[CPProt.net] Winds change in the battle over ancient artefacts. Curators remain defiant as the 'send them home' argument gains ground.

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Winds change in the battle over ancient artefacts

Treasures of dispute ... part of the Elgin Marbles which Greece wants back
from the British Museum, and a Greek plate, inset, held by New York's
Metropolitan Museum, which Italy says was illegally excavated from Sicily.
Photos: http://snipurl.com/ki97


December 6, 2005

Curators remain defiant as the 'send them home' argument gains ground,
writes Hugh Eakin.

THREE years ago, the directors of some of the world's top museums, meeting
in Munich, commiserated over a major annoyance: the growing demands from
countries such as Greece and Italy that they return ancient artefacts.

What emerged was a defiant statement defending their collecting practices.
Signed by the directors of 18 museums - from the Louvre in Paris to the
Hermitage in StPetersburg to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to
the J.Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles - the document argued that
encyclopedic museums have a special mission as treasure houses of world
culture, and that today's ethical standards cannot be applied to yesterday's
acquisitions.

That philosophy is under siege as never before. The long-time director of
the Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello, recently met in Rome a
lawyer for the Italian Culture Ministry to discuss works in the museum's
collection that the Italians say were looted. Also in Rome, the former Getty
curator Marion True has gone on trial for conspiring to import illegally
excavated antiquities for the museum.

"The ground is shifting radically under the pressure of newly documented
claims," says Maxwell Anderson, a museum consultant and the former director
of the Association of Art Museum Directors. "While there may not be a single
clear solution for every claim, institutions will need to be forthright in
explaining future acquisitions."

Behind this shift, museum directors, curators and lawyers say, are broad
changes in the way source countries are pursuing and enforcing cultural
property claims - and the public's perception of those claims. Caught in the
crosshairs, museums face pressure to clean up their acts and embrace
rigorous standards for future acquisitions - and to return prized works
acquired in past decades.

"In the eyes of the public," says James Cuno, the director of the Art
Institute of Chicago, there is a sense that "the museum is a greedy hoarder
of ill-gotten goods, in opposition to the legitimate claims of the
powerless".

Rather than capitulate, though, many American museums continue to resist
adopting standards that would rule out the continued acquisition of
antiquities. Last year, for example, the American directors' association
adopted new guidelines on the issue for its members. But archaeologists
fault the guidelines on the ground that they suggest museums should use
their own discretion about acquiring treasures that may not have a
verifiable provenance.
Archaeologists argue that museums in other countries have established far
more rigorous policies on antiquities. Both the British Museum and the
Berlin State Museum have recently adopted comprehensive standards for such
acquisitions, based on a 1970 UNESCO convention prohibiting the circulation
of illicit antiquities.

"The question becomes, how should museums position themselves in relation to
what is clearly an organised international illegal market?" says Neil
MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, which has long faced demands
from Greece that it return the Elgin Marbles, which have been in its
collection since 1816.

In the US, only a few museums have adopted a standard by which unprovenanced
antiquities that surfaced after 1970 should not be purchased. Rather than
setting such a date, the museum directors' association recommends that
museums buy only objects that can be demonstrated to have been outside their
countries of origin for at least 10 years.

In recent years, archaeologically rich countries like Italy, Greece and
China have relied on tightening international laws and growing public
interest to open well-organised campaigns to repatriate artefacts and crack
down on the antiquities trade.

But several directors argue that the basic mission of museums is to bring
works from foreign cultures to a broad international audience. They say this
aim is ill served by an overzealous application of laws designed to keep
objects from ancient civilisations within the boundaries of the modern-day
states where they are found today.

"One of the key questions is the internationalist versus the nationalist
perspective," says MacGregor. "There is a very real tension between the
belief that great culture is a shared inheritance of everybody and the view
that it is the particular inheritance of one modern political entity."

Defenders of the so-called internationalist view like to point out that the
law governing Italy's current claims against American museums was passed in
1939, during Italy's Fascist era.

MacGregor argues that while upholding the rigorous national ownership laws
established by source countries, the UNESCO convention has failed to address
the issue of illegal excavations at the source, within the claimant
countries themselves.

Privately, curators and directors note that during the years when most of
the objects in dispute were acquired - the 1970s, the 1980s and even into
the 1990s - the Italian government largely turned its back on the
flourishing trade in antiquities within its borders.

But many museums are reluctant to speak out on such issues, because they
face what one museum official, who declined to be identified, described as
"a free fall of anxiety about liability, for themselves, their curators and
their boards".

"The big question is from what date should we take account of these new
practices," says Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre. "It is true
that up to World War II and for some time after, people worked in a very
different way than today. There are certainly some objects that were removed
illegally. From what date should there be a prohibition? I don't know."

The New York Times

http://www.smh.com.au/