Long-Term Leasing for Antiquities

Donn Zaretsky and Tyler Cowen both linked to a fascinating article last week by two economists who argue that long-term leasing of antiquities are a better alternative to export restrictions. Michael Kremer of Harvard, and Tom Wilkening (I think from MIT), argue that long-term leases would allow source nations to earn much-needed revenue from their antiquities, but would preserve their long-term ownership interests. Here is a link to their working paper.

It is a great idea I think, and one with a great deal of promise. It is a pragmatic solution, and one that has as good a chance as any at pleasing the disparate interest groups that shape cultural policy. A couple potential drawbacks are the risk of transportation, problems insuring against theft, and upsetting those who feel antiquities belong in their source nation. It's an exciting idea though, and one that merits further study.

Italy Agrees to Repatriate a Roman Statue to Libya

In yesterday's Washington Post, Ariel David has an interesting article on Italy's decision to repatriate this Roman statue of the goddess Venus. The statue is a copy of a Greek statue which has never been found. It was discovered in 1913 by Italian troops near the ruins of the ancient city of Cyrene on the Libyan coast. It was probably created in the 2nd Century AD. It's currently housed at the National Roman Museum in Rome.

Libya requested the return of the statue in 1989, however a legal dispute involving a group which considered the statue part of Italy's heritage has prevented the return for the last 4 years. Last week an Italian Court rejected a plea from the Italia Nostra conservation group, as international agreements "obliged" Italy to return the Greek statue.

Edmondo Zappacosta, counsel for the Libyan government said "This is a granite-like sentence, with solid arguments... On the basis of historical and juridical considerations, it was virtually a foregone conclusion that the Italia Nostra appeal would be rejected." The statue can now be returned to Tripoli. A date has yet to be set for the return.

The ruling is an interesting one. Many of the news reports indicate that it allows Italy to claim that other nations should return antiquities illicitly taken from Italy. I think a better reading of the decision is that it limits the ability of individuals to challenge the return of cultural heritage. This was a decision about whether the Italia Nostra could block the return. If angry citizens groups were allowed to challenge repatriation decisions, it would be very difficult to effectively repatriate objects, especially if the objects at issue are part of a popular collective heritage, like Greek or Roman civilization.

Historic Brestplate Not for Sale

Thanks to Will Anderson and Dave Phoenix for pointing this one out for me. South Australia's Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jay Weatherill has barred a ceremonial breastplate linked to the Burke and Wills expedition from sale. An earlier post is here, and there are some very good comments by folks who know a great deal more about Aboriginal Heritage than I do.

Minister Weatherill will now undertake an investigation to determine the rightful owners of the breastplate. The sale was banned under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 (SA). As Weatherill said, "This breastplate is a significant piece of our shared Australian history... It is one of the earliest symbols of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians."

The object was due to be auctioned today, but it has been declared an object of Aboriginal significance. Had it gone to auction, some estimate it would have sold for up to $200,000 Australian. It is an interesting situation in that the object was a gift to aborigines for helping the expedition, yet is still deemed a piece of aboriginal heritage. It think the Minister made the correct decision here, as the breastplate was an early effort at aboriginal reconciliation.

Scotland Yard Halves Art and Antique Squad Funding

Grim news for the London Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Squad. Saturday's edition of the Guardian had the following:

The dramatic scaling down of Scotland Yard's once renowned arts and antique squad has left organised criminals free to plunder the nation's heritage, according to a leading fine art insurer.

Police have sought private money to finance the squad after its annual budget of some £300,000 was halved earlier this year. But the Guardian has learned that Scotland Yard has failed to secure a penny from insurers or auction houses, after months of discussions.

---

Britain's art market is second only to the US and experts claim up to £200m worth of stolen art and antiques are sold in the UK each year. Interpol estimates that art theft is the fourth largest organised crime after drugs, people trafficking and arms.

Annabel Fell-Clark, chief executive of Axa Art UK, which pays out tens of millions of pounds a year to reimburse victims of art theft, condemned the slashing of the unit's budget. She warned that scaling down the unit was already having an impact on pursuing art thieves who target Britain's stately homes and museums.

"We have seen that they [the team] are increasingly overstretched and being treated as a very low priority. At the moment we have very good information which we are wanting to pass on, which would bring arrests, if not convictions. But we are not being treated particularly seriously, let's put it that way.

"We want to see criminal gangs brought to justice, and in some instances lack of interest from the squad has stopped us being able to pursue further recovery. We want and need to work with the police."

She said Axa was aware the government was seeking funding for the squad but the company had decided it would not consider paying directly for the unit, adding that attempts by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police to find private sponsors in the art world were shortsighted.

"It would be a conflict of interest for us to get involved," she said. "We have slightly different agendas. As insurers, we are interested in recovering the pieces however we can, and are not that bothered about finding and prosecuting the perpetrators. We are concerned that this aspect of law enforcement is not taken particularly seriously right now.

"Very often when you are investigating art theft connections are uncovered with organised crime in relation to drugs and arms dealing, so it doesn't make sense to ignore this aspect of criminal activity."

The London based "arts squad" was formed in 1969 to pursue and prosecute criminals who operate in the second biggest art market in the world. In the past the unit, which is called in to investigate 120 cases a year, was involved in recovery of art works across the world.

(continue reading)

This is a troubling development. 150,000 is not a very large sum, and a drop in the bucket compared to the amounts of money which changes hands in the UK art and antiquities market. If the United Kingdom is serious about combating the illicit trade in arts and antiquities, it needs to maintain a well-funded art-theft unit. To expect the arts and antiquities unit to solicit funding from those they are supposed to regulate and police also strikes me as ridiculous.

Can "My Things" Prevent Art Theft?

A new internet service called MyThings.com has just launched in the US, while it has been running in the UK since last December. It is a clever concept, and as I understand it, it has a number of uses:

• It allows people to track their belongings
• People can have some of their belongings valued
• It can help police track down stolen items
• It can add items to a portfolio at the point of sale via agreements with retailers
  
• People can show off what they own

The website is in the initial stages, but it does seem to market itself to art and antiquities owners. People can choose to display what they own to the whole internet, or keep them private. The concept is clever, but makes me a bit uncomfortable, because it seems much of this information must surely be tracking the buying habits of consumers, and the website does not seem up front about this (at least from my cursory exploration). I wonder what kind of an impact this site or others like it will have on the cultural property trade. It's biggest impact may be insuring people have photos of their art for insurance valuation, and it may help police track down the objects, but it is still no substitute for a licit and honorable market which is based on solid provenance.

Chihuly Glass Thefts in Florida (UPDATE)

Up to 12 red glass reeds designed by Dale Chihuly were stolen from the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida. The large hand-blown glass reeds were taken during a severe storm on April 11. Each glass sculpture may be worth over $10,000. This is the second time the reeds have been stolen from the Fairchild, but the reeds were discovered after an anonymous tip.

Regardless of the artistic merit we may place on the glass sculptures, they are very beautiful and colorful objects, and very valuable. Selling them will be the most difficult task for the thieves. It might not be as hard as we might think though. I wonder how unique the reeds really are. I know some of the Chihuly displays are eventually sold to the public, and these kind of red reeds have been displayed all over the world (at least based on a simple google images search they seem to be). I wonder how many of them there may be. Of course the thieves could have wanted them for personal use as well.

UPDATE:

The glass sculptures were found in a vacant lot less than a mile away. The Police think they recovered all of them and that they were just thrown away and discarded. This looks less like an art theft and more like art-defacement. Were the vandals commenting on the artistic merit of the glass sculptures? There were replaced by plastic pipes.

Church Thefts in Omaha Nebraska

The Omaha World-Herald reports on a number of recent church thefts. Most of these thefts generally occur in South America or Europe. They are not as common in the United States:

Since last May, thieves have taken works from St. Cecilia Cathedral and First Covenant, All Saints Episcopal, Immaculate Conception Catholic, St. Thomas More Catholic and St. Joseph Catholic Churches.

The thefts don't tie into any particular national or global trend. Most of the works don't have a large resale market.

So they're tough to figure out.

John Wilson, head curator of Omaha's Joslyn Art Museum, said art thefts from churches are widespread in South America, Italy and other places abroad.

"But why is it happening in the middle of America, in Omaha? I don't have a clue," he said.

It's not happening in other Midlands museums or churches.

Anna McAlpine, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Museums, said galleries across the country have not been seeing thefts of religious art.

Representatives of the Catholic Archdioceses of St. Louis and St. Paul-Minneapolis and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., say they haven't heard of thefts of art from their churches.

Omaha may be a surprising spot, but churches aren't. They are often notorious for having lax security.

"Churches don't see these artworks as investments," Wilson said. "They hang the paintings for spiritual purposes, and sometimes they may be a little too trusting."

The criminals aren't drawn to the works because of spirituality, said Bob Spiel, a Chicago-based private investigator, security consultant and former art theft and forgery investigator for the New York City branch of the FBI. He has worked dozens of cases similar to those in Omaha. The motivation is always the same.

"It's always about money," Spiel said. "Someone is looking to turn the painting around for some quick cash."

It doesn't have to be lots of money. The value of the artworks snatched from Omaha churches ranges from about $500 to the $100,000 painting of the Virgin Mary at St. Cecilia Cathedral.

Continue reading.

Monteleone Di Spoleto Wants Its Chariot Back

This exquisite bronze chariot was discovered in 1902 by a farmer clearing some of his land. Today's New York Times has an interesting article by Elisabetta Povoledo on the small Northern-Italian village which wants this chariot returned.

The 2,600 year-old bronze chariot was assembled in 1903, but has recently been reassembled to better show what Etruscan chariots probably looked like at the time. Carol Vogel had a nice article on the new reconstruction last week here. It's also got an excellent slide show of the chariot. The image above shows the chariot before the reconstruction, the picture below is after.

As the Mayor of Monteleone Di Spoleto Nando Durastanti says, "I'm very sorry for the Met because they've done a great job in making the most of the chariot." This is not a claim pursued by the Italian Culture Ministry, rather mayor Durastanti enlisted an Atlanta lawyer named Tito Mazzetta to pursue its claims.

Mazzetta argues that Italian law in 1902 dictated that the chariot was the property of the state, and he uses a decision by the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University which returned an Egyptian Mummy in 2004 even though it had been exported to North America in 1864. Mazzetta wants another exception carved out in the already exception-ridden statute of limitations provisions. I'm not sure what kind of exception he hopes to carve out, but I think he's going to have a difficult time with it. The Demand and Refusal rule which is the law in the State of New York triggers a limitations period when an object that has been missing is demanded from its current possessor. That is the most generous limitations rule that I am aware of in the US. In this case, the Italian State knew about the chariot in 1904. The New York Times has an article on Feb. 16, 1904 in which Italian authorities were critical of the chariot's export. In any case, it seems that an equitable defense such as laches would certainly step in and prevent a repatriation.

This is a difficult battle for Mayor Durastanti, given that over a century has passed with the chariot on display at the Met, and the Italian Culture Ministry does not support the repatriation. His claim is an ethical one. However those claims need public pressure to be effective. Without the support of the Italian Culture Ministry, that is a nearly impossible battle to win in my view.

As Maurizio Firorilli, a lawyer with the Italian Culture Ministry said, "the preconditions that have guided other negotiations don't exist in this case." I think that is right, even though Mazzetta still attempts to stake the moral high ground in the dispute by saying "When lawyers challenged the slaver laws or fought for equal rights for women, people thought they were out of their minds ... Laws should be changed. The crimes of the past should not be condoned." That may be true, but this antiquity seems a very different situation from something like slavery.

The chariot was found by chance by an Italian farmer who didn't know what he had found. He sold the bronze chariot as scrap metal so that he could re-tile his roof. Perhaps the chariot should be returned to Italy, but the World's museums cannot be emptied of all antiquities and works of art which originated in another nation.

The Getty Trust's Francavilla Marittima Project

The J. Paul Getty Museum announced today that a second volume of research will be published from the Francavilla Marittima project. The project brings together researchers and scholars from Italy, Switzerland, and the Getty. As today's press release states, "this partnership, designed to discover information about the origins of objects from antiquity, demonstrates the good that can come from collaborative international scientific research based solely on the pursuit of knowledge".

This project was started in 1993 by Marion True, after a Dutch archaeologist named Marianne Kleibrink notified true that many of the vases in the Getty's collection came from a Greek colony in southern Italy knowns as Francavilla Marittima. It seems most of these vases and terracottas were donated to the Getty in the 1970's.

In response, True and the Getty undertook this research initiative, and also repatriated many of the objects to Italy. And so they should have, because we don't know who donated the terracottas, but it seems possible that many of the vases and fragments were illicitly excavated or illegally exported.

This is a welcome research initiative, and is good in the sense that it is attempting to learn more about these vases. However, it's a bit like closing the proverbial barn door after the horse has escaped. If these terracottas had been professionally excavated, a great deal more would have been known about them. Of course, because the objects were donated, the Getty didn't really play a part in that illicit trade. Today's move seems a clear move to improve the public image of its former curator Marion True, and highlight its research initiatives. I'm only a novice at archaeological study, and I do not know about the quality of this research. If any archaeologists have an opinion on the scholarly merit of what has been learned from the Francavilla Marittima project, please post your thoughts in the comments section.

As Michael Brand's statement today made clear, "The goal of this project from the start was to repatriate the objects to Italy following a period of research and documentation and I'm pleased we played a part in this important international effort". Research initiatives like this one are a welcome step, but are by no means a substitution for a professional excavation. I would like to see more of a collaborative effort between the antiquities market and archaeologists which uses the purchase price an antiquity fetches at an auction to fund excavations in source countries. There are a number of difficult barriers in erecting such a system, but it seems the best chance to forge a pragmatic compromise and reduce the illicit trade.

Another Iranian Loss in the High Court in London

Iran has lost a legal dispute involving 5,000 year-old antiquities. Here's a story from the Daily Mail and also The Independent. Gray J. ruled against Iran because it could not establish Iranian title to the artifacts. It seems the antiquities were exposed after flooding in 2001. There may be an appeal, but it's unclear why exactly Iran was unable to establish its ownership claim. Was the national patrimony declaration unclear? Or, could the antiquities have come from any number of nations? As Gray J. said, "but the enactments relied on by Iran fall short in my judgment of establishing its legal ownership of the antiquities." Another frustrating example of poor legal reporting. That's the result, but we have no idea why the court reached that decision. In any event, this is an important and interesting ruling. I'll write more when I can track down a copy of the opinion. Sometimes the opinions take a couple of weeks to hit the internet.

It seems that 2 large antiquities shipments have been seized by Customs officials in the UK and returned to Iran. I was not aware of those seizures. This decision is a blow to source nations, and a bit of a surprising one. Courts in the US, even in the civil context usually enforce these declarations. I will be very interested to read the opinion in this case.

The "Booming" Business of Restitution Claims

Howard Spiegler and Lawrence Kaye are receiving a great deal of attention (and free advertising) these days. Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal had a nice article on Lawrence Kaye 2 weeks ago titled "the Bounty Hunters" which appeared in the Mar. 23 edition ($). It's an interesting article, and a number of the points she discusses have been covered in this blog in recent months.

In particular, she paints the art restitution practice as a booming business. As she says,

In a dynamic that echoes past law-industry booms -- asbestos and tobacco litigation, securities class -action suits -- a confluence of factors has tipped art restitution from a boutique practice of a decade ago to a mini-industry. Museums are putting their archives online, and the number of online art databases is growing, making it easier to locate potentially looted works. As art prices reach further uncharted territory, lawyers are accepting jobs that wouldn't have paid off in the past. Top cases yield nine-figure payouts.

I think it's true that restitution litigation is increasing, and the sums of money which can be recovered are staggering. However, I think it would be laboring the point to make out the restitution litigation as the next big legal trend. These claims are interesting and dynamic, but they don't yet rise to the level of the asbestos or tobacco suits I don't think. Spiegler and Kaye are the only attorneys I'm aware of which have a devoted restitution practice (at Herrick, Feinstein), though there may be others. I do think "cultural property law" or "art law" is a fascinating field because it touches on a number of interesting and novel points of law ranging from limitations periods to intellectual property and commercial law. It's an interesting and diverse mix of law, and one that is much different from the transactional work a lot of lawyers have to do. Art law just sounds more fun and interesting than drawing up a contract or commercial sales agreement.

Carol King of the New York Times also has a great article on these guys as well in last week's museum section. It's available here (as an aside, the NYT has made a terrific decision to allow everyone with an academic-affiliated email address free access to it's Times Select service, including .edu and .ac.uk email addresses).

The NYT piece talks about some of the landmark art law cases including Turkey's dispute with the Met, the Schultz prosecution, and the Elicofon case. If you are a nation or claimant and you want the return of a cultural object, Spiegler and Kaye are the attorneys you want to speak with.
I think it would be too easy to simply paint these guys as champions of dispossessed art. They are attorneys and their job is to zealously advocate on behalf of their clients. They aren't charged with creating good cultural policy. Some of their efforts have been successful and worthy of praise. However, other disputes have been more controversial, most notably the Portrait of Wally dispute that is going at 8 years without a trial on the merits.

In general, the work of these lawyers is worthy of praise admiration; they are cleaning up a market which has shown itself unable or unwilling to police itself; they also have had the good fortune of operating in a lucrative and interesting niche practice area.

Recent Repatriations and the Parthenon Marbles

The TimesOnline had an article last week by Ben Macintyre tying in the recent repatriations and criminal trials in Italy and Greece to the Parthenon Marbles (or the Elgin Marbles as they are often referred to). Here's an excerpt:

The return to Greece of a spectacular Macedonian gold wreath from the 4th century BC may lead to the repatriation of several looted artefacts worth millions of pounds.

Court cases in Italy and Greece are increasing the pressure on museums around the world and could lead to widespread changes in the handling of ancient treasures.

The campaign to return stolen work to its country of origin has emboldened Costas Karamanlis, the Prime Minister of Greece, to predict that Britain will soon be forced to surrender the Elgin Marbles. Also at stake are hundreds of statues, bronzes, engravings and other artworks from museums in Europe, the US and Japan.

At the heart of this revolution is the landmark case of the funerary wreath, one of the most beautiful surviving examples of ancient craftsmanship, which was looted from Greece more than ten years ago. A delicate spray of gold leaves interwoven with coloured glass paste, the wreath was probably designed as a funeral gift and made soon after the death of Alexander the Great.

It was put on display in Greece for the first time this week after a long campaign to persuade the J. Paul Getty Museum, in California, to return it to its homeland.

Mr Karamanlis welcomed its return as evidence that Britain would soon be forced to relinquish the Elgin Marbles, which were acquired by the British diplomat Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1810 and are currently housed in the British Museum. Britain has argued that they are better preserved in London (continue reading).

These repatriations are an important step, and are an example of stronger action by both Greece and Italy. However, the Vatican is expected to announce that it will refuse to return some fragments of the Parthenon. Parts of the Parthenon are spread all over Europe, including London, Rome, Copenhagen, Berlin.

I was at the British Museum a few weeks ago, and I was reminded how impressive the sculptures still are, even though they are broken and decontextualized. It would be very exciting to see all of the sculptures collected in Athens for display. However, people all over Europe can view parts of them at present, and there is a value in that as well I suppose. In the end, I seriously doubt whether the British Museum will ever relinquish the marbles.

The case for their return seems much different from the gold wreath which the Getty just returned and from the trial of Marion True. The argument for their return is only ethical or moral, there is no legal claim to them which Greece could hope to assert.