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What We Talk About When We Talk About Provenance: A Response to Chippindale and Gill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2016

Elizabeth Marlowe
Elizabeth Marlowe*
Affiliation:
Department of Art and Art History, Colgate University; Email: emarlowe@colgate.edu
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Abstract:

In an influential article published in 2000, David Gill and Christopher Chippindale devised a scale to assess the quality of the provenance information provided for the antiquities displayed in seven recent high-profile exhibitions or collections. This article critically reviews Chippindale and Gill’s provenance scale, arguing that the values it encodes legitimize some of the more intellectually harmful practices of dealers and curators. The scale also fails to differentiate between more intellectually responsible methods of hypothesizing provenance and those that merely generate houses of cards. An alternative model for assessing how antiquities are discussed in museum scholarship, focusing on epistemological precision and reflexivity, is offered.

Type
Discussion Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , August 2016 , pp. 217 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2016 

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