Another review of Chasing Aphrodite, The book about the problems of looted artefacts in their collection that have plagued the Getty Museum for the last decade.

From:
Paste

By Chaz Oreshkov
Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
The Art of Looting
Published at 12:32 PM on June 12, 2012

“To me my works of art are all vividly alive. They’re the embodiment of whoever created them—a mirror of their creator’s hopes, dreams and frustrations. They have led eventful lives—pampered by the aristocracy and pillaged by revolution, courted with ardor and cold-bloodedly abandoned. They have been honored by drawing rooms and humbled by attics. So many worlds in their lifespan, yet all were transitory. What stories they could tell, what sights they must have seen! Their worlds have long since disintegrated, yet they live on.”—J. Paul Getty, The Collector’s Choice

Artifacts belong in museums. We know this much from Indiana Jones’ epic words at the beginning of Last Crusade, when he yells (on a sinking ship in the middle of a typhoon, no less) “That belongs in a museum!” to another explorer who wants to keep an artifact for private use.
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Jason Felch, talks about his plans for a “wikiloot” database to help located looted artefacts based on the evidence that is already available. Unfortunately, the project is unsuccessful in getting the funding grant from the Knight Foundation, but they are still looking for other organisations that might be interested in funding such an endeavour.

From:
Guardian

WikiLoot aims to use crowdsourcing to track down stolen ancient artefacts
Man behind WikiLoot hopes crowdsourcing experiment will help to find some of the world’s oldest and most valuable treasures
Tom Kington in Rome
Wednesday 6 June 2012 18.39 BST

Campaigns to combat archaeological tomb raiders have notched up some big successes, notably a deal under which the J Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles agreed to hand back 40 precious artefacts after it was shown they had been looted from digs in Italy.

Activists, however, call that a drop in the ocean in a business valued at as much as $10bn (£6.5bn) a year, and claim hard-pressed lawyers and police forces are struggling against unscrupulous dealers.
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As well as eighteen artefacts in the Metropolitan Museum, Turkey is requesting the return of many other disputed artefacts in other museums across the USA.

From:
Los Angeles Times

Turkey asks U.S. museums for return of antiquities
By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2012, 8:48 p.m.

The government of Turkey is asking American museums to return dozens of artifacts that were allegedly looted from the country’s archaeological sites, opening a new front in the search for antiquities smuggled out of their original countries through an illicit trade.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are among the institutions that the Turkish government has contacted, officials say.
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The author of the Wikiloot proposal, has pointed out that the proposal will in part be assessed based on the amount of support people show for it on the submission page for the Knight News Challenge. There are 1000 other entries, so make sure you like or comment on the proposal at the Knight News Challenge page, to increase its chance of being given serious consideration.

You can read my original post about Wikiloot here.

The page from Knight News Challenge, to comment on the plan is here.

Further information about the WikiLoot project, from the Author’s website. Remember to visit the proposal details on the Knight Foundation’s website & express your support for it, by “liking” or commenting on it.

From:
Chasing Aphrodite

Introducing WikiLoot: Your Chance to Fight the Illicit Antiquities Trade
Posted on March 12, 2012 | 3 Comments

Today we’re pleased to announce — and to seek your help with — an exciting new project we’ve been tinkering with in private for some time. We’re calling it WikiLoot.

The idea behind WikiLoot is simple:

1. Create an open source web platform, or wiki, for the publication and analysis of a unique archive of primary source records and photographs documenting the illicit trade in looted antiquities.

2. Use social media and other tools to engage a broad network of contributors — experts, journalists, researchers, dilettantes and curious citizens — to collaborate in the analysis of that material.
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Jason Felch, one of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite, has submitted an application to the Knight Foundation, for assistance in creating WikiLoot – a website that would use crowd sourcing to create a database of looted artefacts in US museums.

Now – the suggestion is that it is only museums in the US, but others around the world are far from blameless in this issue & it ought to be easy to extend the remit of such a project to gradually include these too.

I think that the idea is an excellent one. I started trying to create a definitive list of artefacts disputes – just based on the articles I’ve posted on this site, but it is not a simple task – some cases have very little information available & each case is very different – so it is hard to come up with a simple way to categorise them all.

The key thing at this stage is to get funding for the project. In the words of the creator “One of the key things considered by judges is public engagement with the proposed idea. The best way to show this is for you to “like” our proposal or add a comment on how you think it could help — or be improved. (You may need to sign in with a Tumblr or other social media account.)” So, if this idea is of interest to you, make sure you go to the Knight Foundation page and “Like”, or ideally comment on the proposal. Remember also, to forward the details of the project to anyone else that you think may be interested in it, to try and get their support.

I look forward to being able to post further news about this project as it develops.

From:
Knight Foundation

WikiLoot: crowd-sourcing an analysis of the black market in looted antiquities

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
WikiLoot will identify looted antiquities in American museums by crowd-sourcing the analysis of a unique archive seized from black market dealers.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]
A handful of researchers around the world have access to parts of the archive. None have tried a crowd-sourcing approach to locating the thousands of looted objects shown in it.
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Another review of Chasing Aphrodite – about the Italian’s hunt for looted artefacts in the Getty Museum.

From:
Washington Times

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Chasing Aphrodite’
CHASING APHRODITE: THE HUNT FOR LOOTED ANTIQUITIES AT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MUSEUM
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 384 pages, illustrated

The 19th century was the golden age of acquisition. European and American collectors, smitten with the lure of antiquities from Greece, Italy and China, spent recklessly to assemble great collections in London, Paris and New York. No one questioned that marbles from the Parthenon would get more careful attention in London than in Athens.

Then the tide began to turn. Italians became restless at the sight of their “patrimony” being exported abroad. In 1939, Italy passed a cultural property law stating that archaeological objects found after that date were the property of the state. In Athens, Greeks demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles.
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The Trial (without result) of former Getty curator Marion True has been covered here many times before. The book “Chasing Aphrodite” aims to retell some of this story, as well as the background to it.

From:
New York Review of Books

What Went Wrong at the Getty
June 23, 2011
Hugh Eakin

Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum
by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 375 pp., $28.00

1.

On August 5, 70 BC, at 1:30 in the afternoon, a remarkable criminal trial began in Rome. A young prosecutor named Marcus Tullius Cicero was accusing a senior Roman political official, Gaius Verres, of extortion and misrule during Verres’s tenure as governor of Sicily. “For three long years he so thoroughly despoiled and pillaged the province that its restoration to its previous state is out of the question,” Cicero proclaimed in his bold opening statement.
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The authors of Chasing Aphrodite, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino are taking part in an event in Washington to discuss looted antiquities and transparency in American museums.

From:
National Press Club

Chasing Aphrodite: Investigative Journalists Track Down Looted Antiquities
January 24, 2012 6:00 PM

This is a ticketed event. Click here to jump to the ticket form.

Investigative journalists to analyze looted antiquities, and museum transparency

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, investigative journalists and authors of “Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum” will join Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum and Arthur Houghton, a former curator at the Getty Museum, to discuss looted antiquities and transparency in American museums at 6 p.m. Jan. 24 in the National Press Club ballroom.
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