Felch on KQED: The Conceptual Limits of Focusing on Museum Restitution

Jason Felch, co-author of Chasing Aphrodite, was interviewed last week on KQED, one more sign of the remarkable publishing success of that book. I admire the reporting Felch and his colleague did for the book. What I wanted to flag from the interview, though, is something that also lurks in the background of the book, and indeed lurks in the background of all the sturm und drang over the question of whether museums should participate in a market in which 95% of the items are likely to have been dug up by looters who in the process destroy our ability to ever find out crucial details about our past. At one point, after Felch notes that the Getty's acquisition budget was upwards of $100 million, several times that of the Met's, a listener emails to ask what is being done to stop private collectors. Felch notes that the art market is unregulated but points out that several collectors have in recent years had to return objects. This begs the bigger question, which is what the size of the high-end market as a whole is. The assumption on the part of those who have worked assiduously to force museums to clean up their act has been that this will put an end to the looting, presumably because museums are market makers. Certainly the Getty was a market leader, but that was only because Getty himself was so wealthy and fixated on Greco-Roman antiquities. The Met was unable to compete with Japanese buyers for van Gogh's sunflower back in the early 1980s (de Montebello said the price for that one painting alone was several times the Met's acquisition budget, and he could only watch in amazement), and we know that other pieces on the licit market have been purchased by private collectors (the "Artemis and the Stag" donated anonymously to the Met after purchase, and the Guennol Lioness last seen publicly after being sold to a private collector for $57 million, the highest price ever paid for a sculpture).

My point is that there are many, many millionaires in this world interested in purchasing antiquities, and their combined wealth almost surely dwarfs the resources of the major museums. If that is the case, then museums having clean hands will make some, but not much, difference to the looters and their middlemen. Felch claims, without much evidence, that the illicit trade in Greek and Italian antiquities has more or less dried up, supposedly as a result of the Marion True case. The statistics from the carabinieri do show some drop in the number of arrests for illicit digging and trafficking in the past few years, but that corresponds to an increase in funding for their efforts, and in any case the digging has by no means stopped altogether. In fact, as Ferri and others have noted, looters who have found Italy too hot these days have moved to Bulgaria where lax site protection means Greco-Roman antiquities can still be dug to feed the continued demand from collectors. The recent arrest in Greece of men who had a recently-found kouros in the back of their truck is another indicator of the obvious: so long as there are people willing to pay large sums of money, artifacts will continue to be dug.

In this regard, the case of Iraq is particularly interesting. Felch surprisingly goes out of his way to downplay the losses from the museum ("we now know not nearly as much was take as we had feared"), which misses the point that much more was taken than anyone expected before the war began, some 15,000 items, of which nearly half remain unaccounted for. As Felch notes, these objects have not surfaced in museums -- and only a very small number at auction houses or dealerships. The reason for that is obvious: these museum pieces are on a Red List, and there is a worldwide ban on Iraqi antiquities trading as well. But what Felch does not mention is that in spite of this ban, Iraqi archaeological sites were looted on a massive scale for several years following the invasion. No museum would touch such pieces. So either something like 100-200,000 artifacts were dug up by looters for middlemen who saw them as an investment to be warehoused and sold at some later date (hard to believe), or there are collectors, almost certainly in the Persian Gulf states, who were keeping those diggers busy.

The economic basics are clear: looting will continue until the antiquities market itself is regulated and taxed to pay to prevent the harm that even the purchase of a legal antiquity does. (As I have noted a number of times, the Guennol Lioness sale was perfectly legal, but it signaled how much a similar piece, illicitly excavated, might be worth.)

Another way to say all this is that fascinating as it is, the Getty story, and the restitution issue more generally, is a sideshow.