For many years, Museums sat comfortably in the knowledge that despite turning a blind eye to the looted antiquities in their collections, the law was on their side & successful prosecutions were rare, even in relatively clear cut cases. In the past three or four years though, a constantly evolving situation has begun to shift far more rapidly.

So far, Italy has taken the lead role in spearheading the wave of restitutions, but other countries are carefully watching & learning.

From:
Cleveland.com

Analysis: Museums often pay the price for looted antiquities
by Steven Litt/Plain Dealer Art Critic
Sunday November 23, 2008, 6:30 AM

On Sept. 13, 1995, Swiss and Italian police raided a suite of offices in a warehouse on the southwest side of Geneva rented by Italian antiquities dealer Giacomo de Medici.

Behind the gray metal door of Room 23, on Corridor 17, they found shelves packed with looted vases, statues, bronzes, frescoes, mosaics and jewelry.
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Another review of Sharon Waxman’s new book. Another new book by Nina Burleigh looks at one of the side effects of the endemic trade in de-contextualised unprovenanced artefacts.

From:
Washington Post

Fool’s Gold
How stolen ancient artifacts have turned up in famous museums around the world.
Reviewed by Roger Atwood
Sunday, November 16, 2008; Page BW02

LOOT – The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
By Sharon Waxman | Times. 414 pp. $30

UNHOLY BUSINESS – A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land
By Nina Burleigh | Smithsonian/Collins. 271 pp. $27.50

Early this year, officials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art trussed up one of the prizes of its collection, an ancient vase known as the Euphronios krater, and sent it back to Italy. Italian authorities had presented evidence that the piece had been looted from a tomb near Rome less than a year before the Met paid $1 million for it in 1972. Faced with the prospect of a lawsuit and a ban on receiving any future loans from Italian museums, the Met, writes former Washington Post and New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, “stalled, stonewalled, and would not be swayed — until it was forced to do so.”
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Sharon Waxman’s book on the looted artefacts filling some of the world’s greatest museums is getting quite a bit of media attention. Its position is almost completely the opposite of that taken by James Cuno in his book published earlier this year. In many ways it could be said that Cuno represents the view of the museums whilst Waxman ‘s view is more closely aligned to that of the general public. In countries such as Britain though, a large amount of the funding for the largest museums comes from tax payers via the government – so surely these institutions should be doing more to reflect what the public expects of them?

From:
New York Times

Art of the Steal
By HUGH EAKIN
Published: November 7, 2008

Loot is an ugly word. Derived from ­Hindi and Sanskrit, it emerged in British India, where it no doubt proved useful in describing some of the more sordid transactions of empire. In the 20th century, it was applied to Jewish art collections systematically plundered by Hitler and, later, to electronics pilfered from shop windows during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Most recently — and perhaps most provocatively — it has been wielded against well-to-do American museums whose pristine specimens of ancient civilizations have with shocking frequency turned out to be contraband.
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Another review of Sharon Waxman’s book on the looted antiquities that fill many museums of the West.

From:
Boston Globe

Golden fleeces
For centuries the West has plundered the treasures of the ancient world; now some nations are fighting back
By Michael Kammen
November 9, 2008

LOOT:The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
By Sharon Waxman
Times, 414 pp., illustrated, $30

Have you ever wondered why the Rosetta stone (so crucial to our understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics), discovered by Napoleon’s army in 1799, is situated in the British Museum? Or why a Babylonian stele called the Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known legal code in human society (“an eye for an eye”), is located in the Louvre in Paris? Or how the beautiful bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti ended up as the showpiece of a Berlin museum?
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Sharon Waxman’s book questions the ideology that many of the West’s great museums are based on. Should we accept now that the world has moved on & that it is time start rethinking our museums?

From:
Time

The Skimmer
Who Owns Ancient Treasures?
By Gilbert Cruz Thursday, Nov. 06, 2008
Loot by Sharon Waxman

Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
Sharon Waxman
Times Books; 414 pages

The Gist:
The great museums of the world are stuffed with spoils of war. They’re crammed with stolen relics and permanently borrowed treasures, beautiful icons obtained through shady means and cultural riches that their countries of origin want back — right now. In her look at the debate over who owns ancient art, Waxman, a former Hollywood reporter for the New York Times profiles four museums—the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum—and poses the question, “Shall we empty [them] because one source country after another seeks the return of treasures past?”
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Another review of Sharon Waxman’s new book about the looting that fills the museums of the West.

From:
Dallas Morning News

‘Loot’ by Sharon Waxman: Author delves into the plundering of antiquities
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, November 2, 2008
By ALEXANDRA WITZE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Alexandra Witze is chief of correspondents for America for the science journal Nature.

Classical scholar Marion True, a curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, was a leading light in the museum world, until her passion for antiquities landed her in court in Italy.

In a bizarre series of events starting in 2005, Italian prosecutors pursued her for allegedly covering up earlier transactions in which the Getty had bought looted artifacts for its collection. Yet Ms. True had long fought against the murky underworld of smuggled antiquities, and many now feel she became a scapegoat in an ongoing battle between august Western institutions and the often-poorer countries from which the world’s great artifacts were taken.
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Another success story, a few days after Greece secured the return of illegally acquired artefacts from a prominent US collector.

From:
Associated Press

Hungary to return looted antiquities to Greece
By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS – Sep 11, 2008

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Hungary has offered to return a collection of antiquities on display in a leading Budapest museum that were illegally exported from Greece, the Hungarian foreign minister said Thursday.

Kinga Goncz said Greek and Hungarian experts would meet to study the 22 pieces and discuss which would be repatriated.
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Greece has secured the return of two artefacts from a US collector after lobbying for their return based on the fact that they had been removed illegally from Greece. Following the successes of Italian efforts, Greece has in recent years stepped up their campaign for the return of any artefacts looted from the country.

From:
Reuters

Greece gets antiquities back from U.S. collector
Wed Sep 3, 2008 3:10pm BST

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece celebrated on Wednesday the return of two rare smuggled antiquities from a prominent U.S. collector and expressed hope other ancient Greek treasures housed overseas would one day be sent home.

A fourth century B.C. bronze vase and the upper part of a marble tombstone were returned by U.S. collector Shelby White in August, a year after the Culture Ministry started lobbying to get them back on evidence they had been smuggled out of Greece.
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James Cuno, Neil MacGregor, Phillipe De Montebello & Thomas Gaehtgens represent the astonishingly one sided collection of speakers lecturing in Chicago on the concept formerly known as the Universal Museum. (details of each lecture follow the main article).

From:
Chicago Art Institute

NEWS: The Art Institute of Chicago Presents: 360 Degrees: Art beyond Borders
22 Aug 2008

The Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

27 September 2008–16 June 2009

[…]

Join us for a wealth of insightful and exciting 360 Degrees programming.

# Lectures: Four engaging lecture series occur throughout the season. In “The Fate of Encyclopedic Museums,” directors from the Art Institute, the Getty, the British Museum, and the Met discuss the role of the encyclopedic museum. Noted scholars also explore current and historical perspectives on globalization and Art Institute curators give their take on the encyclopedic nature of their collections.
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Maurizio Fiorilli has in recent years been no stranger to restitution cases in his work for the Italian Government. Here he talks about some of the issues he is dealing with, as well as the way that the problems of looting are exacerbated by the policies of many of the museums that receive the stolen artefacts.

From:
Sunday Telegraph

Maurizio Fiorilli: scourge of the tomb raiders
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 10/08/2008

Bad news for the art thieves who for years have been selling Italy’s ancient treasures to foreign museums: ‘Il Bulldog’ is on your case. Alastair Smart meets the resolute attorney demanding their return

Pasquale Camera didn’t do light lunches. After a third plate of veal Napolitano, washed down by his nth glass of Barolo, the 25-stone ex-police captain galumphed his way out of a Naples restaurant, climbed into his Renault 21, and set off north for Rome. The August heat was intense, and just a few miles up the motorway, he fell asleep at the wheel, smashed into the guardrail and overturned his car. He died instantly.
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Nicolas Mottas writes about some of the current developments in the campaign to reunite the Parthenon Marbles in Athens, along with some of the reason why it is imperative that this happens.

From:
OpEdNews

July 8, 2008 at 07:49:17
Restore the Parthenon Marbles
by Nicolas Mottas Page 1 of 1 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com

“We say to British goverment: you have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now, in the name of fairness and morality, please give them back. I sincerely believe that such a gesture from Great Britain would ever honour your name”. Melina Mercouri, Greek actress and politician, Oxford Union, June 1986.

With pleasure I was informed that the British-based Greek enterpreneur Sir Stelios Hadji-Ioannou is willing to participate actively in the campaign for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles. The case of Marbles reunification’s effort is, less or more, known. Information about the historical backround of the ancient sculptures, their removal from the Athens Acropolis and transfer to London, can be found in various sources, including the internet. On that issue there has been a decades-long concern which is connected with the restoration of the Marbles to their homeland, Greece. However, as it is mostly known, no progress has been done on the issue, mainly due to the continual denial of British Museum’s administrations to discuss such a possibility. Yet, the question still remains: should the Parthenon Marbles return to their natural environment, in the place where they were created, or they should remain in the place where Lord Elgin moved them in the early 19th Century?
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Depending on who you speak to, freer circulation of cultural property is either a great idea, or a terrible thing. It all hangs on whether they think they will benefit or not from such a move. Those who argue against help to prop up the anti-deaccessioning clauses in the charters of many of the UK’s leading museums. Maybe people need to accept that there is no right or wrong answer – what is good in some situations may be bad in others – so it should not be the role of the law to put blanket regulations in place that stifle any efforts at interpretation based on the case in hand.

From:
The Art Newspaper

Do we really want the freer circulation of cultural goods?
Kavita Singh | 5.6.08 | Issue 192

A few years ago, I received a grant from the Getty Foundation for a project on museums in South Asia. I was just about to send 12 researchers to around 100 museums all over India, to get a sense of what place museums occupy in the social landscape of the country today. I asked the Secretary of the Department of Culture for a letter of support, but when I met her, I got an earful. She said, you are going to send people to museums in remote places that have valuable artefacts and very poor security. You will submit your reports to the Getty, and then all our things will begin to disappear.

I dismissed this bureaucrat’s remarks as an aberration, but in 2007 the same sorts of anxieties surfaced next door to India, as the Bangladesh National Museum made preparations for a loan exhibition to the Musée Guimet in Paris.
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