[MSN] Cultural treasures are being looted--and museums and collectors are turning a blind eye

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Stealing History
Cultural treasures are being looted--and museums and collectors are turning
a blind eye
By Thomas K. Grose

6/19/06

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Back in 1972, $1 million was still an eye-popping amount of cash. But to
Robert Hecht, an enterprising American antiquities dealer living in Paris,
it was not too much to charge the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an
exquisite Greek vase created 500 years before the birth of Christ and
painted by one of the acknowledged masters of the craft. The Euphronios
krater, as the vessel is known, was clearly rare and beautiful. But it was
not, according to most experts, worth $1 million. In fact, most curators and
dealers at the time judged the krater's value to be no more than $250,000.
"Bullshit," retorts the Met's former director, Thomas Hoving. "If it's a
great piece, the price will be huge." And so Hoving paid the price and, in
the process, created an art-world monster.

Since the acquisition of the "hot pot of Hoving," as the krater has come to
be known, the prices of antiquities have shot skyward. "When the tombaroli
[tomb raiders] in Italy heard about the price, they just went crazy," says
Peter Watson, a British journalist who has written extensively on the
subject. "Everyone realized that, properly presented, quality objects could
fetch a fortune." Indeed, by 1985, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles
was paying $10.2 million for three objects, including a marble statue of
Apollo; three years later, it paid $18 million for a marble and limestone
statue of Aphrodite, and in 1993, it paid $1.15 million for a Greek gold
funerary wreath.

The problem with the burgeoning traffic in antiquities, however, is not so
much the price but something far more significant: the provenance. Where are
these precious artifacts coming from? And who are their rightful owners? In
the case of too many antiquities, the krater included, the answers are very
far from clear. And evidence is increasing that more and more artifacts are
being illegally excavated from their countries of origin. A recent British
study of five large collections totaling 546 objects, for instance,
determined that fully 82 percent of the objects were suspect. "However dodgy
things look," says Cambridge University archaeologist Christopher
Chippindale, "when you discover the truth, it's always worse."