Irving Finkel: evaluation

Transcript context

……that are the raindrops from which you can reconstruct the waterfall. Precisely so. And it’s not a valid criticism to say to us that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says. “It should go here, it should go there ’cause it’s not on exhibition.” But we’re not doing it for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination. See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers. Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary, if you’re a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate. And with the passage of time, the significance of objects, what they stand for, what they meant, and what they can still mean shifts. And the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own contemporary parallels. So the benefit of distance, storage, and contemplation is inestimable. There are so many questions I want to ask you. What wisdom do you think the people from whom these artifacts came had that we, the modern-day humans, may have lost or lost in part or in whole? It’s often, as you’ve spoken about, we see the ancient peoples as lesser, dumber, more primitive. And you’ve spoken about how they are basically the same.…

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