Dynamite Doug Podcast in Context

"One is prompted to speculate on exactly how

art objects are extracted from their impoverished,

often strife-torn homes of origin to land in the lap of

a rich American museum" (Holland Cotter New York Times, 1994).

Edna Bonhomme in Frieze (3rd April 2023) discusses "True-Crime Podcast "Dynamite Doug" Takes on the Art World" about the six-part series on an alleged looter of Cambodian cultural heritage

Project Brazen and PRX’s six-part podcast series Dynamite Doug (2023) is an explicit take on the crime genre. Although the story isn’t new – it has been reported in outlets like The New York Times (2019) and The Washington Post (2021) – the medium and method are. While some of the interviews conducted already existed in legal proceedings, the producers also interviewed scholars and activists, making this the first audio series to feature oral testimonies and recordings from the trial. It is an unnerving account of the displacement of Cambodian artefacts – intricate bronze sculptures, ceramic jars, gold and jewels – which were allegedly stolen by the late art dealer Douglas Latchford between 1970 and 2000. Described by The Washington Post as a ‘genial Englishman’ who ‘was an explorer of jungle temples, a scholar and a connoisseur seduced by the exquisite details of ancient sculpture’, Latchford is not what you would expect from an art thief.  He played a central role in building the Southeast Asian collections of notable American institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum. Yet, his actions allegedly left Cambodians dispossessed of some of their most cherished ancient artefacts while under the rule of the Khmer Rouge (1975–79) – one of the most brutish periods in the country’s history.[...] Narrator Ellen Wong – a Canadian actress with Cambodian roots who digs into the story not merely from an investigative perspective but as someone with a personal connection to it – grapples with this by dissecting not only the art dealer’s relationship to his accomplices but by revealing an entire network of people who helped to procure the Cambodian artefacts, estimate them as worthy, forge documents to misrepresent their provenance and sell them to art collectors.

She uses her review to discuss the issue of western museums displaying Asian and African art in general, and the repatriation issue, drawing attention to the roles of the purchasing institutions in the persistence of culture crime, and asking to what extent the visitors to those museums are complicit.

This sentiment is the theme of Dynamite Doug: is the crime in question the looting or is it something even bigger? But there is another point the programme forces us to consider: what is it about the podcast medium that makes us want to listen to a narrative drawn from evidence which has been out in the open for years? Are we more attuned to true crime when it’s packaged in an easily digestible format? And what is our shared responsibility as art viewers? [...] Loss is at the centre of Dynamite Doug – not as an event particular to one country but as part of a glaring, art-world phenomenon. The culprit isn’t merely the art looter himself, but anyone blinkered to the moral obligation of restitution.

I'd add that this is about artefact hunting and collecting in general, rather than this one specific issue of "restitution" which is only one response to the antiquities crisis.