Jason Felch has a hard-hitting interview with Julian Radcliffe which raises a number of questions about the Art Loss Register when it comes to dugup antiquities ('Optical Due Diligence: Art Loss Register Claims To Vet Ancient Art. Does it?' Chasing Aphrodite blog, on August 1, 2013).
Museums, auction houses, private collectors and dealers all claim to vet ancient art to make certain it was not illegally excavated. Yet we keep learning that the vetting process failed to prevent the acquisition of recently looted art. A key facilitator of this fiction is the Art Loss Register, a for-profit registry based in London. ALR charges nearly $100 for a search of its files, touted as “the world’s largest database of stolen art.” In return, a client receives a certificate stating “at the date that the search was made the item had not been registered as stolen.” Sadly, that caveat-laden certificate has become the coin of the realm for due diligence in the art world.Felch asks"why the ALR continues to issue certificates for ancient art — and why the art world continues to accept them as evidence of anything". The answers were somewhat evasive.
2 comments:
julian radcliffe saying "reintroduce partage to create a legitimate market" hardly instills confidence in solving the currant problem of his company adding a vanear of respectability to looted goods.
kyri.
"Reintroduce partage to make the legitimate market and the illicit market very clear. Objects however from source countries like England and Wales (bucketloads of Roman, celtic and medieval coins from metal detecting for example, disclaimed Treasure) come onto the market every day without any "partage", not to mention the material with documented early collecting histories. He is not talking about making a market legit, he's talking about EXPANDING the market.
Anyway, what's the hope that any newly-partaged artefacts surfacing on the market will not within a very short time lose contact with their collecting histories by the same mechanisms as the "old collection" (real and assumed/presumed/pretend) stuff has. Indeed, what dealer with loads and loads of 'unpapered' artefacts in his storeroom is going to want to promote a system of dealing only in 'papered' objects which means he'll not shift his other stock?
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