Busted

With quickly changing mores around cultural heritage-not to mention intense new scrutiny from law enforcement-is it still safe to collect antiquities? 

- Julie Belcove

THE SCENE IS the invitation-only preview of the European Fine Art Fair, colloquially known as TEFAF, in New York last May. A savvy American collector who has known his way around the art world for decades is admiring a headless torso, gracefully chiselled in marble. All that’s left of the statue’s arms is a rough chunk above the right buttock, believed to be the remnant of a hand. The dealer, an elegant Parisian, carefully rotates the millennia-old figure on its turntable pedestal. “We have photographs of it before 1970,” he rushes to tell the collector—a claim that might sound like a non sequitur to the uninitiated but has become (faulty) shorthand in the antiquities trade for ‘legal to sell’.

After a recent barrage of headlines about archaeological artefacts seized from humiliated collectors and museums, dealers criminally indicted for trading in smuggled goods, and countries of origin agitating for the return of such pieces, valuable antiquities have become a hot topic, so to speak. It’s no wonder that some collectors are feeling skittish and dealers defensive. Navigating the art world can be daunting enough without the fear of law enforcement knocking on your door with a search warrant.

And yet interest in artefacts—whether from ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia or indigenous cultures—hasn’t abated. Unlike past eras, when scholarly collectors prided themselves on being among the foremost experts on narrow categories, today many collectors of contemporary art have begun to pepper their Warhols and Princes with Roman mosaics or Chinese Buddhas. At TEFAF, a handful of plum antiquities dealers are ensconced among the Gagosians and Paces of the world.