[MSN] Getty tightens acquisitions policy

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Getty tightens acquisitions policy
By Christopher Reynolds
7:11 PM PDT, October 26, 2006

Under growing international global pressure after decades of buying artifacts that might have been looted, the Getty Museum dramatically has tightened its acquisition standards.

The move is not retroactive -- if it were, the museum would have to relinquish scores of treasured ancient items from its galleries and storerooms -- but some authorities say it's a turning point in a global confrontation between curators and archeologists over the way museums do business.

With this move, two experts said, the Getty is essentially taking responsibility for making sure an item's recent history is clean, instead of challenging critics to prove it's dirty.

"It's a rethinking of the whole issue of the burden of proof," said Malcolm Bell, a University of Virginia archeology professor and co-director of U.S. excavations at Morgantina, Italy.

The Getty chose 1970 as its threshold date because that's when the United Nations gave its blessing to a convention aimed at preventing illicit movement of cultural property. Although the measure had little immediate effect on the habits of major American museums, several major institutions in Britain adopted standards along the same lines in the past decade. The University of Pennsylvania's art museum has won plaudits from archeologists for taking a similarly conservative stance, but until now none of this nation's foremost museums had signed on.

"We're trying to do what we believe is right," said Getty Museum Director Michael Brand, who added that the move had no direct connection with the ongoing trial of former Getty curator Marion True -- whom Italian prosecutors accuse of knowingly receiving looted items -- or Italian cultural officials' pending demand for the return of 52 items in the Getty collection.

"I suspect that they'll be happy to hear about this, but it's not something we've discussed with them at all," Brand said.

The Getty's trustees, who approved the policy change Monday, "are really taking a very principled stand," said Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePauw University and president of the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, based in Washington, D.C.

She predicted that the move would set an example for other institutions. Although New York's influential Metropolitan Museum of Art made headlines worldwide in February when it agreed to return 21 items demanded by Italy, including a prized vase known as the Euphronios Krater, the museum has resisted calls to change its acquisition standards, which match those of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Both endorse antiquities acquisitions so long as there's no proof of impropriety and the works have been documented for at least 10 years.

Gerstenblith dismissed the 10-year standard as "inadequate," and Bell put it this way: "The reformers are at the gates, and the Met is pouring boiling oil on them. . . . The Getty is recognizing the moral problem, and the Met will have to come to that too."

Met spokesman Harold Holzer sees the issue differently.

"We're not contemplating any change in our policy," he said Thursday. "If you choose one date as your watershed date, it doesn't mean you're any more vigilant than you were before, and the Met considers itself extremely diligent."

Furthermore, Holzer said, the Getty's move "doesn't address the idea of what you do in the case of a fugitive masterpiece that's separated from its original site and may not be traceable back . . . . Does that mean you relegate it to oblivion forever?"

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, as major museums scrambled to build collections from the ancient world, curators and directors argued that an antiquity was fair game so long as nobody could prove it had been looted.

Since such evidence is extremely rare, this left museums to enjoy the benefit of the doubt. In the 1980s and '90s, the Getty spent tens of millions of dollars to build an antiquities collection of more than 44,000 items. Although the Getty tightened its standards in 1995 to bar acquisitions that were undocumented before that year, many critics continued to count it among the Met, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and other institutions with long histories of buying antiquities with misty histories from shadowy dealers.

Under the new policy, the Getty will require at least one of these three conditions:

-- "Documentation or substantial evidence" that the piece entered the U.S. by Nov. 17, 1970, and "that there is no reason to suspect it was illegally exported from its country of origin."

-- Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was out of its original country by 1970 and that it has been or will be legally imported to the U.S.

-- Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was legally exported from its original country after 1970 and that it has been or will be legally imported to the U.S. 

http://www.latimes.com