Fictions of Capital: Extracting, Liquidating, and Fabricating Islamic Ceramics for a Global Market

Earthenware bowl with slip decoration, northern Iran, 11th or 12th century with 20th-century additions. Detroit Institute of Art, no. 25.32.

Historical ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide. Many migrated westward during the late 19th-/early 20th-century heyday of Islamic art collecting, a time when craft skills in the Middle East were being redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project’s fanatical harvesting of artifacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities. This lecture re-encounters ceramics faking and forgery in the Middle East as a local form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism. The fictionalized objects of Islamic ceramics collecting married manual and cerebral ingenuity to create new objects of delight for elite collectors, in an environment where the structures of antiquities collection derive ultimately from colonial-era resource extraction and the structures of international banking.