We often talk about provenance, in relation to looted artefacts, being later sold on – and the fact that without provenance, it is hard to really know what the artefact is – where it really came from & whether it is genuine or not. What is sometimes overlooked is that such issues of provenance can sometimes have just as much effect on far more recent art works.

The message is clear – all artwork needs a full provenance, to be certain of its authenticity. The people who buy works which do not have one are encouraging the market in looting & fakes, while at the same time possibly purchasing worth a tiny fraction of what they paid for it.

From:
Vanity Fair

May 2012
A Question of Provenance
By Michael Shnayerson

Ann Freedman had come to Knoedler one last time.

On a mid-February day, she approached the mansion at 19 East 70th Street, where New York’s most venerable art gallery used to be, before its sudden, shocking closing last fall amid forgery allegations. “It’s amazing to think that this institution never stopped for 165 years,” she said. “It didn’t stop during the Civil War, World War I, World War II … I kept it open on 9/11.”

Now the doors were locked, the building cleaned out. The new owner was about to take possession. Knoedler’s former director had wangled a walk-through: a chance, as she put it, to be the last one in and the last one out of this gallery that had once sold Raphaels and Vermeers to Mellons and Fricks. She seemed not to wonder whether she was part of the reason these rooms were now empty.
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Vanity Fair has published a number of letters in response to Christopher Hitchens’s piece on the Parthenon Sculptures. Most are positive, but one tries to perpetuate the myth that Elgin saved the sculptures for the Greeks – referring to an article that has already been discredited by more than one commentator.

From:
Vanity Fair

September 2009
Letters

[snip]

Greek Love

THANK YOU for “The Lovely Stones” [July], Christopher Hitchens’s beautiful and insightful piece on the Parthenon, the most elegant edifice created by a free people. His argument for the return of the amputated pieces is stunningly simple and persuasive. And his relating Obama’s stimulus ethos to Pericles’s plan “to recover from a long and ill-fought war”—to “give employment (and a morale boost) to the talents of [Greece’s] citizens … over tremendous conservative opposition to his spending”—is a breathtaking historical reflection. —GEORGE LOIS, director, Good Karma Creative, New York, New York
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Christopher Hitchens has written a 4 page piece in Vanity Fair about the Parthenon Marbles & the reasons why he believes that they belong in Greece. Unlike many recent pieces though, although it is prompted by the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, it goes far deeper into the argument, looking at many aspects of it rather than purely focussing on this most recent development.

From:
Vanity Fair

Acropolis Now
The Lovely Stones
Among the first to visit Greece’s new Acropolis Museum, devoted to the Parthenon and other temples, the author reviews the origins of a gloriously “right” structure (part of a fifth-century-b.c. stimulus plan) and the continuing outrage that half its façade is still in London.
By Christopher Hitchens July 2009

The great classicist A. W. Lawrence (illegitimate younger brother of the even more famously illegitimate T.E. “of Arabia”) once remarked of the Parthenon that it is “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” I was considering this thought the other day as I stood on top of the temple with Maria Ioannidou, the dedicated director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, and watched the workshop that lay below and around me. Everywhere there were craftsmen and -women, toiling to get the Parthenon and its sister temples ready for viewing by the public this summer. There was the occasional whine of a drill and groan of a crane, but otherwise this was the quietest construction site I have ever seen—or, rather, heard. Putting the rightest, or most right, building to rights means that the workers must use marble from a quarry in the same mountain as the original one, that they must employ old-fashioned chisels to carve, along with traditional brushes and twigs, and that they must study and replicate the ancient Lego-like marble joints with which the master builders of antiquity made it all fit miraculously together.
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