THURSDAY 13 APRIL 2000

DR NEIL BRODIE

140  I am quite interested—as somebody who loved watching Lovejoy—in this argument that the fine art market is somehow more respectable than the antiquities market. Where do you draw the line between what is an antiquity and what is an antique? When does a car become an antique? Every car which I have owned has just dropped completely in value, but if I had hung on to some of them for long enough they may have started to go up again. Where do we draw the line?

  (Dr Brodie) That is a very deceptively simple question and I am afraid that the answer cannot be as simple as everybody would like. I also suspect that different people would give you different answers. I suspect that the trade generally would give a more precise answer than I can. I think the trade might say, "Well, it is quite obvious that an antiquity is something that comes from the lands of classical antiquity. Maybe it is something which dates before AD 1000 from the general area of the Mediterranean or the Near East." That might be their description, I do not know, maybe they would have a different one. For archaeologists it is very hard to put a hard and fast definition on what an antiquity is. "Antiquity" is a convenient shorthand really and it varies from place to place. We can say, "Well, it is an object that has come out of the ground", but then that would exclude any archaeological monuments, and that is not a very satisfactory definition. We could put a time threshold on it and say that anything before AD 1000 is an antiquity, but then we would have to exclude a large part of the pre-Columbian archaeological heritage, we would have to exclude the Incas and the Aztecs, so obviously that is a very poor definition. I think we cannot actually say in strict terms, "An antiquity is something that was found in a particular context before a particular time", I do not think that works. If we go back to the steel mills and the coal mines, we have there a situation where we can go to the library and we can read about the steel industry and we can read about the coal industry. There are endless books that have been written about them, it is all well documented and there are archives, so the actual steel mills and the coal mines themselves are not our only source of information about society at that time or about the industry. What we do is we preserve a representative example so that we can go to all the other sources and then go to the one preserved steel mill. This is not the case with countries or societies only known through their archaeology, there is no documentary evidence at all, we are reliant upon the archaeology to reconstruct the history. I think it is in these circumstances, when they prevail, that looking at antiquities or what we would call antiquities, really provides us with the only information that there is of a society or of a certain aspect of society. I think that would be my definition at the end of the day. [18]

141  What do you do about a situation which must crop up again and again, where somebody takes along an object to a sale house and does not know much about it, except for being able to say that it has been in the family for years?

  (Dr Brodie) That is fine. If they know that, that is a provenance of sorts. If it has been in the family for years, then they can tell us how long it has been in the family. There is a general feeling, I think, now emerging, or a general agreement, that you have to have a cut-off somewhere. When we are talking about these issues we have to have a cut-off, we cannot just go back for hundreds and hundreds of years and try to put everything back in its original place. There is a consensus emerging that a reasonable cut-off date would be 1970, so that if anything was outside its country of origin before 1970 you know it is too far gone now. Anything moved out of its country of origin illegally after 1970 would be considered illicit. If somebody comes into a showroom and says, "This has been in my family since 1938", that is fine, it was out of the country of origin before 1970, so we would not consider that to be illicit.

142  How widely would you cast your net? Yesterday, by chance, I went into a shop in Chelsea where they had a film poster from 1956—which I am greatly tempted to buy, I am minded to say—would you include that in the kind of objects that you are talking about?

  (Dr Brodie) This goes back to my point that that would not be a primary source of information about society in the 1950s.

143  And very easily ascertainable in that case too?

  (Dr Brodie) Sorry.

144  Very easily ascertainable in that case?

  (Dr Brodie) Yes.

  Chairman: There is no doubt whatever about what it is, and since it is a very rare film, nobody would ever bother to re-print it.

145  Although we are at the early stages of this inquiry, I think it may be of great help to all of the industry. It seems to me that it is very clear that it has already done an awful lot for secondhand car dealers, politicians and journalists, because we have almost moved off the bottom of the league. Can you paint a picture of the dealers? They cannot all be as bad as we seem to be hearing, surely?

  (Dr Brodie) I would not really like to comment on the dealing community because I do not have dealings with them. I am not a collector, I do not buy antiquities.

146  There must be a mood that you would be happy with their operations?

  (Dr Brodie) I think that is a personal thing. If you know people, you know generally how they operate and you must know how open they are with you and how reliable they are with you. There are going to be other dealers who are particularly shady and will withhold information, but I think that is very much a personal thing. It will be part of the relationship between a purchaser and a dealer. I do not think that I am in a position to start commenting on who would be a reliable dealer or an unreliable dealer.

147  Why do you think the British Government has refused so far to sign the UNIDROIT and UNESCO agreements?

  (Dr Brodie) I would imagine that they are afraid that it will damage the British economy, but I do not know, I do not think they have ever said that. They think it might damage the art trade perhaps.

148  Is it more likely to be the administration required or are there special interests in the people who are represented in DCMS, not within the department itself, but those closely associated with it?

  (Dr Brodie) It is very difficult for us to answer this, because when the Government announced in February that it would not ratify the UNESCO Convention it gave no reasons at that time, so we are left guessing the reasons. We can look at reasons which have been given in the past. First there is this problem: you have to produce a list of objects for the UNESCO Convention, and obviously that is very tiresome and we are probably not able to do it. That objection now has been shown to be a false one. In actual fact you can just have a set of categories, which already exist in Britain for purposes of export licencing. So that is one argument which we can dispose of. There is the argument that the art trade might be damaged. We have looked at the United States here. They ratified UNESCO in 1983 and over the past decade their art trade has out-performed the British one, so obviously it has not had an adverse effect there. Then there are the legal points which I find more difficult to comment on because I am not a lawyer. I think Professor Palmer can probably deal with those better than I can.

149  Have you thought whether the net itself will begin to open up the situation altogether, because even the private collectors like to show off what they have now and again to the public? Has there been any attempt to put these collections on the net so that people can get in and see them?

  (Dr Brodie) Do you mean the Internet?

150  Yes.

  (Dr Brodie) I know of one major collection which is going on the Internet, but I do not particularly go looking for them. The more worrying thing about the Internet is the appearance of Internet auctions and Internet sales. They are going to be very, very hard to regulate. We were talking before about Britain being badly looted at the moment. I am currently monitoring Internet sales for a particular category of British objects, and after a year or so maybe I will have an answer as to what is moving out of the country. It is quite depressing because you can see adverts for Roman coins, fresh out of the ground in Britain and their current location is the United States, and they are up for sale on the Internet. I am sure they have not gone through any kind of documenting system here and I think that that is quite worrying. I am worried about the Internet really helping the market become more deregulated.

151  Would there be a case for licensing dealers so that you can only deal in antiquities if you had a licence to do so, and if you were then, of course, caught dealing in something which was stolen you would be under the threat of losing that licence, and if you lost your licence you could then no longer be a dealer?

  (Dr Brodie) I find myself in favour of that idea, but I doubt if the dealers themselves would be very favourable towards it.

  Mr Maxton: It is a thought.

152  Presumably you could do what you said with regard to specific objects, namely have a minimum turnover. In Manchester along Stockport Road there is a whole chain of antique shops, as there are in some of the smaller towns as you go out towards Buxton, and some of those may do a great deal of trade, some may do a little, but presumably all have to do VAT returns and on the basis of that you could have a minimum turnover, could you not?

  (Dr Brodie) Yes. It would be interesting to analyse the structure of the market, because obviously there is a trickle-down effect here. There must be points in the market which have a higher turnover and if you could focus on these points it would then mean that as items came through it we would have some sort of control.

153  To follow up on the conversation with Mr Keen, when we were in Rome we went along to UNIDROIT and Marina Schneider gave us an account of this. When I asked her what good UNIDROIT had actually done in stopping illegal trade I think it is fair to summarise her answer as, "None." That being so, what is the point of signing up to a convention whose achievements by the person responsible for it are not proclaimed as being substantial, to put it mildly?

  (Dr Brodie) I think Miss Schneider was possibly being unduly gloomy.

154  I do not think that she was gloomy, I think she was talking herself up.

  (Dr Brodie) Other commentators who have been very closely associated with UNIDROIT have said that its major effect probably has been in the area of due diligence and encouraging the concept of due diligence. It has been very influential there and we can see this moving through into other areas. You have the recent COPAT codes which have just been released. I think people would argue that even if nobody signs UNIDROIT it has been influential at least in improving standards in the market. I think it is wrong to say it has had no effect whatsoever. Also, in a way it is like a bolt-on piece to the UNESCO Convention, so as a stand alone piece of legislation it is probably not as effective. There is no mechanism in UNIDROIT to allow import controls to be placed. There are in UNESCO. So you really need to ratify UNESCO as well as UNIDROIT for it to have its maximum effect.

  Chairman: Dr Brodie, thank you very much indeed. It has been a very, very useful session indeed.