| Original Message: Re: Nice pictures, but.... |
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Hi Will, I am surprised by your reply. But what it means is that I have to take a closer look and not just let the images whiz by. I felt some of these pieces were probably fakes/reproductions, but I did not have the extreme response that you generate. (Of course, there is also the issue of presuming that whomever composes such pieces of exposition knows what he/she is talking about—which can be a very dicey assumption.) As I was discussing with Joyce yesterday on the phone, the problem with presentations such as these, and in various books, is that there is some implied archaeological authenticity—as though these items were recovered from tombs or other sites, when MANY are just found in the marketplace (as you well know). But a presentation that suggests the archaeological "rightness" of a piece just dilutes what people think they know about "tomb jade," or whatever one wants to call it (and whatever the topic may be). Consequently, we find that someone who implicitly believes his/her "ancient jade" is authentic uses these very publications (or Net articles) to bolster-up the pedigree of the ersatz artifacts—further muddying the waters that are already densely cloudy. The Chinese have been making reproductions of earlier styles of carving for generations—and anyone who knows this field even a little has known for a very long time that the misrepresentation of copies is rampant. Nevertheless, it is in the past ten years that the marketplace has been FLOODED with a new generation of fakes, that (if they copy anything) imitate beads/objects that are so esoteric and generally unknown as to have no easily-found prototypes for comparison. So it is easy to understand how it comes to be that people are fooled into believing a fake is authentic—even when various authorities say otherwise. As with fake amber (the subject of my original fame as a bead researcher over thirty years ago), I have to say—I LIKE this stuff..., but I struggle to help people understand that the pretty and cunning is not necessarily ancient and authentic—but can be not-without-merit in terms of its charm. Jamey All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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