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?

Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
Author: Sharon Waxman
Publisher: Times Books
ISBN: 0805086536

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.

Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
Author: Sharon Waxman
Publisher: Times Books
ISBN: 0805086536

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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A new book by Sharon Waxman looks at how many museums of the West have relied heavily on looted artefacts to build up their collections, even in comparatively recent times.

Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
Author: Sharon Waxman
Publisher: Times Books
ISBN: 0805086536

From:
Truthdig

Book Review
Karl E. Meyer on Sharon Waxman’s ‘Loot’
Posted on Oct 24, 2008
By Karl E. Meyer

I devoured “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World” with particular zest, having published in 1973 an earlier account of the same cultural underworld, “The Plundered Past.” A seasoned reporter with an Oxford degree in Middle East studies, Sharon Waxman has updated and surpassed my explorations, in part because the outcry over the illicit traffic has reached fever pitch, provoking voluble, angry and indiscreet utterances from curators, collectors, dealers and a new breed of watchdogs, viz.:

“You end up thinking we’re all a bunch of looters, thieves, exploiters, that we’re some kind of criminals … but who would be interested in Greek sculpture if it were all in Greece? These pieces are great because they’re in the Louvre.” So protests Aggy Leroule, the Louvre’s press attaché, and so complain directors, trustees and publicists at the many great temples of art and archaeology. Yet there are also dissidents, an unlikely example being Thomas Hoving, once the acquisition-obsessed director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now a fallen Lucifer who recalls, almost with relish, his prevarications past.
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A book due out next year by Michael Gross looks behind the scenes at the Met – in particular, how they made some of their acquisitions & whether they really did believe that they were always acting in good faith. The author tells me that quite a bit of previously unknown information will be revealed in the book.

Perhaps this will offer an interesting antidote to James Cuno’s book, giving the other side of the story of how a universal museum actually operates.

From:
New York Post

MUSEUM EXPOSÉ
September 17, 2008

ONE unwelcome chore for Thomas Campbell, director-elect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be the repercussions from “Rogues’ Gallery” by Michael Gross – the exposé Campbell’s predecessor, Philippe de Montebello, failed to stop. Though it’s not due out until spring, it’s already ruffling feathers. Among its revelations is the real reason why the Met returned its Euphronios vase and other looted objects to Italy this year: Italian prosecutors threatened to indict the museum’s emeritus antiquities curator, Dietrich von Bothmer, and put the wheel-chair-bound nonagenarian on trial if the treasures weren’t returned. Just like that, they were.

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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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New York’s Metropolitan Museum has no record of Nigerian art prior to the Benin Bronzes. Met Director Philippe de Montebello suggests that this is a problem brought about by the 1970 UNESCO convention on Cultural Property.

Kwame Opoku however suggests that perhaps this approach is glossing over the realities of the situation.

From:
CultureGrrl

Kwame Opoku, a tireless commentator on restitution issues (one of whose essays recently attracted a rejoinder on Afrikanet.info from Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello), responds to Michael Conforti Q&A About AAMD and Antiquities:

It is always interesting to hear from those whose work it is to keep records of the past achievements of mankind and society declaring that we must forget the past and look forward to the future. What they are saying is that there should be no archaeology of the acquisition practices of the past.
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Lee Rosenbaum offers some thoughts on whether the idea that Neil MacGregor was offered the job of director of the Met was all down to distortion of the issue by headline writers.

Read her piece here.

At the same time Norman Lebrecht uses this news as another chance to extol the virtues of MacGregor & the British Museum in a tone that seems almost too adulatory to be believable. If only the residents of all the countries hoping for artefacts to be returned were as excited by this news.

Read his piece on the news here.

When Philippe de Montebello announced his retirement from New York’s Metropolitan Museum, British Museum director Neil MacGregor was one of the people tipped to replace him. The British Museum has just announced though that although he was offered the post, he has turned it down with the intention of staying with the British Museum until 2012.

During the next four years though, whilst MacGregor may continue trying to resist change, he may find that he is left with little choice, with the carpet being swept out from under him by changing views on restitution in the Museums’ world.

From:
Daily Telegraph

British Museum director says no to Metropolitan Museum of Art move
By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
Last Updated: 6:42PM BST 01/07/2008
British Museum director Neil MacGregor has turned down a job as head of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr MacGregor was approached as a possible replacement for Philippe de Montebello, who is stepping down as Met director at the end of this year.

But after weighing up the offer, he has pledged his future to the British Museum for another five year term.
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Philippe de Montebello, Director of New York’s Metropolitan Musum has never been popular with restitutionists, despite being unwillingly responsible for some of the most significant artefact restitutions in recent years. He always gives the impression that he does not really even try to understand the issues & implies that he has been forced into making decisions by situations outside his control.

From:
Modern Ghana

DOES THE DEMAND FOR THE RESTITUTION OF STOLEN AFRICAN CULTURAL OBJECTS CONSTITUTE AN OBSTACLE TO THE DISSEMINATION OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT AFRICAN ARTS? COMMENTS ON A LETTER FROM PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO, DIRECTOR, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.
By Dr. Kwame Opoku
Mon, 21 Apr 2008
Feature Article

Reference is made to the letter from Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1), New York, which was published in AFRIKANET on Friday, 18 April, 2008. http://www.afrikanet.info/. In his letter, Philippe de Montebello refers to my article entitled “Is Legality still a viable concept for European and American Museum Directors?” http://www.afrikanet.info/index. The Director of the Metropolitan does not address the main point of my article, namely, that the arguments the European and American museums present in defence of their holding of stolen African cultural objects are extremely weak. It seems the director is more interested in the picture inserted in the article than in the serious comments on legality. I shall therefore only comment on the points raised in his letter.

We are sorry that the Director of the Metropolitan Museum had to go to so much trouble in order to identify the Nok terracotta. Incidentally, why must a Nok sculpture be described as “haunting, strange-looking object”? This description comes from a museum director who has artworks from the Egyptians, Guro, Lobi, Dogon, Bamana, Senufo, Baule, Lumbo, Igbo, Fan Yoruba, Chokwe, etc among his collections. I thought we had long moved away from the period when the Europeans and Americans described whatever came out of Africa in these terms. Or are we going back to those days when an unbridgeable difference was assumed to exist between African art and European art? Surely, after the influence of African art on modern art and after so many exhibitions on African art, some organized by the Metropolitan Museum, such a description sounds somewhat odd, especially coming from a Director of one of the leading museums of the West.
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Museums in the USA were founded on very different principles to many of those in Europe. Nowadays, this difference is starting to manifest itself in their more pragmatic approach to the restitution of disputed artefacts in their collections.

From:
Slate

Trading Places
Cultural property disputes are reshaping the art world—but how?
By Carol Kino
Posted Monday, July 28, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT

It’s a sad truth that the depredations of war and imperialism have sometimes had positive side effects for art history. Take the Metropolitan Museum’s recent “Manet-Velázquez” show, on the influence of 17th-century Spanish painting on 19th-century French art. For most of the 18th century, Spanish artists like Murillo, Zurbaran, and Velázquez were little known outside their homeland. Then in the early 1800s, hundreds of Spanish paintings arrived in Paris as Napoleonic war loot. Some were briefly shown at the Louvre before Napoleon’s defeat, after which they were returned. Later that century, French artists began adopting the Spanish artists’ realist aesthetic and loose, sensuous brushwork—a move that laid the foundations of Impressionism and radically changed the course of modern art.

Unlike many European museums, American museums were built with civic and capitalist muscle, rather than imperial might. Yet well into the 1970s their attitude toward acquisitions—as any expert will admit off the record—was frequently “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But today American courts are dealing with an unprecedented number of Holocaust reparation cases. And last year, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted a well-known New York dealer, Frederick Schultz, for conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. As a result, some foreign collectors and museums have become more cautious about loaning work to museum shows—particularly those in America—and everyone has become vastly more diligent about conducting provenance research before buying.
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