Italian Antiquities Looting Prosecutor: Legal Frameworks Hampering Efforts to Recover Artifacts and Deter Looting

A quite interesting interview with Paolo Giorgio Ferri by Fabio Isman in the online Art Newspaper. Some of the key points, or at least claims, made by the former Italian prosecutor :

• restitutions concern only a tiny fraction of illicitly-dug artifacts that have appeared on the antiquities market
• we are aware of only about 30% of the looting that has occurred
• Italian prosecutors have a database of at least 200,000 objects that have appeared on the black market 
• investigations restricted to recoveries on behalf of a single country don't make sense, since the dealers often handle materials from multiple countries
• tamping down on looting and smuggling of illicit antiquities in Italy has led to organized crime moving to Bulgaria in search of more easily harvested artifacts
• Discrepancies between the legislation in different countries make it difficult to get assistance (Switzerland viewed Medici's crime as a tax crime and therefore not a matter for assistance)
• Italian law is too lenient, both in terms of penalties and in terms of its statute of limitations, which encourages criminals to bank illegally excavated objects for five years
• ancient coins are often of crucial importance for dating an archaeological site or tomb
• UNESCO is considering updated the 1970 Convention to include requirements for states to set up specialized antiquities crime teams, but unless international law is also amended to make it possible for these national teams to coordinate efforts, crimes will go unreported by one country to another, and efforts to stop crime in one country will simply shift it elsewhere.

Ferri doesn't suggest many solutions, though he does say Italy would be better served if it adopted something like Iraq's legislation which makes it a serious crime to not turn over to police objects excavated after 1995. While such legislation didn't do much to stem the looting of Iraq's sites, because there have been no antiquities police deployed to enforce it, similar laws under Saddam worked well (at least until the sanctions and no-fly zones eroded enforcement capabilities. Italian carabinieri armed with such a law would certainly be able to do even more than they are doing now, which is already considerable.

'Ancient' artifacts, cyber scams - Los Angeles Times

An interesting new article on Charles Stanish's argument that Ebay has reduced looting by making it more profitable for looters to switch to making fakes for gullible, uninformed buyers, and poisoning the legitimate market. Antiquities dealer Jerome Eisenberg disagrees, noting that his annual sales are in the tens of millions of dollars, including an Internet trade that has "increased exponentially" over the past few years. Eisenberg believes that news about forgeries -- and one might add, the Internet's spreading of the news that it is possible to buy antiquities -- only succeeds in making the market grow. 

Eisenberg, of course, may simply be trying to reassure his clientele, and we do not know whether his sales revenues have increased, even if his internet trade has increased. But the fact that this reputable dealer is able to increase his sales on the internet tells us something that Stanish -- and even Steve Levitt -- do not adequately address. The basic economics of "lemons" teaches that warrantied used cars fetch a higher price than unwarrantied ones, and it would be odd if this were not also true of authenticated antiquities. The Guennol Lioness suggests the price for authenticated antiquities may be going way up. (There's an interesting economic question buried here, which is about the difference between a good that is not as good as it appears, i.e., a lemon, and a good that is no good at all if it is not as it appears, i.e., a fake.)

If that is the case, what does it mean for looting? One thing it might mean is that collectors -- even eBay ones -- will learn to distrust unauthenticated antiquities, and that might lead to declines in sales of both fakes and looted artifacts, assuming some archaeological body of experts could be created to vet artifacts. And since the costs of authentication will raise the price dealers need to charge, some buyers will be driven out of the market.

But if some buyers are driven out, many more will have been enticed in by the news stories and by eBay's seductive ease of perusal. Some among these new buyers will surely become cognoscenti, and bring additional money into the system. The more scrupulous will demand authentication from a recognized body, or put their trust in reputable dealers; there are sure, however, to be some less scrupulous who will be willing to pay a lot for artifacts that have been looted, if the middleman can show that the piece has come from the ground. That, after all, was what Giacomo Medici was doing with his Polaroids of dirt-encrusted vases. The Internet has made that technology quaint: a looter nowadays can snap and send a cellphone photo direct from site to buyer. Looting might well continue under these circumstances, not decline.

'Ancient' artifacts, cyber scams - Los Angeles Times

Posted using ShareThis