My ability to happily suspend disbelief appears to have withered.
There's
a shop stuffed with Beatles memorabilia at 231 Baker Street, and a
shop dedicated to Elvis memorabilia next to that. A couple of doors
further up, nestled between numbers 237 and 241-243, lie two black
doors. The one on the right is the entryway to the Sherlock Holmes
Museum and shop, which sells Sherlock Holmes memorabilia; the one on
the left purports to be the entrance of 221B Baker St, the fictional
address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
Entering the shop, you pay your 6 pounds to be allowed upstairs. For the record, this is more expensive than:
- Taking a week or two to really immerse yourself in the halls of the British Museum;
- Having a pie and pint in a pub on Portobello Road after a morning's antique-gazing; or
- Strolling the spaces of the Tate Modern.
The stairs are lined with a clutter of old paintings, and
framed prints and photos; its rooms, two per floor, have old furniture,
and cabinets cluttered with Victoriana; and its rear windows have a
view of the shop's glass dome and air conditioning vents.
In
the sitting room on the first floor a young blonde in a housemaid
costume sat on the divan studying for her driving test, and doing her
best to ignore us tourists. The letters "VR", for Victoria Regina,
were hammered into one wall. Purportedly they were bulletholes but it
was obvious to any amateur detective from the lack of depth and the
outward fraying of the wallpaper that this was not the case.
"Sherlock
Holmes's bedroom" contained a violin, and a stuffed stoat in a small
diorama that hung on the wall; "Dr Watson's bedroom" contained
medicines and medical instruments. Finally, on the top floor a rogue's
gallery of wax figures appeared. "Perhaps it means more if you've read
the books", said Kathrine, who hadn't. I had, and it really didn't.
I'm
not quite sure what I was expecting, but disappointment was probably
not it. I've always liked mockumentaries and mocked-up documents, even
Sherlockean ones (Infocom's The London Thames). But I didn't like the Sherlock Holmes Museum.
After about 15 minutes we escaped in search of the Tate Modern.
It's a wicked thing to tell fibs - Sherlock Holmes in The Three Gables
Portobello
Road markets, on the other hand, I would have enjoyed more had I known
my antiques. I'd first read about it in Jonathan Gash's books - not
that it's particularly obscure, mind you, with its arcades,
shops, and stalls thronged with bargain hunters. And while I can enjoy
reading books on antiques or watching antiques shows (multiple cameras
were filming in the market at the time), my fundamental flaw is that I
can't tell if something was made in 1987 or 1798.
Nor am I
alone. "I really like that plastic comb" said Kerry. The plastic comb
in question was half a foot long, and perhaps suitable for keeping a
pompadour in place. Flipping over the price tag - 58 pounds - I
suggested that there was a possibility it might be tortoiseshell. But
it may as well have been plastic -- and I'm not so sure I could tell
the difference by sight between ivory and high quality plastic or high
quality plastic and jade either. Nor would I have been able to tell
that the familiar white-on-blue of Wedgwood ware were available for a
knock-down-price because they were made only a few years ago if it
weren't for one piece kindly having its date contained within the
commemorative design.
So unless you've expertise you're lost.
You could, I
suppose, use guidebooks but you're still vulnerable to reproductions.
A number of people got fooled by an Action Comics #1 (Superman) reprint
a couple of decades back, spending tens of thousands on something that
was worth a dollar. Old photos and prints are also trivially reprintable. On one visit to Portobello Road, Kerry's flatmate Claire
found one "original" which appeared to have been produced on a home
printer.
"A bad forgery's the ultimate insult" - Lovejoy in The Vatican Rip
Even
the experts at the British Museum have been known to be fooled by
particularly good forgeries. Not very long ago, a trio living in a
council flat managed to produce forgeries acquired in the BM, Tate
Modern, and other public institutions and private collections. And
every so often new forgeries are detected, with technological advances
providing equipment better able to source materials and techniques
used.
Just because an item is detected as a forgery doesn't mean that it necessarily gets
removed from display, however. The museum's crystal skull, for
instance, is known not to be Mayan, being probably 19th century (and
improbably alien) in origin. Forgeries, it seems, may have sufficient
relevance or context to justify their labelled public presence.
Replicas too, appear throughout - there are castings of ancient
carvings that present the condition things they were in before an extra
century or two of damage, for instance, and a copy of the Rosetta Stone for hands-on
examination.
The collection of the British Museum is wonderful. To skim it takes a full day; to really appreciate it properly and do all the talks would take a lot longer. And yet, not everyone is happy with the depth of the museum's collection. The Egyptians want the Rosetta Stone back, and the Greeks want the Elgin Marbles that once adorned the Parthenon. It was only a couple of years ago that the remains of Aboriginal Australians were finally removed from display and returned to Australia for interment.
The Elgin Marbles may have been acquired after permission was granted by the Ottoman Turks who ruled Greece at that time, and had they remained at the Parthenon they could have been further damaged, destroyed, or perhaps ended up lost to a bank vault in Switzerland or a villa in Buenos Aires. But should possession and recent history trump the rights of the native people of a colonised land to regain items of their heritage, even if those aboriginal inhabitants just happen to be European? Is promoting interest in Greek History to visitors anywhere near sufficient justification?
It makes me wonder if museums really need to display genuine items or if, in general, careful copies would suffice. If nobody but an expert can look at something that purports to be ancient and tell that it's painted plaster or resin or tea-stained wood or metal-worked crystal or plastic, and it's made with love and with great skill, then is there a need for exhibits that are aimed at educating and entertaining the public to present things that really are ancient? Is a desire to see things that were crafted millennia ago rather than indistinguishable facsimiles entirely rational? And if a replica perfect in every way were produced and you knew it was a replica, could you suspend sufficient disbelief to value the experience of it anywhere near as much as the experience of the original?
"Unbelievable" - Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
