'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals

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The forthcoming book "Chasing Aphrodite" is the subject of a skilful marketing campaign with a lot of pre-publication hype, deservedly so, the extracts show it to be well-written and the subject is an important one. "Chasing Aphrodite" tells a big story about 'major antiquities' and highlights a more general problem, though one which is on the way to being resolved as museums look to their acquisition policies and get ethical. No longer are sale of 'big' items with no provenance (the no-questions-asked market model) as acceptable to public institutions as they were. Now of course we have the problem of the made-up provenances [collecting histories] and the existence of a not-enough-questions-asked institutional market.

The big problem however is still at the other end of the market, the hundreds of thousands of so-called "minor artefacts" dug out of the archaeological record and "surfacing" (from 'underground'?) on the market by various illicit means and being sold to private collectors who still function in no-questions-asked mode alongside items legitimately on the market. It is this whole process, more insidious and just as damaging as the trade in 'big' Getty-worthy items, which needs closer scrutiny. It ranges from the smuggling of shabtis and scarabs, to the bulk lots of metal-detected coins and artefacts stripped from Roman sites in the Balkans to the legalised stripping of archaeological sites of metal artefacts by metal detectorists in England under a misguided policy of tolerance.

But for the moment, let us plug the big story, as setting the scene for the time when the general public can be persuaded to look more closely at what is happening day after day to the so-called 'minor artefacts' that are being gouged destructively out of the world's archaeological record for entertainment and profit. Because this can only happen as long as the public allows it to.

There is a nice pre-publication interview and article on National Public radio (NPR) called 'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals. The interview well worth listening to (the article is a summary, not a transcript). It talks of the "object lust' which led to the Getty Museum acquiring contextless 'art' objects from dubious sources, from back alleys to basement bank vaults. Author Frammolino says that the "overpowering effects of antiquity" lead to excesses

"People who come in contact with antiquities — the history of it, the beauty of these antiquities, the thought that maybe somebody great had once possessed this — they lose reason," he tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

The Getty Museum had one of the largest acquisition budgets in the country, and perhaps the world which was used in a very savvy way to help it:

build what today is considered one of the most important antiquities collections in the world," Felch says. But that collection would not be possible without the help of a complex web of grave robbers, patrons, wealthy collectors and the complicity of some of the world's most revered museums. "The illicit antiquities trade is kind of the dirtiest corner of the art market," Felch says. "It brought together highly educated, Ph.D. Harvard-graduate curators, and you saw them doing business in bank vaults with people who were in the criminal underground."It might seem an odd partnership, but the brightest minds in the museum world were driven to deal with criminals in the pursuit of objects of beauty. To account for their illicit dealings, Felch says, the Getty adopted a see-no-evil policy. "They danced this very tricky dance for several years, where they publicly denounced the illicit trade and they decried the looting that their acquisitions fueled," he explains.[...]

Collectors and dealers will no doubt be discomfited by the clear expression in this book of the notion that it is the market that is the motor for illicit dealings in artefacts. The book also has a message concerning the customary "good home" argument applied by public museums and private collectors:

The "high" road often taken by antiquities curators — that they are nobly saving what would be otherwise lost pieces — is the core irony at the center of Chasing Aphrodite, Felch says. "The Getty and other American museums over the last decades have justified the acquisition of these things under questionable circumstances by saying that these poor orphan objects have been separated from their archaeological context already, and that we have a duty to rescue them from the market and to preserve them and display them publicly," he says. But the truth was that by buying these objects on the black market, these museums were further fueling the looting that was going on across the Mediterranean.

It is of course worth noting that the museums claim to be rescuing iteems from 'the market' where they could end up in private collections, and private collectors claim to be rescuing objects from ending up in "museum storerooms" where they would not be cared-for or exhibited.

Certainly I think this book will have a great deal to add to the ongoing debate on artefact collecting and in particular expose the hypocrisy of US antiquity dealers' attempts to whitewash the image of the international antiquities trade and its relationship to the looting of archaeological sites.

Chasing Aphrodite
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Hardcover, 384 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List Price: $28

The cover photo shows an ancient Greek depiction of the monstrosity of artefact collecting (right) and trade (left) descending on the fragile and defenceless archaeological record, dismembering it before our very eyes as society stands by helplessly. To save the victim, we need not only to sever the heads of these monsters by legal action, but remove the ground from under their feet by removing public support for their attack on the archaeological record.

Cyprus Collections Against the Law?

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Blogger Peter Tompa takes exception to my recent comparison of the recording of artefacts held in private hands in Cyprus with Great Britain's PAS. He says they are not the same thing at all and finds it "inexplicable" that somebody should say they are. Cultural Property lawyer Tompa seems to be suggesting that that the private collecting of antiquities in Cyprus is forbidden and only survives due to "corruption". ("...the fact there is one law for the wealthy collector, another for everyone else"). The Cypriot legislation ('the Antiquities Act') however does not forbid the private ownership of single items or collections legally obtained . It also stipulates (Art 3-5) a financial reward for any objects reported and retained by the state (which the UK law does NOT, it is discretionary). So if we check out the facts he, for some reason, neglects to take into account it is rather Tompa's line of argument here which is "inexplicable".

Tompa's verdict that the Cypriot antiquities legislation is in some way inferior to the relevant UK ActS that correspond to this law more on prejudice than any specific analysis of these laws. He assumes that the system run by these brown-skinned people must be "corrupt" and then postulates that

the archaeological community's unqualified support for import restrictions on behalf of the Republic of Cyprus only helps prop up such a corrupt system.

Though Peter Tompa and the people he represents seem not too keen to differentiate between the two, what archaeologists in fact support is not the restrictions of imports of legally exported Cypriot antiquities, but the import of illegally exported Cypriot antiquities. This raises the question of whether it is the Cypriots or the US antiquities market that is here "corrupt"?

Tompa adds:

Hopefully, the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and CPAC will take notice when the current Cypriot MOU comes up for renewal.

Yes, let them take notice of what their own antiquity dealers are doing and recommend that the US withdraw from the 1970 UNESCO Convention if its dealers are simply not willing to forgo the import of illegally exported material from the few countries with which the US has such MOUs (and employ lawyers like Tompa to fight to secure that as a "right" by fair means or foul). Let the pirates not trade under a false standard, let them fly their true colours, the Jolly Roger.

Vignette: The true colours of the US antiquities trade represented by Mr Tompa, wants the freedom to trade in illegally exported antiquities.
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Washington Judge Challenges Preservation of Historical Material in (Foreign) State Collections

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We have seen that the no-questions-asked "internationalist" antiquities trade questions the exercise of (foreign) states of responsibility for cultural property found in their territory. Instead they want the distribution of such material to be determined purely by market forces, in other words, they should be free to buy and sell such material untramelled by any cultural property or antiquity protection laws.

The no-questions-asked-trade lobby will therefor no doubt be rejoicing in a verdict delivered in Washington last week discussed on MSN (Maayana Miskin, "US to Russia: Give Back Jewish Books", Israel National News 6th August 2010).

Russia's refusal to release thousands of religious books and documents to the Jewish community is discriminatory, a United States federal judge has ruled. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington Royce Lamberth said the religious materials are in the possession of the Russian state library and military archive “unlawfully”. Many of the documents were confiscated during the Bolshevik revolution. Another 25,000 pages of the writers of Jewish leaders were seized by the Nazis and later retrieved by the Russian army, which claimed the papers as state property and refused to return them to the Jewish community. [The] Agudas Chasidei Chabad of the Chabad-Lubavich community, an orthodox Jewish group, has filed suit to have the documents returned. Under US law, a foreign nation may be charged in America in cases where property was stolen in violation of international law. Many of the books and papers held in Russia were written by the Chabad movement's leaders.

Well, the obvious first thought on reading this is, just who do the Americans think they are dictating to foreign governments like this? The second is what "international laws" were in fact violated; none of the accounts (mostly in the Jewish press and blogs) of the "victory" specify this. This verdict cuts right to the core of the debate on whether states and governments control and have a responsibility for the cultural property found on their territory, or whether individuals and individual groups have a "right" to it which overrides that. This is a constant theme of these debates with antiquity dealers over cultural property and "collectors' rights", the split between so-called "internationalism" and their accustations of the "nationalism" of governments caring for their nation's cultural heritage.

Let us get this straight. The Agudas Chassidei Chabad (Association of Chabad Chassidim)of the Lubavitch Chabad is a Chassidic group (until 1994 led by Menachem Mendel Schneerson regarded by some of its members as the Messiah). The group is now based in the US, though originated in Russia in the town of Lubavitch just to the east of Smolensk (just by the Belorussian border in fact). The New York centre already has an extensive library of works removed at various times in the past from Russia (and Latvia and Poland), the history of which can be found online here. It will be seen that a large part of the group's collections was already removed from Russia with government permission. The books to which the article refers seem to be those deposited in Moscow warehouses and nationalised under Lenin and deposited in Moscow Public Library. It is the maintenance of this archive in public collections that is declared "illegal"?

It is not clear just how much the U.S. District Court in Washington knows of recent Russian history. One of the lawyers representing the Chassidic group, Attorney Seth Gerber, is quoted as saying: “This victory is a triumph for justice for the Jewish people and others who abhor the [...] immoral suppression of religious faith by the current Russian government”. Eh? Could Mr Gerber think that the Soviet Union still exists? What on earth is he talking about?

In recent years there has been an important revival of interest in Jewish studies right across eastern Europe, including Russia, where we see in Moscow State University a new institute being created for the purpose. The Avi Chai organization has similar aims. The New York based Jewish Theological Seminary runs a course in Moscow, and its "numerous alumni who have gone on to play key roles in the revival of Jewish life in Russia since the fall of the USSR as educators, journalists, professors, and directors of Jewish institutions". This is quite a significant webpage in this context for the photo I reproduce: "Students study in the Judaica library in Moscow". Is this the library the Washington court wants to dismember and haul part of overseas? Should not interested students and scholars in Russia be able to study the history and heritage of the Lubavitch Jews in the land where those Jews lived? Or does one group of US Jews want for some reason to have a monopoly in that? Should the study of Jewish life, culture, thought and religion and the protection of its historical monuments and physical cultural heritage be encouraged or discouraged in Russia?

More to the point, to now rule that the appropriation of cultural property by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October revolution is "unlawful" puts many US collections in a rather awkward situation. The Bolsheviks raised money for the civil war by selling precious items they had confiscated from the Tsar's family, the nobles and the rich landowners. In a programme publicised as "loot the looters" and "turn gold into bread", the Bolsheviks set up a state committee, called Gokhran, in 1920 to organize confiscations, to gain state control over a considerable part of Russia's wealth and cultural heritage. This has recently been described in Sean McMeekin 's book, the "History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks" (Yale University Press).

"... armed detachments fanned out across Russia ... breaking open safe deposit boxes in 'nationalized' banks, withdrawing hundreds of millions of tsarist rubles from other people's saving accounts, looting landed estates, churches and monasteries, and prying precious stones and other valuables from the bloodied bodies of anyone who dared resist Bolshevik confiscation".

Illegal? Well, it was done in accordance with the decrees the Bolsheviks themselves established between 1917 and 1922. Western industrialists did not really bother too much where the gold bullion (recast for the Bolsheviks in Sweden) came from. Not many questions were asked here it seems. Beers for example bought £1 million worth of diamonds for £365,000, one wonders whether among them were those taken from the bodies of the royal family executed in Yekaterinburg. Whether or not this was the case, these were blood diamonds anyway. Greedy western capitalists...

were directly responsible for funding the Red Terror and the Bolshevik's war against the peasants. Adapting Lenin's phrase, Western capitalists sold the Bolsheviks the rope not with which to hang them, but to hang millions of Russians.

Collections in the United States were a direct beneficiary of this looting and laundering of Russia's national patrimony. Right-wing American millionaires were the biggest buyers of the treasures prised from the hands of murdered Russian nobles: Armand Hammer's collection for example (now in UCLA) and even more significantly Andrew Mellon's haul of Old Masters from Russian collections bought from the Bolsheviks for a reported $6.6 million which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. [There is a succinct Wikipedia summary of these sales here.] See also Mark Durney's post: Russian Nationalization of Art - Bolsheviks! on the issue of the precise origins of a painting now in Yale, but adding some of the background.

In the light of this recent verdict, we should also note that the material that found its way across the Atlantic from these sales by the Bolsheviks of their looted Russian cultural property is not restricted to artworks. Andrei Pliguzov and Abby Smith ('The Bolsheviks in Business The Russian Book Trade After the Revolution') describe how today a large part of the private library of the Romanov family is now housed in the Library of Congress's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and other looted items ended up in Harvard University, New York Public Library, Columbia University and others. The law library of the Library of Congress has a large collection rare seventeenth and eighteenth century Russian legal materials which "has richly benefited the study of Russia in America".

If now the US courts have indeed decided that the appropriation of this material by the Bolsheviks from private owners in accordance with their own decrees was illegal, then the way is open for the Russian people and those families to claim all that material bought by American collectors from the Bolsheviks back. In the light of this ruling, this material had too been illegally acquired (indeed, also on the basis of "discrimination"). If the Agudas Chasidei Chabad of the Chabad-Lubavich community can claim back the books left behind in Russia by former members and leaders of the group, then the Library of Congress material should go back to Russia on the basis of the same judgement, as well as all those paintings bought by Mellon and the others in 1930-31, doing deals which financed the establishment of totalitarian rule in Russia and the creation of the Soviet Union. If Washington insists on upholding the verdict of its own courts, this material too was illegally acquired by the same "international laws".

How interesting it is that this verdict from a Washington court in favour of the "internationalists" has not yet been "observed" by Washington lawyer Peter Tompa's blog (he is currently more excited by the fact that an archaeologist was insulted in a German court).

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Vignette: students at work in a library of Judaism in Moscow, and Sean McMeekin 's book, the "History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks" (Yale University Press).

How Dare They?

The last nine or ten days since the plane crash in Smolensk which killed 96 people has been very distressing for all of us in Poland specially those who lost relatives or friends in this disaster. The past weekend however saw the beginning of the end of the official period of mourning, though the effects on lives will be painfully felt for much longer.

Saturday and Sunday saw the President's funeral. As we watched the procession carry the coffin from the lying in state to be taken first to the cathedral and then to Kraków for interment in the crypt of the old royal cathedral there, we who were there were very much aware of being witnesses to "history in the making".

President Kaczynski, commentators reminded us was very aware of the role of the nation's history in cementing the bonds within society. He was the initiator of several initiatives in this regard, most notably the innovative museum to the Warsaw Uprising. As a Pole involved in the history-writing of the region, one might have reservations, even many reservations, as a professional to the brands of public history that society accepts. That is in the nature of the debate which is fundamental to modern historiography, which is not only permissable but desirable. What is not at all desirable however is a group of outsiders, a commercial interest group attempting to dictate what we or any other foreign nation should regard as our history, dressing their attempts to thrust their own wishes, their own pseudo-histories on other nations, trying to mask their own commercial greed, as some form of "superior" ideology called "cultural property Internationalism" which attempts to negate the rights of communities to claim the cultural heritage of the region where they live as their own. How dare they? Just who do these collectors think they are?

Photo: Pawel Kopczynski, Reuters

A History of the World in 100 Collected Objects

Tom Flynn started the debate on this winter's BBC cultural blockbuster, A History of the World in 100 Objects, narrated by British Museum director Neil MacGregor:

The most remarkable thing about the British Museum's forthcoming collaboration with the BBC — A History of the World in 100 Objects — is the almost total lack of critical response to the project from any quarter save for a few lonely voices of indignation echoing from the African subcontinent. Instead we've witnessed a nauseating media hagiography of British Museum director Neil MacGregor in which he single-handedly educates the world from the comfort of his beautiful Bloomsbury office.

Followers of cultural heritage issues will not be surprised that foremost among those "few lonely voices" is that of prolific writer Kwame Opoku. On 6 February 2010He published a text called A History of the World with 100 Looted Objects of Others: Global Intoxiation? which was reprinted on Feb 25th as Africa: History Through a Hundred Looted Objects. Either is well worth reading containing as they do the same consistent arguments we have come to expect from this author.
There is an odd thing about this whole affair... 100 objects is a radio programme. McGregor does not even need the objects in front of him to tell his story, the viewer is led to imagine the picture he paints with his words. So why "things"? Why not "places"? A history of the World in 100 places could be made every bit as interesting (100 places which the viewer can visit on Google Earth maybe while listening). Why do we need these isolated "things" at all?

Controversy over Marbles "Largely a Matter of Greek Politics"

Having built this new museum for the Elgin Marbles, the Greeks have managed to rustle up one or two British journalists credulous or naïve enough to write articles calling for their return. But if anyone thinks the building is ever going to house anything other than the plaster casts that are on display there
now, they are hopelessly out of touch with reality. There is virtually no chance that the director or trustees of the British Museum, now or in the future, will comply with this outlandish demand.

Thus writes the Telegraph's outspoken art critic Richard Dorment. "The Greeks should erect a statue of Lord Elgin near the Parthenon to express their nation's gratitude to him for saving the Marbles", he says "instead of whining about events that happened more than two centuries ago, perhaps the Greek ambassador should formally thank Britain for displaying the marbles in those beautiful galleries at the British Museum".

He ends predictably: "Let the new museum stand as a monument to the futility of cultural nationalism — in this case trying to claim back something that by now belongs to the whole world". [Well, the British Museum at any rate, and of course the Torygraph never expresses any nationalistic sentiments of its own does it?].

The Parthenon marbles are a case which shows that any "antiquity" can be made "portable" if you cut it into suitably sized pieces. Like all "portable antiquities", they do not make full sense when individual "displayable" bits are taken out of the context of the rest of the assemblage. The overused term "cultural nationalism" does not seem to have much sense here. In fact, one might reflect that it does not ever have much sense when applied to the removal of material from a country when it is self-evident that this is reducing to a significant degree the size and scope of the resource of such material available for study, collection and display within that country. Is trying to reduce or even reverse the process in itself "nationalism"? James Cuno and no-questions-asked collectors would prefer people to think it was, I wonder whether they could give us a more precise definition of what they mean by the use of the term. Probably not.

Opoku on the Unfulfilled Promise of the Next Cuno Book from Princeton

Readers of the Cultural Resource Preservation literature cannot fail to have noticed that last year James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago published a book Who Owns Antiquity? (2008) which was met with many serious criticisms (see a list of reviews in Looting Matters). Instead of answering these, Cuno subsequently over the next few months wrote a number of articles which merely reiterated the same arguments. Now his publisher has released another book of collected articles under Cuno’s editorship (several of which are outdated reprints) apparently making very much the same points, suggesting it is intended to provide a cover for the gaffe of writing the first book.

This work, Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities (2009) has apparently been written with the intent of challenging “the perception of museums as rapacious acquisitors of ill-gotten goods and to argue instead that our public museums build their antiquities collections responsibly and for the public’s benefit”. This is all well and good, if museums really are acquiring their exhibits responsibly and curating them properly, then nobody has any doubt that museums are beneficial institutions in many regards. Institutions, indeed, with “promise”. What is in question, however, is the degree to which museums (worldwide) have been fulfilling these obligations over the past few decades. Clearly though, the answer is not simply to encourage the no-questions-asked collecting of so-called portable antiquities in scattered and ephemeral personal collections, which is what (as we all know) the pro-collecting lobby will be using Cuno’s book for, despite this not being the author’s intention.

Cuno's new book has just received a lengthy review by the indefatigable Kwame Opoku. (Whose “Universal Museum”? Comments on James Cuno’s “Whose Culture”?). Like most of his recent texts on these issues, it is a good read, (but a lengthy “fresh-pot-of-coffee, plump-up-the-cushions-first” one).

Dr Opoku is as we all know primarily interested in the restitution to their original cultural context of items taken from other countries (especially Africa) as a result of colonial attitudes – and their hoarding by the retentionist countries that hold them in their museums and will not give them back (which is an expression of the continuance of those attitudes). What is interesting though is the degree to which he finds that Cuno’s arguments for the continued expansion of “universal museums” overlap with those of private collectors of decontextualised archaeological artifacts as objects of commerce. It is therefore of interest to me because to a high degree the comments critical of Cuno apply equally to the views of the so-called “collectors rights” lobby in general.

In reading Opoku’s text, I highlighted a few fragments of text which I found significant from the latter point of view, and I'd like to add a few comments of my own to whet he wrote, so this is a sort of a review of a review. I am not sure I will be buying the latest of Cuno’s books, getting every single new work like this over here is an expensive game. Despite the advance of the discussion around them, it would seem that the pro-collecting literature also seems to be getting very repetitive and ultimately unsatisfactory.

Opoku starts off with a discussion of Cuno’s “Introduction” to the volume. He states: “The editor of Whose Culture? has an astonishing way of presenting statements that are wrong or only partially correct as if they described the obvious plain truth that everybody would accept without hesitation” and then discusses a few of them. These apparently include the tired old suggestion that modern societies really should have no claim to the archaeological heritage in the soil of the land they inhabit as they are not genetic descendants of the “vanished cultures”. This argument of the ‘Cunoites’ is of course the result of the application of nineteenth century views of identity based on genetic descent. It totally fails to take into account that in many branches of the humanities, after several decades of penetrating discussion of identity and ethnicity, we see the problem as a far more complex one including ideas about power of place and shared responsibility for care of the historic environment – developments that private collectors in general simply do not wish to consider.

Opoku writes: “Cuno is obviously a past master in misrepresenting the argument of others and in displacing the weight of the argument in directions that distort the real issue. He continues to misrepresent the main argument of the archaeologists against illegal diggings and the acquisition of unprovenanced objects. He creates the impression that archaeologists are against the acquisition of looted objects or objects without clear histories because they consider them to be of no great value or as not providing any valuable information”. Dr Opoku is no archaeologist, but can see the fallacy of this argument – as one would hope most educated people (the ones who are not portable antiquity collectors) can. Opoku realizes that the main concern of archaeologists “is that illegal diggings or looting deprive us of the possibility of studying artefacts in their context and that by removing these objects we lose valuable information which may never be recovered. Furthermore, the purchase of objects without clear history encourages plunder […]”. In a nutshell.

Opoku says that having ignored that issue totally, the art institute director “takes some pages examining famous objects which, according to present standards, were procured without any clear history, out of their context but have nevertheless provided useful information about the societies that produced them” including the Laocoön and Rosetta Stone as “examples of […] objects [that] would be, according to Cuno, regarded as meaningless by archaeologists and rejected as unprovenanced by today’s standards”. Really? Are archaeologists such an ignorant bunch of oiks that any of them actually would “reject” such items as “meaningless”? My question is however what meaning Mr Cuno would see in a rimsherd of Dragendorff form 29 terra sigillata? (One of my personal favourites and relatively chronologically and functionally distinct), or a coarseware cooking pot base with burnt food residue in it.

Opoku rightly observed that the function of Cuno’s paper tiger argument is to shift the weight of the argument of the archaeologists “from the damage and loss that unlawful digging causes to archaeological sites and placed on the value of the single object or objects looted”. As Dr Opoku points out, this seems like the sort of twisted logic we hear all to often from the pro-collecting bunch, who simply fail to address the core issues (and one cannot but conclude that this is deliberate).

Opoku points out that the common ploy of the pro-collectors’ “rights” lobby of placing all the blame for their woes on (“elitist, ivory tower”) “archaeologists” who – it is argued - have some other “agenda” than merely preserving archaeological sites from plundering, is also a false one. “What is not said in all these comments is that it is not only the archaeologists who wish to preserve such sites but also lawyers, administrators and a whole lot of others”. I would guess many educated members of the public too would prefer the archaeological heritage from the countryside around their homes being used to enrich knowledge about the history of the area (for them, their children and children’s children), rather than merely helping contribute to the back-payments on some antiquity seller’s new Porsche.

Opoku notes that “the retentionists of looted artefacts, have a very remarkable facility of attributing to all those who seek the recovery of their cultural artefacts a political motivation or design. This is assigned without any reference or relevant information from the persons concerned but solely on the basis of the statement of the retentionists”. An example of this is the alleged way in which laws protecting the archaeological heritage serve “to support a state’s nationalist political agenda: its claim on cultural continuity since antiquity […] archaeology and antiquities at the service of modern nationalist identity politics”. As Opoku notes, “it is doubtful whether many intelligent people would accept this misleading picture by Cuno and his supporters”. I wonder how many of Cuno’s supporters in the collecting world would care to apply his arguments to the USA’s own 1979 Archaeological Resource Protection Act and the fates of the cultures of various groups of Native Americans. That certainly would place a different slant on a model which so far is (disgracefully) being applied by US collectors only to the culture and identity of an “other”. Opoku summarises his comments by saying that Cuno’s introduction “clearly does not provide anything new except more attacks on the archaeologists and those he regards as nationalists”. Nothing new in that then, that is all the pro-collecting lobby can manage also.

In order to bolster his own atavistic views, Cuno enlists the help of a few similar-thinking museum directors and scholars, the first part called (collectors should note) “The Value of Museums”, consists of articles by Neil Macgregor, Phillipe de Montebello (both originally delivered at a 2006 Association of Art Museum Directors conference), and Kwame Anthony Appiah (the latter as David Gill has noted is a reprint of an article available online here).

The second part of the book (entitled “The Value of Antiquities”) contains three texts pointing out what in the views of their authors we can learn from unprovenanced artefacts, even if we do not know their archaeological context. James C.Y.Watt (Chairman of the Metropolitan's Department of Asian Art ) apparently reckons (“Antiquities and the Importance - and Limitations - of Archaeological Contexts”) that archaeological context is more important in the case of early historical periods but this importance diminishes with time and “after arriving at a critical point in the accumulation of archaeological data of a certain type of site of a certain period, further excavation data becomes (sic) superfluous” (!). As an archaeologist, both of these reported statements seem utter nonsense to me - does he really say this? The contribution by Sir John Boardman, entitled “Archaeologists, Collectors, and Museums” is another of those reprints so adds nothing we’ve not heard before to the debate, it is a repeat of his criticism of fellow archaeologists (not all of it undeserved) we are already familiar with from this classicist. I’ll probably discuss the notions behind the third (Owen) in another post here.

Part Three is called “Museums, Antiquities, and Cultural Property” which has three texts purporting to examine the nature of cultural heritage and the underlying philosophical and political currents. Two of its three articles ( Gillman and Merryman) are also reprints.

Dr Opoku criticizes Cuno for his statement “Some readers will be disappointed that not “all sides” of the debate are presented here. It is our view that other books already do this and well enough that we needn’t repeat the “both sides of the argument” formula here”. He comments that this statement of Cuno “sounds like an open abandonment of all pretence to objectivity and impartiality”. I see nothing wrong in this. Many onlookers may of course be undecided and confused by opposing arguments they cannot place comfortably in context maybe. Nobody seriously involved in the discussion can seriously claim to be impartial in this debate where totally opposing interests are confronted in the no-questions-asked market and collecting of portable antiquities. What however is disappointing is that there already other books (including Kate Fitz Gibbon (ed.) Who owns the past: Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law - Rutgers University Press 2005) which presents the ACCP/ collectors’ “rights” arguments in an equally partisan manner (just as there are many more which present the views of the resource conservation lobby), but Cuno and Princeton University Press have in effect produced nothing new. It’s the same old arguments, the same dialogue of the deaf, the same pars pro toto and straw man constructions being churned out – and totally ignoring the fact that a number of perfectly pertinent questions were raised in response to Who Owns Antiquity? One may only charitably suspect that for some reason Princeton had signed a contract with Cuno for this second book well before the extent of the critical comment on the first book became obvious. Does this mean we can expect a third one in the series? A Cuno Trilogy where in the final (?) one Cuno does his best in the spirit of academic enquiry (as would befit a book published by Princeton University Press) to seriously address at last the questions raised by the first two?

Cuno against the world

The onslaught against James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute in Chicago, continues with a well written and genuinely interesting article by Tom Hundley from the Chicago Tribune which places it firmly in the context of the acquisition by US private collectors (and through them museums) of looted objects from post Gulf War Iraq and pits Cuno's abrasively phrased and controversial views against those of the archaeological conservation lobby:

A war of words has broken out between the two camps. Archeologists
argue that major museums and the wealthy private collectors who often sit on their boards have hastened the destruction of archeological sites by their willingness to pay high prices for objects that have almost certainly been looted. The museum directors and private collectors contend that by rescuing these artifacts from the vicissitudes of the black market they are giving safe shelter to the historical patrimony of all mankind. The high-end trade in illegal antiquities is centered in New York and London, but Chicago has emerged at the vortex of the debate

The article concisely summarises the main arguments of Cuno's recent book and discusses each of them, none too sympathetically. The author points out that:

Earlier this year, Cuno was on almost everyone’s shortlist to become the next director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art after the aristocratic and long-reigning Philippe de Montebello announced that he was stepping down. Although the Met ultimately picked one of its own curators for the post in September, Cuno’s book, which features a photo of the heavily guarded entrance of the Baghdad Museum on the front cover and a ringing endorsement from de Montebello on the back, was seen by some as a not-so-subtle pitch for the job. As it turned out, the controversy that has grown up around book may have hurt his chances.

Let that be a lesson to those who go around attacking archaeologists and conservationists. More here: Loot! Chicago at center of battle between archeologists, collectors. See also Kimberly Alderman's Cultural Property & Archaeology Law Blog.

Photo: Artefact hunters searching at Isin, Iraq, January 2004. From the book "Catastrophe!: The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past" (Photo by John M. Russell, Massachusetts College of Art)

Kwame Opoku challenges Universal Collection arguments

In a wickedly elegant and well argued essay, tireless campaigner Dr Kwame Opoku raises a number of extremely pertinent points about the accusations thrown out by the Universal Collection advocates who oppose the repatriation of cultural property taken under dubious circumstances from other countries. In particular he cites the recent provocative book Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage by James Cuno, the publication of which has emboldened a few wannabe clones in the collecting world to join their voices to the clamour against “retentionist nationalism” and the policies lying behind the 1970 UNESCO convention.
The “universal collectors” see the nationalism in their own culture as benign while in foreign source countries it is dangerous, needing to be eradicated. The concept of nation-State:

gives countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon a certain amount of control over their own resources and cultural artefacts. These opponents of nationalism turn out almost invariably to be persons who would like to see the world governed by the forces in place. They would like to have a free-for-all situation where the stronger get what they want and the weaker ones can go to hell with their complaints.

Opoku notes that none of those playing the “Universalism” card offers:

any evidence that nationalism has any deleterious effect on restitution or on culture except that it prevents the large museums from continuing their old practice of taking objects from wherever they want. It also appears that they resort to accusations of nationalism only when there is a discussion on restitution of stolen or looted cultural objects that are in the so-called “universal museums” in the western world. We are still awaiting their explanation why nationalism in the case of claimants is somehow less respectable but not in the case of the western retentionists who are hanging onto stolen or looted property […] Cuno and his supporters should bring evidence why “retentionist nationalists” in some countries - Egypt, China, Turkey, Greece, Italy and Nigeria - are to be suspected in their motives for demanding restitution but “retentionist nationalists” in USA, Great Britain, Germany and France are not to be questioned in their motives for holding on to looted or stolen cultural artefacts.

He concludes that

With the hope of having contributed to clearing away this diversionary accusation of nationalism, the retentionists of the western museums should now offer more solid arguments, if they have any, for holding on to stolen or looted cultural objects from other countries. They should not present us arguments that do not help in understanding or solving the issue of restitution of stolen or looted cultural objects that are in the European and American museums. Their untenable contentions obscure the issues rather than enlighten us on the asymmetric nature of power in the colonial and imperialist system that made such illegal and unjustified robberies possible. The unresolved problems arising from colonialism will not simply disappear and the earlier serious efforts are made to reach acceptable solutions, the better for all of us

The whole article is well worth reading in its entirity, and it will be interesting to see whether the Universal Collectors reply with anything more than embarrassed silence...