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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtis, post: 8258708, member: 26430&quot;]I&#039;ve appreciated hearing your perspective on this and related topics, and feel I&#039;m in agreement on anything substantial.</p><p><br /></p><p>To be fair, though, disturbing as they may be, those particular posts are 5-6 years old (and only a few between 2009 and 2016). As a rather early career academic at the time, his perspective could&#039;ve &quot;matured&quot; a bit since then.</p><p><br /></p><p>What I find off-putting and discrediting is mainly that he was mixing it up with the <i>ad hominem-</i>frenemies-of-the-numismatic-cultural-property debate, Paul Barford (who I find offensive quite apart from being mistaken) and Peter Tompa (whose advocacy I feel sometimes veers into the kind of &quot;intellectual dishonesty&quot; you mentioned in another comment recently). I feel all of that stuff does harm to everyone; while don&#039;t want to see it at all, I definitely don&#039;t want to see someone in a non-advocacy position being involved. But it was years ago, and he&#039;s not exactly an old grayhair even now.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I&#039;ve heard Elkins speaking more recently, it&#039;s clear he isn&#039;t inclined to support a pro-collector perspective. But, I didn&#039;t think he said anything specific&nbsp; (recently) that I thought was unreasonable or intellectually dishonest, which I agree (if understood you right earlier), is one of the biggest problems with the debate. (That, and interested parties seem to be either empirically uninformed or not to have even considered some of their opposition&#039;s central arguments -- on both sides, or on all three or four, depending how you count.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I agree with what you&#039;ve said above about the history of collecting and our scholarly knowledge on the topic (as well as the very presence of many/ most coins in institutional collections). I think there are reasonable arguments to be made that antiquities (including coins) shouldn&#039;t be traded entirely <i>laissez-faire</i>, but I also think it&#039;s unreasonable to try to regulate away demand, and would be self-defeating for those wishing to study or protect coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Personally, I (very modestly) financially support both the ANS and the ACCG, despite disagreeing with noticeable portions of what each says and does. But I do so because I think they each have a valuable role to play (even if I wish it were played a bit differently).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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