Market for antiquities
Market for antiquities
Arena
in which artifacts from ancient cultures are obtained from
archaeological sites and then bought and sold by dealers, museums,
scholars, and private collectors. The market concentrates on artifacts
regarded by buyers as artworks, including both objects created as art in
antiquity, such as ancient Greek sculptures, and objects originally
created for other uses which were re-categorized as artwork by modern
buyers, such as Pre-Columbian funerary ceramics (see Collection and Display of Classical Art).
A
market for these objects existed in antiquity, with the first
collectors of ancient Greek art, and the trade in ancient objects in the
Western world continued to focus primarily on artwork from Greece and
Rome until the 19th century. Subsequently, increasing access to other
areas of the world, the changing tastes of private collectors, and
expanding conceptions of the role of museums led to interest in
obtaining antiquities from other cultures. Recently, concerns about the
looting of archaeological sites to obtain antiquities that appear in the
legal market with forged paperwork (see Black market for art) have resulted in a reappraisal of the laws and practices of selling antiquities.
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