Month: September 2007

Persepolis Fragment on Sale


This Persepolis relief fragment owned by Denyse Berend will be up for sale at a Christie’s auction on October 25th. Iran temporarily blocked the last auction in an unsuccessful bid to reclaim the fragment. You can read about the case and my reaction to the High court decision by clicking on the label below.

All indications are that Iran will not bid on the fragment. I wonder if there was any attempt by Iran to work out a compromise with Mme. Berend?

I’m reminded of a 2004 article by Professor James Nafziger (A Blueprint for Avoiding and Resolving Cultural Heritage Disputes, 9 Art, Antiquity and Law 3 (2004)). In it he points out that cultural heritage disputes are adversarial. In this case, both parties have solid, and perhaps legitimate arguments but only one side will retain the tablet. He discusses the parable of the two sisters, each of whom wants one orange:

How should it be allocated? One solution would be to award the orange to the sister with the greater ‘rights’ to the orange. That is the strictly adversarial approach that often characterizes the formal resolution of cultural property disputes today. A second solution would be to award half of the orange to each of the sisters, an appealing compromise until it becomes apparent that one sister wants the orange only to eat its pulp whereas the other wants only the orange peel for cooking. Thus, although compromises may often be preferable to either/or solutions, they typically fail to take contending interests, as opposed to stated positions, into account. A third, better informed allocation of the disputed orange would be to encourage the sisters to express their respective interests in the orange and then to work out a mutually productive, more-than-zero-sum solution to a dispute.

Professor Nafziger and the International Law Association have proposed a more collaborative process which has a great deal of merit I think. In this case, Mme. Berend wants to sell the tablet without admitting any wrongdoing, and Iran wants the tablet returned, and perhaps a vindication that its cultural heritage has been taken. Surely there is a middle ground here? In any event the auction will be quite interesting, and I wonder if Iran’s legal challenge will have an impact on the purchase price. It could open any cultural institutions to an ethical claim for repatriation or it more likely cemented the purchaser’s title which is now beyond legal challenge.
(Hat tip to Chuck Jones for alerting me to the auction).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Why Distort the Facts when they support you?

The Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded to the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad by saying, “Stuff happens… the images you are seeing over and over and over. It’s the same pictures of some person walking out of some building with a vase and you see it twenty times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases?” Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” Those are callous and ridiculous comments to be sure, and there were a myriad of failings in protecting the museum when hostilities began.

However Naomi Klein in her new book The Shock Doctrine is just plain wrong when she attempts to criticize the coalition forces after the Iraq invasion. An excerpt of her new book is published in today’s Guardian. After reading the piece I wondered, why distort the facts so badly when the solid facts actually could support your position. Here is the relevant excerpt:

The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was.

“The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Gone are 80% of the museum’s 170,000 priceless objects.” The national library, which contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur’ans had disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell. “Our national heritage is lost,” pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher. A local merchant said of the museum, “It was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn’t recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen.” McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called it “a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed”.

Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organised salvage missions in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artefacts has been recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the memory lobotomy was intentional – part of Washington’s plans to excise the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their own model. “Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture,” 70-year-old Ahmed Abdullah told the Washington Post, “and they want to wipe out our culture.”

As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it is true that Rumsfeld did not plan for Iraq to be sacked – but he did not take measures to prevent it from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.

During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26 Pentagon memo to coalition command listed “in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad”. Second on the list was the museum. Other warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international police contingent in with the troops to maintain public order -another suggestion that was ignored.

Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they weren’t sent. There are numerous reports of US soldiers hanging out by their armoured vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove by – a reflection of the “stuff happens” indifference coming straight from Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting, but in other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International Airport was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time, smashed furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the runway: “US soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of the planes’ fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and popped out every windshield.” The result was an estimated $100m worth of damage to Iraq’s national airline – which was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early and contentious partial privatisation.

From what I understand, Klein argues in her book that crisis has been manipulated by leaders to bring about sweeping social change. That seems like an interesting hypothesis, and its the kind of controversial and engaging argument that I usually find interesting. But in discussing the looting of the Iraq museum, she gets a myriad of facts wrong, distorts the truth, and wholly fails to account for the good work American soldiers, led by former prosecutor, and then Colonel Matthew Bogdanos did in tracking down objects. I talked about this last year.

Most notably, the 170,000 figure has been discredited, and the number of objects still missing is probably around 3,000. That’s still an alarming number to be sure, but why quote old and inaccurate estimates? Also, the Iraqi military occupied the site, and fired on coalition troops from the museum. To be sure, the invading forces dropped the ball when they neglected to secure the museum after the museum was abandoned, but that paints a very different picture from what Klein describes here. When you have plenty of good accurate evidence to support your position, why would you resort to this kind of lazy inaccuracy? I presume that in her zeal to lay out here position she neglected to account for other points of view. This is the same kind of myopic view which has plagued the current administration. It becomes all the more puzzling though when you consider Rumsfeld did most of Klein’s work for her.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Native American Art Returned

Scott Sonner has an interesting AP story on the decision by the US Forest Service to return boulders bearing petroglyphs to the site they were removed from four years ago. Here’s an excerpt:

U.S. Forest Service officials never believed John Ligon’s claim that he dug up two boulders etched with American Indian petroglyphs four years ago to put them in his front yard for safekeeping.

But they did share a concern he voiced that someone would steal the centuries-old rock art on national forest land a few football fields away from a growing housing development. After they recovered the stolen property, federal land managers struggled for years with the question of what to do with the rock etchings of a bighorn sheep, an archer, a lizard and a wheel.

Now, after initially thinking it was best to place them in a state museum, the agency — in consultation with local tribal leaders — has decided to return them to the mountainside where they were for perhaps as long as 1,000 years before they were disturbed.

“It belongs out there,” said Linda Shoshone, cultural resources director for the Washoe Tribe in Nevada and California. She and others said removing the petroglyphs from the site takes them out of their spiritual context.

“I realize it is a tough decision on our part because we don’t want it to be damaged any more than it has been,” Shoshone said. “But I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe the more we educate John Q. Public at the sites, the more they will help us preserve stuff like this.”

The theft of the petroglyphs on the northwest edge of suburban Reno garnered national attention at the time and still reverberates through the community.

“The significant assault on Native American memories and cultural items is as bad as walking into a Catholic church and taking a cross off the wall,” said Arlan Melendez, chairman of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.

Archaeologists believe the rock pile where the drawings were located was a hunting blind where 800 to 1,000 years ago tribesmen lay in wait for deer and elk migrating from Peavine Peak toward the Truckee River valley below.

The site is visible three miles away from the upper floors of the federal courthouse in downtown Reno where the accused looters stood trial in 2003.

That’s an interesting problem with no easy solution. If they return the petroglyphs, they risk another theft. But the art loses something if its housed in a museum I think. The only real solution is to educate the public about the benefits of archaeology, why it is important, and how easy it can be to lose information from important sites forever. I think that is one of the biggest reasons why more nations should adopt the approach most of the UK has taken with the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which David Gill talks about today as well. As Professor Patty Gerstenblith has argued, a nation protects those elements of its past which it values. As Linda Shoshone, cultural resources director for the Washoe Tribe in Nevada and Colorado, said in the article “It is really hard to educate a society that has no culture here in the United States — our land. They left it in Europe… But when we teach fourth graders about things like this, they are going to teach their parents.”

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Hire This JD/PhD!

Please forgive the self-promotion, but I am approaching the end of my time as a PhD candidate here at the University of Aberdeen, and my wife is quite understandably tired of supporting my education habit. Two 3-year postgraduate programs really are about the limit, so I’ve reluctantly concluded that I should get myself employed.

I will be submitting my thesis tentatively titled “The US and UK Response to the Illicit Trade in Cultural Property” in November of this year. If you think I would be a good addition to your law faculty, arts institution, law firm (or anything really) please visit my web page where I’ve listed my qualifications, publications, teaching experience, and research interests. Location is no obstacle, we would be excited to move anywhere in North America or Europe especially.

I have submitted my information to the AALS, so any law professors who may enjoy my writing, I would appreciate a kind word to your hiring chairs. I’m cautiously optimistic about the process, but I would also be interested in some teaching fellowships as well.

If you have further questions you can email me at derek.fincham “at” gmail.com.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Fourth-Largest Criminal Enterprise?

Cameron Skene of CanWest News Service had an overview of art theft over the weekend. He talked to the usual folks who speculate about the size of the art theft problem, and gave the normal ranking of art theft as the fourth-largest criminal activity.

Estimating the size of the illicit market is a difficult undertaking. Skene writes “Interpol ranks art theft as the fourth largest criminal enterprise after drugs, money laundering and weapons.” This appears incorrect, but its a common mistake. A number of media reports and even scholarly articles use this ranking, but I’m not sure its accurate. Interpol certainly does not endorse it:

We do not possess any figures which would enable us to claim that trafficking in cultural property is the third or fourth most common form of trafficking, although this is frequently mentioned at international conferences and in the media. In fact, it is very difficult to gain an exact idea of how many items of cultural property are stolen throughout the world and it is unlikely that there will ever be any accurate statistics. National statistics are often based on the circumstances of the theft (petty theft, theft by breaking and entering or armed robbery), rather than the type of object stolen.

The best estimates I have found are the FBI’s rough account of $6 Billion annually, and the various reports given to the UK’s Department of Culture Media and Sport Illicit Trade Advisory Panel which was given a number of very different estimates. I wonder, do any readers have any better or more concrete estimates? Empirical research is very popular in legal scholarships these days, does anyone have any ideas about how we could calculate the size?


Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

More on the Acroliths at UVA

The University of Virginia’s student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily has an editorial today on the two acroliths in the University Museum. Contrary to some speculation, there has been no confirmation the objects will return to Italy, and neither the University nor the Italian Culture Ministry have made any announcements yet. The Cavalier has another story by Laura Hoffman and Thomas Madrecki, which reveals some interesting details:

University Associate General Counsel Richard Kast said the artifacts were also given to the University by an anonymous donor.
Kast added that the University entered into an agreement with the donor to neither publicize the acroliths nor reveal the identity of the donor.
“Under the agreement that is in place, the University is not supposed to openly publicize the fact that they have the acroliths,” Kast said.
Kast also said, however, that the University is “obviously” in the possession of the marbles.
“There is an agreement, and the agreement has been in place for a while,” Kast said.
Several Italian news outlets have reported that the acroliths will be returned to the Aidone region in 2008. The New York Times article quoted Beatrice Basile, the art superintendent for the Italian province of Enna, as saying “We’re happy they’re coming back.”
According to Malcolm Bell, III, University professor of art history and director of ongoing University excavations in Morgantina, the museum will display the artifacts until the end of this calendar year.
Bell added that he is “eager to see them returned” and “optimistic” about the possibility of their return to Italy. Bell also said the Times article was accurate.
Kast declined to comment on the possibility of ongoing inquiries from the Italian government to the University in reference to the acroliths.

That seems odd. They have these objects but are not allowed to publish the fact. It seems there is an agreement, but no announcement has been made. As the editorial asks:

Too many questions remain unanswered. Even more, it seems, haven’t been asked. Who owns the masks? To whom do they rightly belong? Does the University Art Museum plan to return the masks? And if not, why? Until the public learns the truth, the circumstances surrounding the masks will continue to arouse suspicion.

I think that is exactly right. It seems like the University of Virginia has a good relationship with Italian authorities certainly, and perhaps is acting as a go-between for the anonymous donor, most likely Tempelman, and Italy.

On an unrelated note, unlike student papers here in the UK, (especially the atrocious one run by the students here at the University of Aberdeen) student papers back in the States take their jobs seriously and do some real reporting.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

"Loot" Reviewed


This weekend I’ve had a chance to finally finish Loot: Inside the World of Stolen Art, by Thomas McShane with Dary Matera. McShane worked as an undercover agent for the FBI for 36 years, and recovered a number of works of art. In order to win the confidence of the handlers of the stolen works, McShane had to adopt aliases, most notably Thomas Bishop, the elegantly dressed art buyer.

The book starts strong, revealing the recovery of Rembrandt’s the Rabbi. The theft from the Bonnat Museum was “[a]s is so often the case with art thefts…a crime of opportunity rather than precision planning. On 1 March 1971, a young French art student named Robert LeBec visited the Bonnat Museum as he often did to study the brushtrokes of the ancient masters.” The travels of the work reveal a great deal about art theft. The work was very easy to steal, but the handlers were unable to unload it, and it seemed to cause them nothing but trouble. I enjoyed the description of smaller art museums as “reminiscent of the ‘easy jug’ banks American bandit John Dillinger robbed with impunity 40 years earlier. Security was lax or non-existent. Alarm systems, if present, were rudimentary and easily overcome. The atmosphere was friendly and hands-on.”

Most of the book accounts how McShane transformed himself into his art buying alter-ego. He would invariably set up a “buy”, then authenticate the work, checking the brush strokes, paint composition, nails on the canvas; and then would signal the other agents listening in to make the bust. Interestingly McShane was always arrested with the thieves, to preserve his cover.

The stories are interesting, and fun to read. The book was great summer reading, but unfortunately it never seems to go below the surface. Part of that may be that McShane is unable or unwilling to reveal what goes on behind the scenes. For example, he would always get “tipped” that someone was looking to unload a Picasso or major work. It would be interesting to know how difficult it really is to fence stolen artwork. McShane gives a baseline. A thief can usually expect to get 10% of a stolen painting’s value. But how often to museums cave in and pay a ransom. What about insurance companies? Is it more important to recover the work or catch the thief?

One of the most interesting chapters involved Picasso’s still-missing Man with the Purple Hat. It was a 6 foot bright-purple canvas which was stolen on the way from Houston’s Jasper Museum to Manhattan. The work was sealed in a truck in Houston, but when it arrived in New York the painting was missing. The authors argue this is a likely “Dr. No” theft, where someone commissions a theft: “He, and she, exist all right. From Riyadh to Beverly Hills, they’re out there gazing up at their special prizes each and every day, proving once again that ‘stolen apples taste the sweetest.’ They’re just extremely difficult to catch.” There is no hard evidence that these evil geniuses are out there, but McShane should command some deference for his long service and many recoveries.

In the book’s second half, some momentum is lost, as the prose gets a bit muddled; and for some reason the author’s start describing each new character based on their likeness to Hollywood and tv Celebrities like Kojak and the like. Some of this is regained at the end with McShane’s take on the largest unsolved art theft: the theft of 13 works from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. I enjoyed the speculation on that theft a great deal. But shockingly, if the thieves have sold the works on, the statute of limitations for the theft has expired, so the actual thieves may be able to collect on part of the $5 million reward. One wonders how often that goes on, but seldom is a full and open account given.

It’s a fun read, but ultimately it left me wanting more substance. In the epilogue a call is made for increased security and criminal penalties. But how? That does not seem to provide a complete picture, as museums are often strapped for funds, and they have to walk a balance between access to the public and security. No discussion of provenance was given, or how effective stolen art databases have become. I was also disappointed more was not said about current efforts at the FBI, including the Art Crime Team which seems to have had some notable successes. The authors seem to think this is still not enough, claiming that only one agent works full time on the problem. I had believed it was closer to half a dozen, but perhaps many of these agents have other duties. In any event it is a fun read, has some exciting stories to tell, but ultimately does not help us arrive at a better way of actually thwarting art theft.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Another Repatriation to Italy

Elisabetta Povoledo reports in today’s New York Times that the University of Virginia Art Museum will likely be returning these two acroliths to Sicily in 2008. An acrolith is a statue in which the body and torso are made of wood while the extremities are carved in marble.

The reports are coming from Italian news outlets, but neither the University of Virginia nor the Italian Culture Ministry are commenting. Of course the University of Virginia has been conducting work at Morgantina for decades, and Malcolm Bell III has written on the antiquities problem in Italy.

Povoledo’s speculation of the chain of title of these acroliths is quite interesting:

Silvio Raffiotta, the Italian prosecutor who for more than a decade investigated the two acroliths, has said they were illegally excavated by tomb robbers in Morgantina in the late 1970s. They are believed to represent the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, whose cult was deeply rooted in Morgantina, which fell to the Romans in 211 B.C.

In all, two heads, three feet and three hands were found; the body, most likely made of wood, might not have survived the centuries underground.

In a 1988 deposition, Giuseppe Mascara, a former tomb robber and antiquities dealer, told Mr. Raffiotta that in the spring of 1979 a young man had offered to sell him the two marble heads, which he said had been excavated in Morgantina.

“They were in the trunk of a car,” Mr. Mascara said in the deposition, and of “exceptional make.” But he did not buy them “because I didn’t know the man offering them to me and because of the asking price, which was enormous.”

Vincenzo Cammarata, another antiquities dealer who has been investigated for handling looted objects, also testified that he had been shown the acroliths, in the summer of 1979.

Mr. Raffiotta’s investigations began some years later and tracked the acroliths to the London showroom of the antiquities dealer Robin Symes, who is being investigated in Italy for dealing in looted art. Before arriving in London, the objects moved through Switzerland, a typical route used to disguise provenance.

In 1980 Mr. Symes sold the pair to Mr. Tempelsman, reportedly for $1 million. No evidence suggests that Mr. Tempelsman was aware that the statues might have been illegally excavated.

Mr. Raffiotta first made a claim to the statues in 1988, while they were on exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The museum immediately returned them to their anonymous lender.

In news reports Mr. Tempelsman later emerged as their owner. In 1994, upon the death of his companion Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, schoolchildren in Aidone sent Mr. Tempelsman a condolence note that also asked him to return the acroliths to their hometown.

Italian officials began quietly negotiating with Mr. Tempelsman, and Forbes magazine has reported that a deal was reached in which Mr. Tempelsman would give the acroliths to an institution, which would then return them to Italy after a specific period.

Mario Bondioli Osio, who was involved in those negotiations, said this week that he could not comment on the details until next year. “But I am convinced they will return home,” he said.

It would be helpful to know how this repatriation came about. The Forbes article does not appear to be published online yet. These acroliths have been displayed at UVA’s Art Museum for five years. Was there some kind of arrangement where Tempelsman could donate the works to UVA, receive the substantial income tax deduction, and then the work would be returned to Italy? If so American taxpayers are subsidizing this repatriation of illicit antiquities, and that strikes me as very troubling.

Another related question: Tempelsman is a diamond dealer, who has been a vocal supporter of the Kimberley process; perhaps there needs to be a kind of Kimberley process for antiquities acquisitions?

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com