In 2024 antiquities dealer, trafficker, and character Michel van Rijn passed away. Coincidentally antiquities dealer, trafficker, and character Leonardo Patterson also passed away recently. Many readers may not know that van Rijn and Patterson had a super strange, over the top beef, that played out partially and spectacularly on the internet of the early 2000s. At that time van Rijn had a website which he used as a proto blog, before we had that word blog, where he would post dirt on EVERYONE interspersed with random things. For those of us old enough to have been watching his website updates in real time, each post of his was eagerly read and followed by some form of “WHAT is going ON”!
Reports indicate that in 2004 James E Ferrell, “founder of propane distributors FerrellGas”, and dealer Bruce Ferrini sought an injunction against van Rijn’s website, seemingly for alleged violation of a gag order. Van Rijn apparently didn’t think he had violated the order and, in response, “in a fit of pique, van Rijn published all his background research on the story. In so doing, he unquestionably breached his gagging order. His lawyer quit the case the same day.”[1] That’s VERY van Rijn’s site. In 2006 he took the second version of his website down because, according to him, his children were recieving death threats.[2]
What I want to tell you all, for posterity, is that both van Rijn’s first website (michelvanrijn.com) and his second website (michelvanrijn.nl) have been at least partially archived by the glorious internet archive and they are available for you to browse and use:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000510214947/http://www.michelvanrijn.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20050106092111/http://www.michelvanrijn.nl
Please, please have a look. PLEASE USE THIS FOR STUFF.
Fun bonus, van Rijn put a pdf of his whole book up on his website and it, too, has been saved by the internet archive. If you have never read his 1993 Hot Art, Cold Cash, you are in for a treat: http://www.michelvanrijn.nl/finish/hacc.htm
For those of you not familiar with the Wayback Machine in the Internet Archive, you need to click back and forth at the top to find versions of the website that were archived at different times. This is important because van Rijn constantly updated with more information and, at times, took information down. Go back and forward in time. Also, remember that not every page of his site was archived during every pass by the internet archive. We’re likely missing some things. Also please take everything on here with a huge grain of salt. Much of this was posted after van Rijn stopped giving a flip and was ready to roll on, seemingly, everyone. But there is still a very interesting human in the middle of all these, perceiving of things his own way, and selecting what to share.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about information loss related to past periods of the trade in cultural objects, and I fear van Rijn’s website is something that we will lose if more people don’t know about it. After van Rijn died, an anonymous emailer sent me download of his whole blog, asking me to share it. Well, (A) of course I already had my own copy of everything I could salvage from the van Rijn site within my own archive; but (B) I can’t legally just reproduce van Rijn’s writing like that. But what I can do is tell you all where you can find it yourself.
If you know of any other juicy, interesting, and important records of the past of the antiquities market, please get in contact with me. We can figure out a way to save and share them.