"Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else." - Will Rogers

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"The Illicit Trade—Fact or Fiction?

PRESS AND PUBLIC STATEMENTS about the antiquities market often cite estimates of a billion or more dollars per year for the illicit trade in “cultural property,” a term equated with recently looted or stolen antiquities and associated dramatically with the looting of the Iraq National Museum, in Baghdad... this billion-dollar value is a myth...

One source for widespread misapprehensions about the value of the illicit trade may come from the fact that when police agencies, including Interpol, use the phrase “cultural property,” the term refers to paintings and sculptures from all periods, including contemporary works of art, silver and jewelry, antique furniture, carpets, and other non- manufactured items of value.

Collected data on stolen art indicates that the value of antiquities is a tiny fraction of the “cultural property” total. According to information published by the Art Loss Register, 54 percent of reported thefts of art and antiques are from private dwellings. Thefts of antiquities represent only 3 percent of total art thefts as compared to 51 percent for thefts of pictures, a category including paintings and drawings. The “cultural property theft” cited so often in the press as pertaining to looting of antiquities actually refers primarily to losses from household burglaries and commercial theft...

Comparisons to illicittrade in drugs or armaments, also common, are even more tenuous. Armaments become obsolete. Drugs are consumed and must be replaced with fresh supplies. Art neither is consumed nor wears out, and has circulated in a worldwide market for centuries. The absurdity of these comparisons becomes obvious when one asks how many people take drugs and how many collect antiquities. A more realis tic appraisal ofthe traffic in recently looted antiquities would represent a small percentage of the total worldwide trade in antiquities as a whole, a few millions, not a few billion dollars a year. Certainly, this number itself pales in comparison to the “value” of antiquities lost each year due to war, vandalism, development of archaeological sites, dam construction, and poor conservation of sites or archaeological collections...

Archaeologists and others are right to be angry: the looting of archaeological sites is a tragedy, and represents a real loss of knowledge of the history of humankind. Finding working solutions to the problem of art theft, however, requires knowing the facts, not repeating a myth."


"It’s very difficult to explain the mainland Chinese government’s atti tude toward the trade in ancient objects currently being excavated in China. They have a horribly bad record in terms of preserving cultural property within China in the years following the Revolution. Starting in 1949 there was more wholesale destruction of cultural property over the next twenty-five years than there had been in any other time. State- directed destruction of ancient temples, architecture, and works of art was followed by the Cultural Revolution, when there was persecution of anyone who showed any interest in works of art or preservation of ancient material. Art became of interest to the Chinese only in the sev enties, when the use of cultural property for political ends became clear to them. They could bask in the glow of China’s ancient glorious history, and earn hard cash, too."


"WHERE TO PLACE ART is one of the art world’s most problematic issues. The UNESCO policy is that cultural patrimony should stay in its country of origin, and that such material, if already exported, should be returned to the land in which it was produced—sometimes decades or even cen turies after its removal... In an era of multiculturalism, the notion that any cultural group owns all of its production has a faddish appeal, and repatriation has taken on the trap pings of political correctness. The nationalist supporters of this view say that all Egyptian material should be in Egypt, all British art in Britain, all Benin masks in Benin.

Museums, prejudiced toward display of portable material away from sites of excavation, and collectors have found themselves in conflict with these policies. Internationalists believe that works should be distributed around the world, so that people everywhere can see the material culture of other countries. There are excesses associated with this idea; restraints must be placed on an open market that encourages the rape of historic sites, where sculptural elements are chiseled off great buildings so that they can be transferred to private hands. The idea of art without frontiers is dangerous. But the idea of repatriation is even more dangerous. The rage to return artworks to source countries is considered enlightened by many American intellectuals, but it is in fact provincial. The history of culture is catholic and international, and our policies on collecting should reflect that.

The policy that important art should never be removed from its country of origin has been upheld with ludicrous literalism in recent years, to sometimes disastrous effect. The most dramatic recent example is Afghanistan. The art treasures in the National Museum in Kabul were destroyed not by irresponsible American bombing but by irresponsible Western noninterventionism. In early 2001, the museum’s director, Omara Khan Masoodi, contacted UNESCO and warned that the Taliban was likely to destroy the collections. He asked UNESCO to take the work out of the country and find a safe repository for it. UNESCO replied that it was against its policy to remove from any country art that might be described as part of that country’s cultural heritage. Masoodi protested that the work was going to be destroyed, but u stood by its position, declining to help. Indeed, all of the pre-Islamic art remaining in the museum and its storerooms was destroyed six months later—including fragile ceramic and stucco finds from Fondukistan and a monumental Kushan stone sculpture that ranked among the most important artworks of Central Asia. Provincial repositories of art and site museums were opened and the artifacts smashed by Taliban wield ing sledgehammers, while the great Buddhas carved from the cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley were shattered by explosives—the most spectacular if not the most artistically significant loss...

Those losses could and should have been avoided. “I wept when I ran up against this policy,” Masoodi said, weeping again when we met in Kabul. “I saw my collection smashed to pieces by brutal thugs with angry hammers because policy dictated that what had lasted a thousand years not be saved for the next thousand.” Visiting the National Museum is a heartbreaking experience. In an unheated back room, archaeologists sort the rubble that the Taliban left behind. Large trays are heaped with pebble-sized fragments of the life-size statue of Kanishka, a second century king, that once stood inside the museum’s entrance, and of the long Buddhist panels that were among the collection’s highlights. “I saw them do this,” says Masoodi. "It was like watching the slaughter of my children."... It is a tragedy of indescribable proportions.


"THE WORLD WEPT over the wanton destruction of the treasures of the ill-guarded National Museum of Iraq and the burning of Baghdad’s unique Islamic library. It is an irreplaceable loss for all humanity. Despite the recovery of many of the major pieces carried off by vandals and the discovery of many more hidden by museum staff prior to the invasion by coalition forces, the loss can never be replaced.

Worldwide, the media devoted much time and space to this tragedy and brought it into our living rooms in all its horrifying details. However, there is one aspect whose mention seems to be taboo: the implied warn ing of the grave danger of having too large a part of a culture’s heritage gathered in a single place on earth...

Vital lessons can be learned from the Iraq disasters. The most important of these is the desirability of dispersing widely the art of past civilizations. The preachings of much of the archaeological community notwithstanding, the retentionist program they advocate is a prescrip tion for future disasters. As folk wisdom has it, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

The events in Iraq should remind us that there are practical as well as ethical arguments for the dispersal of art... it is clear that no responsible museum, art dealer, or auction house will touch any Mesopotamian object unless there is positive proof of provenance dating to prior to the Iraqi wars. During my fifty years as an art dealer in archaeological as well as contemporary art, I have yet to encounter a collector who did not want to share the pleasures of ownership with friends and particularly with scholars and experts. The image of the hermitlike individual gloating over illicit treasures in his castle is a fantasy.

Archaeologists continue to advocate prohibition of exports of archae ological art from their countries of origin by means of nationalization and the restriction of imports into this country. They support laws and treaties that will slowly but surely strangle the art market and access to such art for museums and collectors. They effectively support the efforts of foreign countries to reclaim objects and denude the holdings of our museums and private art collectors.

By using such terms as “stolen art,”“smuggled,”“looted,” and so forth, and impugning the motives of collectors and dedicated museum scholars, the retentionists are wrongfully claiming the moral high ground To the contrary, the proper ethical stance is concerned with the widest possible preservation and survival of the art and archaeology of past civilizations.

Within each culture, the objects yielded by excavating tombs often tend to be quite repetitive Even the inventive ancient Greeks developed only thirty-two major forms of ceramic offertory vases and cups. As a result, the storerooms of museums in ancient regions are overflowing with duplicates, many from old collections or found as a result of con struction, not from scientific excavations. Any scholar who has visited the back rooms of museums in major centers such as Rome, Athens, Cairo, Mexico City, or Lima can testify to this. Objects are often poorly cared for and suffer from all the vagaries of benign neglect.

The great contribution that the art market makes to preservation is to endow works of art with value. When objects have no value, they are inevitably at risk of destruction because preserving them is a costly enter prise. Storing, safeguarding, heating and air conditioning, and conserv ing art in public institutions can be done for only a relatively few objects. In practice, there is constant triage, which saves a few treasured objects but consigns the remainder to slow deterioration...

The supporters of import restrictions believe in the desirability of leaving ancient art in the same location where it is found. They endorse the stance of many art-rich nations who, for reasons of nationalism, do not want to share with the world the art of their ancient past and who continue to denounce as “stolen” any work thought to be from their soil that is found abroad. It is ironic that so many archaeologically well- endowed regions are populated today by the descendants of the invaders who destroyed the very cultures whose remnants their modern govern ments claim as exclusively their own. Turkey’s Adriatic coast is rich in ancient Greek art—but in the 1920S, the remnant of its Greek popula tion was expelled in an early instance of ethnic cleansing. Many Latin Americans are descendants of the Spanish conquistadors who destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires. Do these descendants have a more exclusive moral claim to the buried artifacts of earlier civilizations than the rest of humanity?"


[UNESCO says that] "the international circulation of cultural property is still largely dependent on the activities of self-seeking parties and so tends to lead to speculation which causes the price of such property to rise, making it inaccessible to poorer countries and institutions while at the same time encouraging the spread of illicit trading"

This statement combines anti-capitalist and anti-market sentiments, referring, with evident disapproval, to buyers and sellers engaged in mar ket transactions as “self-seeking parties”; engaging in the pejorative use of “speculation” for the normal human tendency to base present action on assumptions about the future; and making the economically naive assumption that speculation causes the prices of works of art and other cultural objects to rise.

Knowledgeable observers would argue instead that constricting the licit supply of cultural objects by prohibiting their export is far more likely to cause prices to rise and to encourage the spread of illicit trading than would “speculation” by museums, collectors, dealers, and auction houses trading in a licit market. As to “poorer countries,” many of which are source nations, the orderly marketing of surplus cultural objects could pro tanto displace the black market, while providing a significant source of income to the source nation and its citizens. That major source nations typically hold stocks of marketable surplus objects is confirmed by another paragraph in the Recommendation’s preamble: “Many cul tural institutions, whatever their financial resources, possess several identical or similar specimens of cultural objects of indisputable quality and origin which are amply documented, and . . . some of these items, which are of only minor or secondary importance for these institutions because of their plurality, would be welcomed as valuable accessions by institutions in other countries.”

Such objects would also be welcomed to the international market by museums, collectors, and the art trade. The Recommendation, however, rejects the market and relies exclusively on interinstitutional (government-to-government and museum-to-museum) exchanges as the medium through which to promote enrichment of cultures and mutual understanding and appreciation among nations. Such exchanges are a commonly used tool of museum collections management. They are, however, a form of barter, with all of barter’s considerable limitations. The market is a much more efficient and productive mechanism for the international circulation of cultural property, and to exclude it seems perverse...

It is true that many antiquities that newly appear on the market are undocumented. It is true that archaeo logical sites are abused, contexts destroyed, and information about the human past irretrievably lost. But it is also true that museums and col lectors would much prefer to acquire, and the antiquities trade would strongly prefer to deal in, legitimately excavated and properly docu mented objects. They are disabled from doing so, however, because excessive source-nation restrictions, which archaeologists strongly support, have shut off the supply.

Archaeologists have intensified the antiquities problem by demand ing that museums, collectors, and the art market acquire only properly documented objects. Elaborate due-diligence procedures are not enough to satisfy them. These Crusaders presume that an antiquity that is notfully and properly documented is illicit: guilty, in other words, until proved innocent. Employing this inversion of the normal burden of proof, collectors who acquire antiquities and museums that show them are acting criminally, even if no source nation claims the antiquities and no one has shown that they were improperly acquired.

As a predictable result, much antiquities traffic is diverted from legiti mate dealers and purchasers to the black market, which risks the mis treatment of objects and sites and the destruction of context (as well as other evils, including the confusion caused by counterfeit antiquities and forged provenances and export documents). If one set out to encourage harm to the archaeological record, it might be difficult to contrive a more effective way of doing so than the present one. As Quentin Byrne-Sutton has observed, the result is “a ridiculous situation in which regulation nourishes what it seeks to eliminate.”...

It is unlikely that the archaeologists’ Crusade against trade in antiqui ties will succeed. The record of other, more highly organized and better- financed attempts to suppress the trade in controlled goods for which there is a strong demand (e.g., arms, strategic materials, technology, narcotics, alcohol) is well known: disappointing progress toward an ever- receding objective, unanticipated expense, and a variety of unforeseen, often seriously damaging secondary effects."

--- Various essays in Who owns the past? : cultural policy, cultural property, and the law / Kate Fitz Gibbon, editor.


"In 1989, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto opened the exhibition, which was scheduled to tour to four other venues in Canada and the United States over the following two years. The exhibition attempted to combine a presentation of African art with an examination of the colonial history of Cana dians in Africa. The publicity leaflet described it as a celebration of ‘the rich cultural heritage of African religious, social and economic life’, and indeed the exhibition did set out to show the beauty, richness and diversity of the artefacts in the ROM’s collections. However, due to the fragmentary nature of the collection and its age, most of which dates from 1875 to 1925, it was impossi ble to provide a detailed study of any particular group or area, or address issues such as urbanisation and industrialisation in contemporary Africa. Jeanne Can nizzo, curator of the exhibition, therefore decided to utilise the nature and peri od of the collections to determine the themes of the exhibition. It was her intention to address the effects of colonialism upon African cultures by provid ing ‘a critical examination of the role played by Canadians in the European colonisation of Africa in the nineteenth century’, and an exhibition which would be ‘a reflexive analysis of the nature of the museum itself and an exam ination of the history of its African collection’ (Cannizzo, 1990b).

The layout of the exhibition was designed to take visitors on a journey through time, beginning with Victorian Ontario, and leading through the Military Hall, the Missionary Room, and into the Africa Room (Cannizzo, 1989; 1991). It was Cannizzo’s intention that the exhibition should examine the attitudes of the Canadian missionaries and military personnel who were involved in British endeavours to colonise and convert the African nations, ‘a seldom-remembered aspect of Canadian history’, and so illustrate the ignorance and ‘cultural arro gance’ of the white missionaries who failed to recognise the complexity and sophistication of the African peoples whom they encountered. Cannizzo used period photographs and quotations to convey ‘the European view of the conti nent at that time’ (Cannizzo, 1991: 152). In the text, inverted commas were used to identify phrases such as ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage customs’ as quotations from nineteenth-century sources. It was a sophisticated message which was not, apparently, successfully communicated to many of the visitors. Despite the punc tuation, it soon became clear that many of those who criticised the exhibition appeared to be unable to distinguish between the views of the museum itself, and the views of the nineteenth-century colonialists being conveyed in the photo graphs and texts. Indeed, the use of inverted commas in this context is highly ambiguous: the incorporation of a quotation does not exclusively indicate oppo sition to the quoted views, but can indicate entirely the opposite. It should, perhaps, not be surprising then that this subtle message was not understood by those whose experiences of twentieth-century racism may have led them to expect little more than nineteenth-century views from a predominantly white institution with little or no record of liaison with the black community.

The second half of the exhibition examined African artistry and the complexities of world views, utilising more conventional museological methods to display the fine artefacts from the museum’s African collection. Initially, the exhibition attracted praise from critics and the media, with descriptions such as ‘fascinating African exhibit’ and ‘a revealing journey through space and time’. However, four months after it had opened, a group of black protesters began to organise weekly demonstrations outside the museum. They complained that artefacts, seen as the souvenirs of missionaries and soldiers, were to them ‘the spoils of war’ (cited in Todd, 1990), ‘art objects that have been stolen from the African people’ (Asante, 1990); that the exhibition did not tell their story, a concept that it was in no way intended to address; neither was it intended to provide a defin itive interpretation of nineteenth-century African art and culture. The exhibition was primarily an examination of the attitudes, values and motives of white Canadians in Africa between 1875 and 1925.

The black Canadian protesters established the Coalition for the Truth about Africa, an umbrella group for a number of local black organisations. They pro duced a leaflet criticising the exhibition, stating that it ‘glorifies and rationalizes Canada’s Racist, Colonialist past of PLUNDER, RAPE AND RACIST ECON OMIC AND CULTURAL EXPLOITATION OF AFRICAN NATIONS’ (sic) (CTA, nd). Weekend visitors to the exhibition had to face the banners and chanting of pickets outside the museum. The ROM took out an injunction to restrict the demonstrators from entering the immediate vicinity of the museum. Demonstrations outside the museum became violent as demonstrators and police clashed. Extensive and detailed press coverage gave the impression that the demonstrations were larger and more frequent than they were. The Toron to Board of Education School Programs Committee deemed the exhibition unsuitable for pupils at primary and junior secondary levels. The venues to which it was due to tour in other parts of Canada and in the United States cancelled their bookings. Whereas Cannizzo had set out to expose the racist attitudes prevalent amongst nineteenth-century colonialists, Into the Heart of Africa was, as Robert Fulford wrote in Rotunda, ‘accused of the crime it depicted’ (Fulford 1991: 21).

Sometimes such adverse reactions to an exhibition may be caused by under lying political intentions on the part of the protesters. It is strongly felt by many who were close observers of the incidents, or actively involved with Into the Heart of Africa, that the exhibition was used as a political platform by black activists, just as three years earlier, The Spirit Sings was unashamedly used by the Lubicon Lake Cree to attract international attention to their grievances."

--- Making representations : museums in the post-colonial era / Moira G. Simpson.