Saturday, March 7, 2015

Better Bulldozed than Safe in a Western Museum?

So it would seem, at least according to one archaeo-blogger who professes not to see much of a difference between the actions of collectors and museums and the iconoclasts of ISIS.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

3 comments:

Dave Welsh said...

Now he apparently seems to be accusing collectors of Satanism:
http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2015/03/devil-worshippers-and-ancient-art.html

It is possible that I may have misunderstood his "point" - maybe he instead intended to compare collectors to the murderous barbarians of ISIL.

As Netanyahu recently observed: "The enemy of your enemy is - your enemy."

I have come to think that Barford actually prefers destruction of artifacts, whether by natural causes as they lie interred exposed to rot and corrosion, or by overt actions of barbarous terrorists, to their possession by private collectors.

March 7, 2015 at 4:39 PM
Cultural Property Observer said...

I think Barford is suggesting ISIS would consider collectors devil worshipers because of their "devotion" to artifacts with graven images on them. But I suspect that they would take a similarly dim view of "context worshipers" like Barford. Anyway, all this goes to show he's way out there. This is a very unfortunate situation, and why he's going down these odd paths is hard to fathom.

March 7, 2015 at 7:12 PM
Dave Welsh said...

I don't find it so hard to fathom. He hates private collectors and collecting as being responsible (in his warped perspective) for "collection-driven exploitation" of archaeological sites, and has a compulsive need to find ways to blame everything on them as being at least partly or indirectly responsible.

March 7, 2015 at 9:25 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)