Ivory towers
In “Tusk force” (September 4), Department of Conservation (DoC) national compliance manager Marta Lang is quoted as claiming, “That cabinet is worth a lot of money because … it has ivory on it.”
She is sadly mistaken. It is typical of unimaginative bureaucratic culture and completely misses the point. The ivory is an integral part of the whole, but does not determine the value of the cabinet. The cabinet’s value is in its history: provenance, rarity, artistic quality and the cabinetmaker himself, Johann Levien.
Levien made furniture in a small hut on Wellington’s waterfront in the early 1840s. By 1847, he was in London making furniture for Queen Victoria, he received a Royal Warrant and went on to become world famous. A career that started in New Zealand.
There will be room for discretion for the minister, or the director-general of DoC, to simply override the obviously silly hurdles, particularly given the background of unintended errors amid lockdown last year. The fact that some ivory is incorporated within a historical artwork is clearly not going to
