The 'Association of Dealers and Collectors of Ancient and Ethnographic Art ' drops the mask. The Ka Nefer Nefer mask affair is an egregious example of a due diligence failure by a US museum. It was not legally sold in "1952" (watch that date) as the SLAM's own collecting history asserts. That a US court sees nothing wrong with it being documented as being in two different places, on two different continents, at the same time is really an indictment of that 'justice' system and US public gullibility. Yet on the news that the US taxpayer is to foot the bill for U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey not being able to see the wood for the trees (to which inexplicably they do not link to the link in the National Law Journal or similar source, but provocatively to David Gill's 'Looting Matters'), on the ADCAEA website it is commented Nice to see a precedent being set......Nice is a relative term. It would seem though that the facade that this dealers' interest group is at all concerned with "advancing the responsible and ethical trading and collecting of ancient and ethnographic art" has just been unceremoniously dropped.
No comments:
Post a Comment