal at the top. So there you have it, for Oxfam to help "people suffering in East Africa" one has to try and forget the terribleness of the antiquities trade in South America, especially in relation to poor and Indigenous communities. For an organization that has a primary goal of finding lasting solutions to poverty-related injustice, they appear to be supporting poverty-related injustice in South America. Oxfam's brand is right there ON an illegal online antiquity sale.

Dear Oxfam: THIS is poverty and injustice in Peru.

The seller has an number of other real or fake antiquities auctions up, many they claim are formerly of the Sackler Collection (seriously??!) and most of which are being sold to raise money for Oxfam. Arrrrghhhh.

I've just sent a pile of emails to Oxfam America about this and it would be great if you did too. Here is their contact info. They probably have no idea that this is going on, but if they are going to launch campaigns like this one through ebay they need to be more careful about where their money is coming from.

Screaming Mummies and Stolen Paintings: Is this why people collect human remains?

(cross posted on Grotesque Stone Idols)


Lately I have been on a art-crime reading kick. Nothing fancy, just popular non-fiction about art theft in my lighter or lazy moments. Such reading makes me feel like I am working (even though I am not) and gives me various things to think about.

Last night I was reading about what seems to be the constant (and often successful) push for versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream to tumble into the stolen art abyss. Everyone seems to be stealing The Scream all the time. Dare I say it calls out for theft? I dare! I keep thinking about the next step in such art thefts and I guess that is the greatest mystery of them all: how can anyone possibly sell off The Scream? Who buys that?! This, of course, is where the "Dr No", directed theft for a secret private collector idea comes in.

I know, I know, people like that can't possibly exist: they are the stuff of novels and kind of crappy films. Yet, if I evaluate prominent art theft on a work by work basis, I imagine that The Scream has just the right tone and mystique to appeal to those master criminals of infinite resource out there. The Scream is the kind of piece desired by those who don't plan on sharing their art collection. It is internal....private. It is an angsty piece for your solitary, self-serving billionaire.

I have to admit, I've never really liked The Scream. Munch just isn't quite what I am looking for. There is something enchanting about his quite edgy 1894/95 Madonna (stolen along with The Scream in 2004), but I think my experience of emotion just does not match Munch's (probably for the best, yeah?). Yet I was instantly interested when I read that there is some evidence that the main figure in The Scream was inspired by Munch's viewing of a Peruvian mummy. "Oh! Yes!" said I.

Gauguin's "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" (Which is in the MFA? I should go look I suppose) has a possible Peruvian Mummy-inspired figure too. Gauguin felt that this painting should be read right to left and the mummy figure is the left-most (last) figure: to quote Gauguin "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts". The artist vowed to commit suicide after the completion of this painting (his masterwork) but he stuck it out for a few more years, dying in 1903 of a syphilis, alcohol, morphine overdose triple threat.

So how did this happen? Ancient Peruvian death as an image of modern angst by the fin de siècle suicidal artist set? I don't actually know. I have no idea

Well, maybe I do have a bit of an idea. I sort of see two strains at work here. The more obvious is the sort of call of the non-Western in the emerging art movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. We all know antiquities and non-Western cultures played their part: your Cycladic figurines and African masks in Picasso... the moment that Matisse realized that Polynesian folks are awesome. Yet I always thought this was a bit cringe-worthy: placing a Western veneer on something else to make it palatable. In 2005, in an exhibit at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, I saw a Maori cape made out of Cambridge scarves. It felt like something that needed to be said.

The second strain is our pan-human curiosity about death. Mummies are death defiers. By simply still existing, they violate the rules of human existence and, thus, seem to hold some sort of secret about the human condition. Skin retracts when it desiccates (is that a word?), mummies tend to look like they are screaming (see a whole archaeology.org article on the topic of screaming mummies), various ancient Peruvians made mummy bundles that often had hands near faces, and BAM you have a dead body that knows the great unknowns of human existence and seems to be horrified by the enlightenment.

In a previous blog entry, I expressed some shock that people actually collect South American mummies. Yet, now that I think about it, perhaps that is not so shocking. If these bodies meant so much to Matisse and Munch that they based the focal points of their masterworks on them, someone else is going to see that. Chalk this blog entry up to trying to understand.

1 Million Euros for Illicit Antiquities Research at Glasgow

Look at that! An article in the Guardian: Glasgow team gets £1m grant to study illegal trade in antiquities

This is wicked exciting on many levels and, actually, is a good little article to send out to the uninitiated. Here's to Simon Mackenzie and Neil Brodie who:

will spend the next four years gathering and analysing data on the movements and motives of traffickers, the types of activities involved, such as illegal excavation; transit and purchase; and pricing structures. The aim is to develop new approaches to regulate the international trade of cultural goods and help policymakers better define laws to fight criminal activities.

Now your favorite blogstress needs to work on writing her grant proposal and getting her passport renewed so she can apply for another UK visa.

Licit antiquities: The Art of Marian Maguire

In a slight departure from the usual, today I want to talk about totally licit art. Specifically, for those who are not familiar with it, I want to share with you the work of Marian Maguire.

For several years now I have adored Maguire's work. She combines the images and general mythology of Attic black and red figure ceramics with ideas and themes of the history of New Zealand. She creates an amazing world of combined mythology and history. Like modern New Zealand itself, it is a mix of Western and Māori...Māori ideas pasted onto the Western, Western classic style peopled by Māori. I think I squealed out loud with delight when I first saw her work.

In honor of this blog actually having a theme (which is a little short of having a purpose but one takes what one can get) I'll focus on her adaptation of one of our most favorite, most illicit-est antiquities.

The Death of Von Tempsky at Te Ngutu o Te Manu (2010)

After a long and random career, fighting pretty much anywhere that there were Indigenous people to fight, Major Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky ended up in command of a fort at Patea (which would later be the site of New Zealand's greatest 1980's hit "Poi-e", which is the background music for Taika Waititi's unforgettable Thriller Haka). This was July of 1868 and hot in the Taranaki Wars. He was involved in an attack on Titokowaru's pa (called Te Ngutu o Te Manu) and was shot in the head within minutes. To quote an eyewitness:

I had not gone far when a man of our company was shot. The Major went to his assistance, and was shot, the bullet entering the centre of his forehead. He fell dead on top of the man to whose assistance he was going. That was how Von Tempsky died.

At least according to Wikipedia, Titokowaru's people held Von Tempsky in high esteem, called him Manu-Rau and, most controversially, may have eaten part of him[1]. Titokowaru's people returned Von Tempsky's sword to his widow (it now appears to be a magical sword of good luck somehow) and the location of his body was never disclosed.

In what I think is a brilliant move, Maguire chose to portray the death of Von Tempsky on, yes, the Euphronius Krater. Von Tempsky lies dead while two warriors, one with a gun another with an axe, pull on his corpse. Titokowaru watches over the scene. At a simple level, Maguire cleverly portrays Von Tempsky as Sarpedon. At Sarpedon's death, the Greeks are able to recover his armor (Von Tempsky's sword), but the gods drop by and grab Sarpedon's body (Von Tempsky's body). It works amazingly well.

Yet on another level, by selecting that backdrop, Maguire captures the contention and the controversy of Von Tempsky's death and, of course, the complicated idea of "return". Like Von Tempsky's sword, the Euphronius Krater has been returned to an heir of sorts, yet something is missing, something has been lost forever. The Krater's looting and decades of controversy will hang like a dark cloud forever, as will Von Tempsky's missing body and the allegations of cannibalism.

I am about to spend a pretty penny (that I don't really have) to buy two catalogs of Maguire's work. They are a wonderful thought exercise, at least for those of us who love attic pottery, issues surrounding colonialism and Indigenousness, and New Zealand.

Here's to Marian Maguire for making my Monday morning magnificent.

[1] Please, if you are Māori, don't get mad at me for writing that. While discussion of cannibalism may have been a form of "Otherizing" and projecting Western concepts of "savagery" in the past, I don't play that game.

Hot Off the Presses: the latest International Journal of Cultural Property

A slight toot of my own horn: do check out the latest issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property for as witty and non-boring of a summary of Bolivian antiquities law that I could manage. I just opened the box of off prints today and I'm feeling pretty good about this one.

Archaeology and Autonomies: The Legal Framework of Heritage Management in a New Bolivia

Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing it.  

Personal Stats, Disturbing Searches (January 2012)

There has always been a lot of talk about quantifying the invisible trade in antiquities. The internet seems like a vast and open space, full of of quantification possibilities, we just have to find them. Indeed, I feel like novel ways to trick out information pop up all the time, the question is how to react. Let me give you one very personal example.

I, like many a young academic sort in the age of social media, have a profile on www.academia.edu. In an effort to find a job (still working on that), I filled that profile with nearly everything that I have done, and everything that I can freely share on the internet. Academia.edu not only notifies you when someone looks at one of your papers, they record (I think for up to a month) the search terms that brought people to a particular paper.

For a while now I have noticed that people come to my illicit antiquities papers through slightly shocking searches. People seem to find me through searches aimed at importing or buying Latin American antiquities rather than searches aimed as preventing antiquities trafficking. I have mostly just been frowning at the computer whenever it happens but perhaps I will start documenting the searches here each month: my own little foray into the shape of the antiquities trade as it relates directly to me.

In the last month, random individuals found my academia.edu page through 38 different keywords. Leaving out the non-illicit antiquities searches we have the following (spelling mistakes and caps in the original searches):

Negative Search Terms (These people want to buy and sell antiquities now)
importing antiques from south america colombia
exporting antiquities south america
south american art for sale
christies pre-columbian art market
pre-columbian art dealers
peruvian huacos antiques collector sites
peruvian huacos sotheby
importation of pre-columbian monumental or architectural sculpture or murals
value of soth american ceramics  

Could go either way (But these people probably want to buy and sell antiquities)
peruvian antiquities x2
regulation of importation of pre-columbian monumental or archaeological
peru pre conquest object
moche portrait vessel forgery

Positive Searches (These people are doing illicit antiquities research)
illicit antiquites from South America x2
WHEN DID U.K. SIGN THE UNESCO TREATY INVOLVING SMUGGLING ARTIFACTS FROM SOUTH AMERICA
what year was the ban on import of pre-columbian antiquities 1972?

I like to think that they landed on a paper or my dissertation and got shamed out of making purchases but that is too much to ask for.

I see potential here. A larger, more comprehensive illicit antiquities website paired with the more robust Google Analytics might actually give us a window into how internet users are researching potential antiquities purchases. I am only one person with a few Latin American-focused papers. A larger, comprehensive Illicit Antiquities website (the S.A.F.E. website perhaps?) would come up on more searches and would have a wider variety of search terms to analyze. We can start thinking about buyers who conduct internet research as a group: What are their concerns? How do they describe the kinds of things they want to buy and sell? How does the terminology differ?

If we understand how they search and what sorts of pages they land on via their searches, we can think about presenting targeted "you shouldn't buy this stuff" literature online.

17 Great Archaeology Blogs on the Anitquities Trade and Looting

I am honestly touched to say that this blog has been featured in "17 Great Archaeology Blogs on the Antiquities Trade and Looting That YOU Should Read" Posted by Doug Rocks-Macqueen at Doug's Archaeology. I blush!

Way more exciting than being featured is that Doug has cooked up a bundle of all the 17 blogs for your google reader (and I suppose other RSS readers?) which can be found here.