Continuing the theme of my last post, I came across this online collection of Mao badges. In his blog, the collector says:
I buy a bunch every time I go to China, adding them to the ones I started wearing as a teenager in the late 1960s.
There are two interesting points here.
i) he adds to his collection each time he goes to China. It’s got to be assumed, therefore, that a large proportion are reproductions;
ii) he began collecting and wearing the badges as a teenager in the 60s. This is really interesting, because, for my research, I am collecting examples of the contemporaeous appropriation of CultRev material culture in the West.
As I suggested in my last post, reproductions of CultRev material culture satisfy a ready market for revolutionary ‘exotica’. Presumably much of this is purchased by tourists and collectors outside China (though, of course, there are examples of Chinese collectors – see Jennifer Hubbert’s paper – though it appears that they collect for very different reasons than Westerners). But does it really matter if the objects they purchase are genuine artefacts or not? I suppose, so long as they haven’t been mislead, it doesn’t. But a quick look at Ebay suggests that some sellers of supposedly genuine CultRev material are less than scrupulous.
