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eBay Fakes Devalue the Craft of Tomb Robbing
James McP writes "According to an article on Archaeology, fake artifacts being sold on eBay have caused the bottom to drop out of the low-end artifact market. This outcome is exactly opposite to what archeologists feared would happen when eBay came on the scene. A side effect of more and more forgers getting in on the act has been a dramatic increase in high-quality fakes that can fool experts and illicit collectors alike, lowering the price for high-end artifacts as well. It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
Anyone stupid enough to think things like that on eBay lacking a complete pedigree are real deserve to get burned.
There's a reason in the art world if a painting cannot be tracked through it's whole life it's first considered a fake.
I think what the summary was aiming for was that the sell of fake items in and of itself is not illegal. If they are honest about the origins (or write their summaries cleverly enough) then it's not illegal. Kind of like the market for forged coins; not illegal as long as your not selling them as the real thing.
Demented But Determined.
Am I the only one that finds it a little odd that people are interested in purchasing items raided from tombs in the first place? O.o
It's how most of the artifacts in museums around the world left their home countries. Also, go to the houses of some old money types in New York and you'll find a shocking amount of looted art. Some of the looted art eventually ends up going back to museums (like the Levy-White collection now trickling toward the Met, though Shelby White still has quite a collection that might astonish you at home).
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
My coworker is an amateur paleontologist. He has a reasonably serious collection that takes up most of his house, and does a lot of trading as well as collecting. He has a lot of stories about fakes.
"Dominican Amber" is this beautiful, amazingly clear, amazingly inexpensive amber from the Dominican Republic. Except that when you do some research, it all comes through one company, who has filed patents on taking ground-up amber fragments and re-melting them under pressure into new-old amber.
Likewise, there are some amazing specimens of fossil fish coming out of China, where their skins are fantastically preserved so you can easily see individual scales. Only, a lot of them are completely identical. They're not cast replicas, though: they took an original, cast or machined a negative in metal, then put pieces of slate on top of the negative and vibrated it until it has excavated a perfect copy into the slate -- so it's pure, natural, ancient rock with something that looks exactly like a fossil. In fact, it's pretty hard to tell the difference even for people who know fossils, unless they have a microscope and some time to inspect the edges where the fossil meets the rock.
He said there are also loads of intricate fossils, stuff with lots of fine features (like the tentacles on squids) that have actually been broken off, and a talented fossil restorer has just cut a new one in the rock itself to make the fossil look complete.
All of these, like the fake antiques, have made the real ones less expensive -- but at the same time, they make a market larger, because more people can afford to buy, and at some point that could make the demand rise sharply overall, even though the individual pieces cost less, still contributing to increased demand for originals.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Sure it's misrepresentation. But who really cares? Anybody who's fooled by this has an expressed willingness to break the law and to help destroy humanity's cultural heritage. Ripping of these narcissists is not morally defensible, but it is hard to get worked up about.
Donald Westlake wrote an amusing novel ("High Adventure", and yes it's pun) about a marijuana smuggler who's conned into buying land that supposedly has Mayan ruins on it. Although there are no ancient artifacts to exploit, he discovers that the locals still know how to carve them. Of course, to make a profit, he has to pretend that he's a tomb robber. So you end up with perfectly legal trinkets being smuggled into the U.S., carefully concealed in bales of illegal weed! One of my favorites.
I think it's far preferable that a bunch of idiots on eBay buy fake "artifacts" than for real artifacts to be looted.
What's more is that I highly doubt that any court in the WORLD would think that these fools could have any reasonable expectation that these were in fact the genuine article. No reasonable expectation, no case.
My sig can beat up your sig.
It reduces the profitablility of ransacking historic sites and graves that might otherwise be studied scientifically.
Fuck collectors, they're 99% of the problem. And if it's good enough to fool a curator, then it's good enough to display in a museum. Not like the average schmuck walking through the museum is going to know the difference.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Case in point: my father collects roman coins and is quite expert. Recently he bought a coin on eBay that appeared perfectly real. But then some time later the same coin was for sale again. He contacted the other buyer and they traded high-res pics: they were identical down to the same defects. He then started a private inquiry on the buyers which led him to some russian (what a surprise) groups that sell perfect fakes on the Internet to people who want to then sell them on eBay. They do mass quantities (in the thousands). They even guarantee them against several types of scientific tests (including fluorescence and mass spectrography) ! I have no idea how they can do that, unless they have access to a certain amount of 2000 year old copper and other metals.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
What we are seeing here is the archeological equivalent of cracking DRM.
Once pieces can be reproduced indistinguishably from the real thing at cost X, the value of the real thing trends towards X.
Archeology's DRM has been cracked.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
A 100% genuine fake is still 100% genuine.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)