{"id":78,"date":"2020-02-27T15:26:19","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T15:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-esc-introtocollegereadingandwriting\/?post_type=chapter&p=78"},"modified":"2020-08-05T19:06:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-05T19:06:00","slug":"a-market-for-looted-antiquities","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-esc-introtocollegereadingandwriting\/chapter\/a-market-for-looted-antiquities\/","title":{"raw":"While Elgin Marbles Debate Rages, There Is Still a Market for Looted Antiquities","rendered":"While Elgin Marbles Debate Rages, There Is Still a Market for Looted Antiquities"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n
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by Simon Mackenzie<\/em><\/span><\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n\"Phidias(?),<\/a>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n

Detail, Phidias(?), Parthenon Frieze, c. 438-32 B.C.E., pentelic marble (420 linear feet of the 525 that complete the frieze are in the British Museum) (photo: Steven Zucker,\u00a0CC BY-NC-SA)<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\nSeveral members of the cast of the film\u00a0The Monuments Men<\/a>\u00a0made headlines for\u00a0expressing the view<\/a>\u00a0that the British Museum should return the Elgin Marbles to Athens after their \u201cvery nice stay\u201d of 200 years in London.\r\n\r\nThat reignited the debate around the ethics and intentions of\u00a0their removal from the Parthenon<\/a>\u00a0in the early 19th century, as well as the controversy around what to do with them now. But whether or not the removal of the sculptures should be considered \u201cpillage or protection\u201d, as\u00a0the Guardian put it<\/a>, we might take the opportunity to reflect on other more contemporary and unambiguous examples of international cultural heritage plunder.\r\n

Demands of the Art Market<\/h2>\r\nThe international art market that deals in ancient cultural objects casts a destructive shadow. Tombs are looted, statues broken from their pedestals, and facades chainsawed off temples, all to feed a booming economic demand among connoisseurs who prize the enjoyment of the artistic attributes of cultural objects, the thrill and investment value of collection, and the social status attributed to those associated with high culture.\r\n\r\nThe source countries for these collectible objects tend to be less economically developed than the market countries and so are usually not very well equipped to protect their heritage resources against plunder. London and New York are the two biggest centers for this trade in the world, and their active art markets have over the years exerted a strong demand for the archaeological riches underground in countries like Egypt, Greece and Turkey; or pieces of temple complexes like those found in South America and South East Asia.\r\n
\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\r\n

Bronze statue of a nude male figure, Greek or Roman, Hellenistic or Imperial, c. 200 B.C.E.\u2014c. 200 C.E., bronze (on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and possibly looted from the ancient site of Bubon in Turkey)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nEstimates of the size of the illicit underworld of the international trade in art and antiquities are unreliable at present. Although figures as high as\u00a0US$6 billion\u00a0have been proposed, it is generally recognised that it is currently impossible to verify size estimates. Many looted antiquities are sold on the open market and their illicit origins will never be detected, let alone proved. And, as well as the public trade through auction houses and museum acquisitions which can be scrutinised to some extent, there is also a private trade between individuals, which is difficult to investigate.\r\n\r\nPolice statistics in most countries do not even have a separate category for art related thefts or seizures. They tend to lump them in with all other types of property theft. Looting in source countries happens at sites which are often remote, and in some cases undiscovered, and much looting activity is not detected or recorded by over-stretched local police forces.\r\n\r\nAll of these factors, and more, make it very difficult to know how much illicit market activity there really is. But\u00a0a growing body of research<\/a>\u00a0has established considerable evidence to show that looting and trafficking is still a sizeable and serious issue, and one involving significant sums of money.\r\n

Cultural Looting<\/h2>\r\nThere was a relatively uncontested free and open dealing in looted cultural objects in Britain and elsewhere running through the colonial era, supported by imperialist values, and this continued. Then, in the 1960s a sustained critique of these practices began to take hold.\r\n\r\nArchaeologists who had experienced first-hand the looting of sites they had been working on began to reflect on the rapacious nature of the market in cultural resources. In particular, they argued that looters destroyed sites as they dug out tombs and other underground heritage, depriving researchers of the historical knowledge which the context of buried objects could give up.\r\n\r\nCriticism of the international trade in looted antiquities mounted, and in 1970 UNESCO brought countries together under\u00a0an international convention<\/a>\u00a0to protect the world\u2019s cultural heritage from exploitation by market forces. This date of 1970 has over time come to be accepted as the norm for acquisition of antiquities, particularly among museums subscribing to a collective ethical code.\r\n\r\nThey now have to look for a \u201cprovenance\u201d (ownership history) dating back to at least that date. This is obviously therefore a rule intended to reduce demand for artifacts looted in recent decades, rather than to right any perceived wrongs of a more historical nature. But not all types of buyers in the market subscribe to the 1970 norm \u2013 and our research evidence suggests the \u201c1970 rule\u201d is not greatly influencing aggregate buying decisions in public market settings.\r\n

Repatriation<\/h2>\r\nMajor dealing and collecting institutions have been implicated in the trade in illicit cultural objects, as one would expect, given that traffickers have inserted looted artifacts into the legitimate trade, where they have most value. And as the understanding of the reach of this increases, so does the trend towards \u201crepatriation\u201d of objects to their source countries from the world\u2019s encyclopedic museums.\r\n\r\nFor example, in 2013 the Metropolitan Museum in New York\u00a0returned two \u201cKneeling Attendants\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to the national museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, looted originally it seems from the temple complex at the ancient Khmer capital of\u00a0Koh Ker<\/a>, one of Cambodia\u2019s great heritage sites.\r\n
\r\n\r\n\"Koh<\/a>\r\n

Koh Ker National Park, Cambodia (photo:\u00a0Bruno Schoonbrodt<\/a>, CC BY-NC 2.0)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\"\"<\/a>At the same time, another statue from Koh Ker has been the subject of litigation in the New York courts:\u00a0the Duryodhana<\/a>, offered for sale by Sotheby\u2019s for an estimated $2m-$3m. The statue in New York was broken off at the ankles and its feet were discovered still attached to their pedestal in the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker.\r\n\r\nThe US Department of Justice alleged that it was torn from its base in the 1970s during\u00a0the civil war which led to Khmer Rouge power<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and from our fieldwork in Cambodia, we have first-hand accounts of similar looting activity from traffickers active at that time. Subsequently, it was transported to London where it was sold to a Belgian collector through the auction house Spink. Late in 2013, Sotheby\u2019s and Cambodia concluded a settlement to the case, and the statue was returned.\r\n\r\nThe pressing question for the great museums of the world is what will happen to their repositories in a climate of greater attention to the ethics of acquisitions, present and past. This raises difficult value judgments around the wider issue of where ancient artifacts belong, the moral status of major museums in rich countries, and \u201cwho owns culture\u201d, as the titles of several books in the field put it.\r\n\r\nFor some people, this question may invite different responses when applied to cases like the Elgin Marbles on one hand, or fresh loot on the other. For so-called \u201ccultural internationalists,\u201d the issue is the very moral legitimacy of countries declaring ownership of all cultural heritage. But the countries themselves would see the moral and legal elements of their title as being settled.\r\n

Market Victim or Complicit?<\/h2>\r\nThe extent to which museums, dealers, collectors and auction houses know about the illicit origins of objects they acquire \u2013 and whether they turn a blind eye or are genuinely duped by fraudulent sellers \u2013 is hotly contested. The New York dealer\u00a0Frederick Schultz, for example, once president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art,\u00a0was sentenced<\/a>\u00a0in 2002 to nearly three years in jail and received a $50,000 fine for his part in receiving looted items from Egypt through a British smuggler named\u00a0Jonathan Tokeley-Parry<\/a>.\r\n\r\nThe smuggled objects had been\u00a0dipped in plastic<\/a>\u00a0and painted to look like tourist souvenir items, thus evading Egyptian border control. The two dealers then fabricated provenance for the items in order to give them the appearance of having a legitimate ownership history, inventing a collector they called Thomas Alcock and attaching labels to the objects to suggest they were from his collection.\r\n\r\nThey even went so far as to artificially age the labels by dipping them in tea, to better support the illusion they were creating. The artifacts included a sculptural head of the 18th dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III, subsequently to be sold by Schultz for $1.2 million.\r\n\r\nAnd in 1997, journalist Peter Watson published the results of his five-year investigation\u00a0Sotheby\u2019s: the Inside Story<\/a>, which alleged complicity among some of the auction house\u2019s employees in knowingly receiving looted and trafficked artifacts.\r\n\r\nSubsequently,\u00a0Sotheby\u2019s closed<\/a>\u00a0the London arm of its antiquities sales department, never to re-open, in a move which was \u201cwidely interpreted<\/a>\u201d as a response to Watson\u2019s book, and which prompted Boston University archaeology professor and long-time commentator on illicit trade issues Ricardo Elia to note that \u201cLondon has been called the smuggling capital of the world<\/a>.\u201d\r\n\r\nAgainst these scandalous examples of malpractice, trade representatives tend to argue that they exercise appropriate levels of \u201cdue diligence\u201d. Criminal offenses for dealing in illicit cultural objects like the\u00a0up-to-seven year prison sentence<\/a>\u00a0created in the UK in 2003 often require the prosecution to prove a buyer\u2019s \u201cknowledge or belief\u201d of an object\u2019s tainted history, which has proved very difficult to do. The UK law remains virtually unused.\r\n\r\nAnd so the current debate raised by George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray\u2019s thoughts on the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles is important, but for reasons which don\u2019t tend to make their way into press reports of the controversy. The discussion around antiquities which were taken from Greece over two centuries ago is part of the context of a more immediate issue of global crime. Looting and trafficking of cultural objects is not only a problem of the past.\r\n\r\nArticle by Simon Mackenzie<\/a>, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society,\u00a0University of Glasgow\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(CC BY-ND 4.0)\r\n\r\nThis article was originally published on\u00a0The Conversation<\/a>. Read the\u00a0original article<\/a>.\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/article><\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
by Simon Mackenzie<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

\"Phidias(?),<\/a><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n
\n

Detail, Phidias(?), Parthenon Frieze, c. 438-32 B.C.E., pentelic marble (420 linear feet of the 525 that complete the frieze are in the British Museum) (photo: Steven Zucker,\u00a0CC BY-NC-SA)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Several members of the cast of the film\u00a0The Monuments Men<\/a>\u00a0made headlines for\u00a0expressing the view<\/a>\u00a0that the British Museum should return the Elgin Marbles to Athens after their \u201cvery nice stay\u201d of 200 years in London.<\/p>\n

That reignited the debate around the ethics and intentions of\u00a0their removal from the Parthenon<\/a>\u00a0in the early 19th century, as well as the controversy around what to do with them now. But whether or not the removal of the sculptures should be considered \u201cpillage or protection\u201d, as\u00a0the Guardian put it<\/a>, we might take the opportunity to reflect on other more contemporary and unambiguous examples of international cultural heritage plunder.<\/p>\n

Demands of the Art Market<\/h2>\n

The international art market that deals in ancient cultural objects casts a destructive shadow. Tombs are looted, statues broken from their pedestals, and facades chainsawed off temples, all to feed a booming economic demand among connoisseurs who prize the enjoyment of the artistic attributes of cultural objects, the thrill and investment value of collection, and the social status attributed to those associated with high culture.<\/p>\n

The source countries for these collectible objects tend to be less economically developed than the market countries and so are usually not very well equipped to protect their heritage resources against plunder. London and New York are the two biggest centers for this trade in the world, and their active art markets have over the years exerted a strong demand for the archaeological riches underground in countries like Egypt, Greece and Turkey; or pieces of temple complexes like those found in South America and South East Asia.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bronze statue of a nude male figure, Greek or Roman, Hellenistic or Imperial, c. 200 B.C.E.\u2014c. 200 C.E., bronze (on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and possibly looted from the ancient site of Bubon in Turkey)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Estimates of the size of the illicit underworld of the international trade in art and antiquities are unreliable at present. Although figures as high as\u00a0US$6 billion\u00a0have been proposed, it is generally recognised that it is currently impossible to verify size estimates. Many looted antiquities are sold on the open market and their illicit origins will never be detected, let alone proved. And, as well as the public trade through auction houses and museum acquisitions which can be scrutinised to some extent, there is also a private trade between individuals, which is difficult to investigate.<\/p>\n

Police statistics in most countries do not even have a separate category for art related thefts or seizures. They tend to lump them in with all other types of property theft. Looting in source countries happens at sites which are often remote, and in some cases undiscovered, and much looting activity is not detected or recorded by over-stretched local police forces.<\/p>\n

All of these factors, and more, make it very difficult to know how much illicit market activity there really is. But\u00a0a growing body of research<\/a>\u00a0has established considerable evidence to show that looting and trafficking is still a sizeable and serious issue, and one involving significant sums of money.<\/p>\n

Cultural Looting<\/h2>\n

There was a relatively uncontested free and open dealing in looted cultural objects in Britain and elsewhere running through the colonial era, supported by imperialist values, and this continued. Then, in the 1960s a sustained critique of these practices began to take hold.<\/p>\n

Archaeologists who had experienced first-hand the looting of sites they had been working on began to reflect on the rapacious nature of the market in cultural resources. In particular, they argued that looters destroyed sites as they dug out tombs and other underground heritage, depriving researchers of the historical knowledge which the context of buried objects could give up.<\/p>\n

Criticism of the international trade in looted antiquities mounted, and in 1970 UNESCO brought countries together under\u00a0an international convention<\/a>\u00a0to protect the world\u2019s cultural heritage from exploitation by market forces. This date of 1970 has over time come to be accepted as the norm for acquisition of antiquities, particularly among museums subscribing to a collective ethical code.<\/p>\n

They now have to look for a \u201cprovenance\u201d (ownership history) dating back to at least that date. This is obviously therefore a rule intended to reduce demand for artifacts looted in recent decades, rather than to right any perceived wrongs of a more historical nature. But not all types of buyers in the market subscribe to the 1970 norm \u2013 and our research evidence suggests the \u201c1970 rule\u201d is not greatly influencing aggregate buying decisions in public market settings.<\/p>\n

Repatriation<\/h2>\n

Major dealing and collecting institutions have been implicated in the trade in illicit cultural objects, as one would expect, given that traffickers have inserted looted artifacts into the legitimate trade, where they have most value. And as the understanding of the reach of this increases, so does the trend towards \u201crepatriation\u201d of objects to their source countries from the world\u2019s encyclopedic museums.<\/p>\n

For example, in 2013 the Metropolitan Museum in New York\u00a0returned two \u201cKneeling Attendants\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to the national museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, looted originally it seems from the temple complex at the ancient Khmer capital of\u00a0Koh Ker<\/a>, one of Cambodia\u2019s great heritage sites.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Koh<\/a><\/p>\n

Koh Ker National Park, Cambodia (photo:\u00a0Bruno Schoonbrodt<\/a>, CC BY-NC 2.0)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>At the same time, another statue from Koh Ker has been the subject of litigation in the New York courts:\u00a0the Duryodhana<\/a>, offered for sale by Sotheby\u2019s for an estimated $2m-$3m. The statue in New York was broken off at the ankles and its feet were discovered still attached to their pedestal in the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker.<\/p>\n

The US Department of Justice alleged that it was torn from its base in the 1970s during\u00a0the civil war which led to Khmer Rouge power<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and from our fieldwork in Cambodia, we have first-hand accounts of similar looting activity from traffickers active at that time. Subsequently, it was transported to London where it was sold to a Belgian collector through the auction house Spink. Late in 2013, Sotheby\u2019s and Cambodia concluded a settlement to the case, and the statue was returned.<\/p>\n

The pressing question for the great museums of the world is what will happen to their repositories in a climate of greater attention to the ethics of acquisitions, present and past. This raises difficult value judgments around the wider issue of where ancient artifacts belong, the moral status of major museums in rich countries, and \u201cwho owns culture\u201d, as the titles of several books in the field put it.<\/p>\n

For some people, this question may invite different responses when applied to cases like the Elgin Marbles on one hand, or fresh loot on the other. For so-called \u201ccultural internationalists,\u201d the issue is the very moral legitimacy of countries declaring ownership of all cultural heritage. But the countries themselves would see the moral and legal elements of their title as being settled.<\/p>\n

Market Victim or Complicit?<\/h2>\n

The extent to which museums, dealers, collectors and auction houses know about the illicit origins of objects they acquire \u2013 and whether they turn a blind eye or are genuinely duped by fraudulent sellers \u2013 is hotly contested. The New York dealer\u00a0Frederick Schultz, for example, once president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art,\u00a0was sentenced<\/a>\u00a0in 2002 to nearly three years in jail and received a $50,000 fine for his part in receiving looted items from Egypt through a British smuggler named\u00a0Jonathan Tokeley-Parry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The smuggled objects had been\u00a0dipped in plastic<\/a>\u00a0and painted to look like tourist souvenir items, thus evading Egyptian border control. The two dealers then fabricated provenance for the items in order to give them the appearance of having a legitimate ownership history, inventing a collector they called Thomas Alcock and attaching labels to the objects to suggest they were from his collection.<\/p>\n

They even went so far as to artificially age the labels by dipping them in tea, to better support the illusion they were creating. The artifacts included a sculptural head of the 18th dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III, subsequently to be sold by Schultz for $1.2 million.<\/p>\n

And in 1997, journalist Peter Watson published the results of his five-year investigation\u00a0Sotheby\u2019s: the Inside Story<\/a>, which alleged complicity among some of the auction house\u2019s employees in knowingly receiving looted and trafficked artifacts.<\/p>\n

Subsequently,\u00a0Sotheby\u2019s closed<\/a>\u00a0the London arm of its antiquities sales department, never to re-open, in a move which was \u201cwidely interpreted<\/a>\u201d as a response to Watson\u2019s book, and which prompted Boston University archaeology professor and long-time commentator on illicit trade issues Ricardo Elia to note that \u201cLondon has been called the smuggling capital of the world<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against these scandalous examples of malpractice, trade representatives tend to argue that they exercise appropriate levels of \u201cdue diligence\u201d. Criminal offenses for dealing in illicit cultural objects like the\u00a0up-to-seven year prison sentence<\/a>\u00a0created in the UK in 2003 often require the prosecution to prove a buyer\u2019s \u201cknowledge or belief\u201d of an object\u2019s tainted history, which has proved very difficult to do. The UK law remains virtually unused.<\/p>\n

And so the current debate raised by George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray\u2019s thoughts on the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles is important, but for reasons which don\u2019t tend to make their way into press reports of the controversy. The discussion around antiquities which were taken from Greece over two centuries ago is part of the context of a more immediate issue of global crime. Looting and trafficking of cultural objects is not only a problem of the past.<\/p>\n

Article by Simon Mackenzie<\/a>, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society,\u00a0University of Glasgow\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(CC BY-ND 4.0)<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on\u00a0The Conversation<\/a>. Read the\u00a0original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div>