[MSN] Is the U.S. Protecting Foreign Artifacts? Don't Ask

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

April 8, 2007
Is the U.S. Protecting Foreign Artifacts? Don’t Ask 
By JEREMY KAHN
WASHINGTON

THE rumor swept through the aisles of the Seventh Regiment Armory in New
York as art dealers traded gossip with collectors: Dina Powell was going to
China. 

Normally a routine overseas trip by a government figure — Ms. Powell is an
assistant secretary of state — would hardly warrant attention from experts
on Song dynasty ceramics or Buddhist statuary. But in their minds, this time
their very livelihoods were at stake. The fear was that Ms. Powell, who
heads the State Department’s bureau of educational and cultural affairs, was
going to Beijing to announce a sweeping ban on the import of Chinese art and
artifacts predating 1911. The Chinese requested the ban in 2004, arguing
that an insatiable American demand for such objects was spurring the looting
of valuable archaeological sites in China. 

As it turned out, the rumor was false: The State Department says that Ms.
Powell is not planning a June visit, although it refuses to say when or how
the United States will rule on the Chinese request. But the panic sowed by
the gossip, in the midst of New York’s annual Asia Week sales last month,
suggests the high stakes riding on the American decision.

At the center of the controversy is not a ranking official but an obscure
State Department advisory panel that has become the bête noire of collectors
of everything from Roman vases to African statuary. The panel, the Cultural
Property Advisory Committee, has been the focus of fierce battles between
archaeologists, who say the art market fosters the looting of historic
sites, and dealers, who say that broad import restrictions threaten
collecting by private individuals and museums in the United States. 

Congress established the committee in 1983 to balance the interests of these
adversaries, deterring pillage abroad while also protecting the legal
antiquities trade. But critics claim that it now tilts heavily in favor of
the archaeological lobby, even in cases when the foreign countries seeking
import restrictions have not met the criteria set down by the law.

“I don’t think the committee has been fulfilling the intent of the original
legislation,” said Meredith Palmer, a Manhattan dealer in 20th-century art
who worked on cultural patrimony issues at the State Department in the 1970s
and helped establish the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, known as
C.P.A.C. 

Kate Fitz Gibbon, a dealer of Asian art in Santa Fe, N.M., and a former
member of the committee, said some members of it now seem to have a
full-blown “prejudice against collecting”: so much so, she argued in an
e-mail message, that they seek to bend the law to “meet a perceived need to
end the trade.” 

Just how did an entity intended as a grand compromise and welcomed by
archaeologists and dealers more than 20 years ago come to be seen as the
enemy of the commercial art market? 

Dealers and collectors argue that the State Department’s professional staff
has manipulated the nominations process in recent years so that a majority
of committee members at any given time lean toward broad import
restrictions. Archaeologists counter that unscrupulous dealers are still
only too happy to profit from looting by selling items of ambiguous origins,
and that import restrictions are an important tool for reining them in.

At the same time it is clear that recent restitution battles by countries
like Italy and Egypt have sensitized American officials and the public to
the principle of cultural patrimony, the idea that each nation has a right
to possess and protect its historical treasures.

The United States government currently has agreements with 11 nations to
restrict the import of culturally significant artifacts. To this day it has
never failed to grant an initial request for import controls. 

But current requests have collectors and dealers up in arms. They argue that
China’s petition is so broad that it would include 19th-century ceramics
that were mass-produced for export. And Cyprus is asking that an existing
ban on imports of Classical and Byzantine material be expanded to include
ancient coins, a category of artifacts that has not been included in other
import restrictions. 

Ms. Palmer argues that Congress intended the committee to protect only the
most significant artifacts from pillage, not grant broad restrictions on the
import of entire categories of objects. James Fitzpatrick, a lawyer who has
represented dealers and collectors before the committee, agrees. “There is
no attempt by C.P.A.C. today to differentiate between items of great
significance and those that are produced in the hundreds or multiple
hundreds of items,” he said. 

But archaeologists say that the import restrictions have been critical in
highlighting the problem posed by looting. “It has proven to be a fairly
effective tool for raising awareness of looting because the U.S. is such a
large art market,” said Ricardo Elia, an archaeologist at Boston University.


Renata Holod, a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, said many ancient sites in Iraq and elsewhere
now look like “a moonscape” because of all the illicit digging. “That is a
feature of the existence of a market in antiquities,” she said drily. While
the American restrictions do not stop pillaging completely, she added, they
do send a message to the rest of the world that the United States opposes
the destruction of other countries’ cultural property. 

In many cases, archaeologists say, Western museums have been willing to turn
a blind eye to murky provenances if they could get their hands on uniquely
beautiful or rare artifacts. In recent years institutions like the J. Paul
Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have agreed to return
objects to their countries of origin after being confronted with evidence
that the artifacts had been exported illegally.

But dealers and museum curators reply that they oppose looting too, and that
archaeologists fail to see that an object’s aesthetic value and its
safekeeping are at least as important as its cultural or historical
significance. 

Some dealers say that archaeologists harbor class resentments of monied
collectors and are uncomfortable with the idea that history can have a
price. 

“In a lot of anti-collecting bashing or museum bashing that goes on there is
always a background of quasi-socialist sentiment,” said William Pearlstein,
a lawyer at Golenbock Eisenman Assor Bell & Peskoe in New York who has
represented art dealers. “You always hear archaeologists hissing about
money.”

That collision of worldviews was on vivid display on March 15 in a
conference room in Washington where the committee held a public hearing. The
issue was an extension of import restrictions on objects from Guatemala and
Mali. Speaking in favor was David Friedel, an archaeologist at Southern
Methodist University who has carried out excavations of Maya ruins there. 

With barely restrained disgust he told the panel that a single Olmec
serpentine figure might bring $70,000 at Christie’s auction house. Ripped
from its context in a Maya tomb, however, its testimony to how the Maya
venerated the earlier Olmec civilization would be lost, he said.

Later in the hearing Claire Hilmer, representing the nonprofit group Saving
Antiquities for Everyone, expressed dismay at the high prices ancient
statuary from Mali brought at auction. That prompted pointed questioning
from James Willis, a dealer in African art who is one of the sales experts
on the committee. 

“Do you think it is a good or a bad thing that these things are worth the
millions that you say they are?” he asked. “If there were no international
market and these wealthy people willing to spend this money on these
figurines, what would happen to them? If those objects had little to no
value, do you think they would survive?”

Under the current law a foreign nation must meet certain criteria to obtain
restrictions. It must document the extent to which pillaging jeopardizes
important cultural sites and objects. It must provide evidence that it is
combating looting inside its borders. It must establish that the American
market in these objects is large enough to warrant more control and that
other methods to address looting are not available. And the law says that in
most cases import limits should be created only if other nations are
imposing similar restrictions, so that American dealers and collectors are
not unfairly disadvantaged. The committee investigates whether these
criteria have been met and issues a recommendation to the State Department,
which makes the final decision. The department almost never fails to follow
the recommendation. 

By law the committee consists of 11 unpaid members appointed by the
president: three each from the art trade and archaeologists, three who
represent the wider public and two who represent the interests of museums.

But this system has gone awry, according to dealers, collectors, former
committee members and others familiar with the committee’s workings. While
nominally balanced, they say, in practice a number of the museum and public
representatives on the panel have been drawn from the archaeological camp. 

For instance, the most recent museum representatives on the panel both came
from the Field Museum in Chicago. Unlike many other top museums in the
United States, the Field sponsors archaeological digs and no longer
purchases items on the art market. Asked about the balance on the committee,
the State Department referred that question to the White House. Citing a
policy of not commenting on personnel matters, a White House spokeswoman,
Emily Lawrimore, declined to explain how the president chooses nominees.


The committee’s critics also say State Department lawyers have used
conflict-of-interest rules to nudge the committee toward import
restrictions. James Lally, the noted New York dealer in Asian art, declined
a seat on the panel in 2000 after State Department lawyers told him he would
not be able to discuss or vote on any petition from a country in whose art
he traded. “I was approved after a long process of investigation,” he said,
“and then they said, ‘Oh well, you cannot speak about any Asian art.’ This
made less than no sense. This is a perversion of the intent of the law.” 

Archaeologists, on the other hand, have not been asked to recuse themselves
from deliberations or votes involving countries where they have taken part
in excavations. Yet dealers protest that these are also conflicts of
interest, since archaeologists must rely on the good favor of these foreign
governments to receive continued permission to dig.

The committee has also been faulted for its secrecy. The State Department
classifies almost all material presented to the group to aid its
deliberations, including press clippings and information available on the
Internet. It also withholds the original petitions for import restrictions
that foreign countries submit as well as the recommendations that the
committee makes to the department. 

Committee members are also told they cannot independently investigate the
facts related to a country’s petition or discuss the matter with outside
experts apart from those who appear at the committee’s infrequent hearings.

Patty Gerstenblith, who is chairman of the Archaeological Institute of
America’s cultural property legislation committee and served as a public
representative on the committee from 2000 to 2003, said she saw good reason
for the secrecy. She said that as a committee member, she might have felt
inhibited from speaking candidly in deliberations if she thought her
comments might later become public. 

She also said information presented to the committee might, if released,
“become a road map for looters” interested in pillaging sites. 

But the committee’s current chairman, Jay Kislak, a real estate magnate and
collector of pre-Colombian artifacts, bristles at the secrecy under which
the State Department has the panel work. 

“In my opinion the restrictions, regulations and lack of transparency under
which we are asked to operate in pursuing our duties at C.P.A.C. are to say
the least unusual, and in many cases they are unbearable, immoral and maybe
either extra-legal or in contradiction” of the law, he said. 

C. Miller Crouch, deputy assistant secretary of state for educational and
cultural affairs, said that the law that created the committee explicitly
exempted it from public disclosure requirements that apply to similar
federal advisory committees.

Given the secrecy surrounding the panel’s deliberations, it is difficult to
predict how the State Department will rule on China’s request. What is
certain is that the controversy over the committee is not going away. With
looting on the rise worldwide, according to Interpol, the number of
countries requesting import restrictions is only likely to grow, and the
clash between archaeologists and collectors will continue. 

http://www.nytimes.com/