A post on the SAFE website in which Dr Gray picks out two recently auctioned objects and looks at how two different news reports dealt with them, and then asks whether the sale of unique items to private collectors is actually appropriate. Here's a short extract:
What neither of these news reports addresses, however, is the question of the ethics involved in auctioning pieces universally acknowledged as rarities to private owners. In fact, the Time article’s main thrust was towards prospective collectors of antiquities, or the “über-rich”, as the article dubs them. Antiquities, according to the article and to John Ambrose, an antiquities dealer and founder and director of Fragments of Time, Inc., are a good investment opportunity. The concluding line of the Time article should give us pause; “. . . no matter how ornate a stock certificate might be, an Egyptian amulet is always going to look better in your living room display case.”
Is this the message the public should be hearing with regard to antiquities – their price tag, and their potential investment value? . . . .
Contrary to the opinions expressed in the Time article, antiquities should not be lumped in with artworks as an investment option; antiquities are intrinsically valuable for the knowledge they may transmit about long-vanished cultures, for information about technology, for historical details, and so forth.
See the above page for the full article.
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