Invisible hands: fabrication, forgery, and the art of Islamic ceramics

Abstract

"In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out iwth the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics. In this stunning work of art history, Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications -- as modern as they were believed to be medieval -- moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly skilled craftspeople to meet the demands of Western collectors. Shifting away from the moralizing stance of past studies on reconstructed Islamic ceramics, Graves shows how fabrication and forgery became a major site of participation in modern global capitalism and establishes an entirely new paradigm in the history of art. Drawing on a substative new body of provenance research, archaeology, economic history, and laboratory analysis, Invisible Hands centers previously marginalized objects, reframing the practices of fabrication and forgery as crucial forms of invention and artistic skill worthy of study and admiration."-- inside front cover flap

Contents

Introduction : fictions of capital -- Middle Eastern antiquities : the making of a modern marketplace -- Objects of desire, in and out of time : an extractivist history of Islamic ceramics -- Making gold from base matter : potsherds, paint, and patience -- The new Babylon : dealing in an American century -- The riddle of Raqqa -- Epilogue : fragile things.