Category: Uncategorized

Rick St. Hilaire has a detailed discussion supporting S.2212:

The proposed bill clarifies the spirit of a federal law in force for over 35 years, but weakened in the last few years. Congress in 1965 passed IFSA (formally known as the Immunity from Seizure Under Judicial Process of Cultural Objects Imported for Temporary Exhibition or Display).  Lawmakers passed it because they wanted to promote the importation of art.  They wanted to let foreign art lenders know with certainty that their cultural works would not become entangled in litigation once on American soil.  

Best of luck to all the teams competing at the Cultural Heritage Law Moot Court Competition in Chicago this weekend. The competition is sponsored by DePaul and the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Protection.

The problem involves a defendant challenging her conviction under the Theft of Major Artwork Act, passed partly in response to the theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Simon Mackenzie and Neil Brodie have been awarded a substantial grant to study the illicit trade in antiquities. This is very good news for those of us who follow this issue. Brodie and Mackenzie have both produced terrific research in this area, using empirical data to track the looting of sites and its connections to major art markets in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. They have taken the study of antiquities looting from impressionistic accounts to a solid empirical foundation for future policy changes in the law and the art trade generally.

From an announcement on the Guardian’s web page:

“It’s extremely widespread,” said criminologist Dr Simon Mackenzie, who will lead the project. “There are architectural sites and museums that are being looted all over the world, including Britain and the USA, but obviously more so in the developing world. Previous safe areas have become accessible and the material is saleable. Nowhere is safe.” 

. . .

Neil Brodie, accepting an ARCA award in 2011

The market, says Neil Brodie, is driven by availability, and the size of an artefact is not a problem “It goes through phases. Greek pots have always been popular but there are not a lot of new Greek pots coming on the market so people might start marketing Iranian pottery. There is more actually coming out of Iran. Some of the pieces are huge; Cambodian sculptures, for example. “The people who sell this material they are actively wanting to create markets. If it becomes possible, for instance, to dig up rock art in the deep Sahara, they will be promoting that; they will actively create a market for it. There is a synergy between the accessibility and the availability of the material, and the marketability by the dealers. The internet has made that a lot easier.”

1. Kristy Scott, Glasgow team gets £1m grant to study illegal trade in antiquities, the Guardian, February 13, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/scotland-blog/2012/feb/13/glasgow-team-gets-1m-grant-to-study-illegal-trade-in-antiquities (last visited Feb 13, 2012).

ARCA Alum 2011 Tanya Lervik has a summary of the Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino event this week at the National Press Club:

The discussion covered a wide range of topics – from the basics of international law and the ethical responsibility of museums to the specifics of various transgressions that occurred at the Getty. Felch and Frammolino described the scope of the problem and how they came upon the antiquities story while researching the lavish spending of a Getty executive, Barry Munitz. In the course of their investigation, they were approached by a “Greek chorus of Deep Throats” who informed them that the executive’s indiscretions paled in comparison. Arthur Houghton commented on his experience at the Getty and recruited members of the audience (including yours truly) to illustrate the donation tax fraud scheme that he discovered was being perpetrated by one-time curator, Jiri Frel. Houghton was instrumental in putting an end to that practice, but he was also the author of the “smoking gun” memo often cited as evidence that the Getty Museum management was aware they were acquiring looted works in contravention of the 1970 UNESCO convention. Houghton also suffered some uncomfortable moments when the conversation turned to his role as the originator of the Getty’s controversial policy of “optical due diligence” wherein they would generally accept an antiquity’s provenance as provided by dealers without stringently investigating its validity.

continue reading 

As the NYT describes this, “a painting no longer attributed to Mark Motherwell”

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that federal agents are investigating recent sales of modern works by artists like Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, but it does. In a very good piece of reporting by Patricia Cohen we learn that the Knoedler Gallery in New York has abruptly decided to close after 165 years, perhaps to avoid a suit by Pierre Lagrange. Lagrange purchased a work purported to be by Jackson Pollock, for $17 million in 2007, yet forensic study of the painting reveals that two paints in the canvas had not been produced at the time Pollock was painting. Oops as Rick Perry would say.

The suspect works of art were supplied by Glafira Rosales, who claimed to have direct access to artists like Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell and others. The story of these works is a sadly familiar one, they were “bought by an unnamed collector in the 1950s from the artists”, then when this collector died their were passed on to a “close family friend” who lived in Mexico and Switzerland, who insisted of course on anonymity. One is hard pressed to fell much sympathy for the dealers and galleries who still rely on these ridiculous provenances. They pollute our collective cultural heritage and defraud future generations. The same stories emerge from nazi-era restitution disputes, recently-emerged antiquities, and forged artworks. When these vast sums of money and important pieces of our heritage are at stake, some sectors of the art market continue to put expedience and short-term gain first. And sadly its a lack of meaningful scrutiny and regulation of these transactions. Thirty years ago Paul Bator argued the art trade is shrouded in secrecy, and sadly not much has changed.

Felix Salmon also looks to the role storytelling plays in all this:

The point here is that the art market, like the stock market, runs on a combination of trust and storytelling ability. The most expensive artists are nearly always those who can be credibly placed into central slot in the history of art; one of the main reasons that Abstract Expressionists in general are so expensive is because they have spent decades as the very heart of MoMA’s collection, which presented them as the pinnacle of 20th Century art, the artists standing on the shoulders of people like Picasso. When gallerists sell paintings, they tell stories not only about the work, but also about the story behind the work, conjuring up romantic notions of dealings between Robert Motherwell and Mexican sugar magnates, brokered by “man named Alfonso Ossorio”. So long as the institution selling the work is trustworthy, potential buyers tend to take such stories at face value — and, of course, they have a vested financial interest in those stories being true, the minute they actually buy the piece.

1. Patricia Cohen, Federal Inquiry Into Possible Forging of Modernist Art, The New York Times, December 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/arts/design/federal-inquiry-into-possible-forging-of-modernist-art.html (last visited Dec 6, 2011).

• Export has temporarily been denied for View of the Rialto Bridge by Francesco Guardi.
• The sale of public trust artwork continues. Donn Zaretsky wonders  if museums are betraying their trust when the public loses all that public trust artwork. Steven Litt looks at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s deaccession of works which were “never, ever going to [be shown]”. Perhaps steps should be put in place to efficiently manage these sales in the same way the UK temporarily delays export of works of art?
• Larry Rothfield says William Brown has overlooked the biggest threat to Libya—antiquities looting. And He suggests specialists should think about how to “plan, fund and manage the physical security of archaeological sites”. 
• But a new government, and support for the Libyan antiquities department has already discovered lost cities in the desert.
• The Getty now has a repatriation dispute over eight illuminated gospels from Armenia.
• How much will climate change affect cultural heritage management? Heavy rains are again plaguing Pompeii. The drought in Texas has exposed a number of historic wrecks. 
• A thorough cleaning results in an inadvertent act of art negligence.
• The unfortunate politicization of heritage at UNESCO.
• 1 in 10 museums have experienced object theft in a survey conducted by ICCROM and UNESCO.

Thousands of antiquities are reported to have been stolen from a Benghazi bank vault in Libya. The objects are small, portable and very valuable. The collection has not been displayed for many years and has not been sufficiently documented. Chances for recovery would therefore be very remote.

The thieves targeted a collection known as the Treasure of Benghazi.

It included more than 10,000 pieces, with coins dating back to Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic times, but also other treasures such as small statues and jewellery.

Most had been discovered during the Italian occupation of Libya and were taken out of the country.

They were then returned to Libya in 1961 after the country’s independence.

The collection has been kept in the vault of the Commercial Bank of Benghazi ever since, waiting for the opening of a museum that was never built.

The coins were never photographed or documented and seemed to have been forgotten, according to Dr Saleh Algab, the chairman of the Tripoli Museum.

Although not the only collection of ancient coins in Libya, Mr Algab said they were a hugely valuable representation of the mosaic of Libyan history – an important reminder for Libya’s sometimes fractious, at times antagonistic, regions and ethnic groups that they all belong in one Libya, he said.

BBC News – Looted Libyan treasure ‘in Egypt’:

Five years and counting, thanks for reading:

http://illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com/2006/09/from-buddha-to-scream.html