More changes at the Getty

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Karol Wight, specialist in glass from the Roman Empire, is leaving the Getty to become the executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, replacing David Whitehouse, executive director since 1999. Wight has been the the Getty Museum's senior curator for antiquities since 2007 when she replaced Marion True, who had departed from the organization in 2005 amid accusations that the Getty had been buying looted antiquities. The LA Times notes that "Wight's resignation from the Getty comes on the heels of the appointment of James Cuno as the head of the Getty Trust". Ms. Wight’s departure leaves the Getty Museum without a curator of antiquities and without a director. Michael Brand, the museum’s director for a little more than four years, resigned in 2010 after differences with the president of the Getty Trust, which oversees the museum.

Vignette: LA Times

'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals

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The forthcoming book "Chasing Aphrodite" is the subject of a skilful marketing campaign with a lot of pre-publication hype, deservedly so, the extracts show it to be well-written and the subject is an important one. "Chasing Aphrodite" tells a big story about 'major antiquities' and highlights a more general problem, though one which is on the way to being resolved as museums look to their acquisition policies and get ethical. No longer are sale of 'big' items with no provenance (the no-questions-asked market model) as acceptable to public institutions as they were. Now of course we have the problem of the made-up provenances [collecting histories] and the existence of a not-enough-questions-asked institutional market.

The big problem however is still at the other end of the market, the hundreds of thousands of so-called "minor artefacts" dug out of the archaeological record and "surfacing" (from 'underground'?) on the market by various illicit means and being sold to private collectors who still function in no-questions-asked mode alongside items legitimately on the market. It is this whole process, more insidious and just as damaging as the trade in 'big' Getty-worthy items, which needs closer scrutiny. It ranges from the smuggling of shabtis and scarabs, to the bulk lots of metal-detected coins and artefacts stripped from Roman sites in the Balkans to the legalised stripping of archaeological sites of metal artefacts by metal detectorists in England under a misguided policy of tolerance.

But for the moment, let us plug the big story, as setting the scene for the time when the general public can be persuaded to look more closely at what is happening day after day to the so-called 'minor artefacts' that are being gouged destructively out of the world's archaeological record for entertainment and profit. Because this can only happen as long as the public allows it to.

There is a nice pre-publication interview and article on National Public radio (NPR) called 'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals. The interview well worth listening to (the article is a summary, not a transcript). It talks of the "object lust' which led to the Getty Museum acquiring contextless 'art' objects from dubious sources, from back alleys to basement bank vaults. Author Frammolino says that the "overpowering effects of antiquity" lead to excesses

"People who come in contact with antiquities — the history of it, the beauty of these antiquities, the thought that maybe somebody great had once possessed this — they lose reason," he tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

The Getty Museum had one of the largest acquisition budgets in the country, and perhaps the world which was used in a very savvy way to help it:

build what today is considered one of the most important antiquities collections in the world," Felch says. But that collection would not be possible without the help of a complex web of grave robbers, patrons, wealthy collectors and the complicity of some of the world's most revered museums. "The illicit antiquities trade is kind of the dirtiest corner of the art market," Felch says. "It brought together highly educated, Ph.D. Harvard-graduate curators, and you saw them doing business in bank vaults with people who were in the criminal underground."It might seem an odd partnership, but the brightest minds in the museum world were driven to deal with criminals in the pursuit of objects of beauty. To account for their illicit dealings, Felch says, the Getty adopted a see-no-evil policy. "They danced this very tricky dance for several years, where they publicly denounced the illicit trade and they decried the looting that their acquisitions fueled," he explains.[...]

Collectors and dealers will no doubt be discomfited by the clear expression in this book of the notion that it is the market that is the motor for illicit dealings in artefacts. The book also has a message concerning the customary "good home" argument applied by public museums and private collectors:

The "high" road often taken by antiquities curators — that they are nobly saving what would be otherwise lost pieces — is the core irony at the center of Chasing Aphrodite, Felch says. "The Getty and other American museums over the last decades have justified the acquisition of these things under questionable circumstances by saying that these poor orphan objects have been separated from their archaeological context already, and that we have a duty to rescue them from the market and to preserve them and display them publicly," he says. But the truth was that by buying these objects on the black market, these museums were further fueling the looting that was going on across the Mediterranean.

It is of course worth noting that the museums claim to be rescuing iteems from 'the market' where they could end up in private collections, and private collectors claim to be rescuing objects from ending up in "museum storerooms" where they would not be cared-for or exhibited.

Certainly I think this book will have a great deal to add to the ongoing debate on artefact collecting and in particular expose the hypocrisy of US antiquity dealers' attempts to whitewash the image of the international antiquities trade and its relationship to the looting of archaeological sites.

Chasing Aphrodite
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Hardcover, 384 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List Price: $28

The cover photo shows an ancient Greek depiction of the monstrosity of artefact collecting (right) and trade (left) descending on the fragile and defenceless archaeological record, dismembering it before our very eyes as society stands by helplessly. To save the victim, we need not only to sever the heads of these monsters by legal action, but remove the ground from under their feet by removing public support for their attack on the archaeological record.

Back to Square One at the Getty?

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It has been announced that Dr James Cuno has been appointed as CEO and president of the J. Paul Getty Trust to replace James Wood who died last June. The post of the Getty Museum's director remains to be filled. There have been a number of reactions to the news of appointment of Cuno:

The least impassioned is by Jori Finkel, 'Getty Trust's new CEO: Art Institute of Chicago's James Cuno', LA Times May 10, 2011.

Others are less sanguine:
Benjamin Genocchio, 'Why the Getty's Choice of James Cuno as CEO Is Clueless' ArtInfo: May 9, 2011,
Lee Rosenbaum, 'Archaeologists’ Red Flag: James Cuno Named Getty Trust President', Culturegrrl May 10, 2011.
David Gill, 'James Cuno as President of the Getty Trust: Reactions' Looting matters, May 10th 2011.
Peter Tompa, 'Cuno to Getty', Cultural Property Observer 10th May 2011 hopes that the appointment means "a new determination to get tough with Italy, whose demands for repatriation have seemingly escalated despite the Getty's efforts to seek accomodation" (sic).

One cannot but think that Cuno's appointment is in some way concerned with the attention that the May 24 launch of Ralph Frammolino and Jason Felch's exposé Chasing Aphrodite of the Getty antiquities scandals will doubtless attract in a few weeks.

Rosenbaum sees the appointment of the author of the controversial 'Who Owns Antiquity' in this post as potentially potentially damaging to the well-established international collaboration the Getty has established, she has written of him:

By taking an extremist stance that belittles the deeply felt and legitimate concerns of archaeologists and source countries to preserve archaeological sites and national heritage, he undermines efforts by reasonable people on both sides of the cultural-property divide to arrive at mutually beneficial compromises. And he self-destructively undermines any role he might personally have played in working cooperatively with foreign governments to forge mutually beneficial sharing arrangements.

Cuno dismisses such concerns, he says:

"In terms of my criticism of cultural property laws, I think reasonable people can disagree on these matters, and I very much look forward to engaging in conversations with colleagues around the world. I think we are all seeking the same thing: to preserve the objects of antiquity and broaden public and scholarly access to them.

Sadly Cuno here ignores the fact that the whole problem with the trade in illicitly obtained artefacts is that they are obtained by the destruction of archaeological contexts, sites, monuments and assemblages. It is not ownership or "protection" of the objects that is the problem, it is where they come from before they surface (from underground?). it was the failure to recognise this that was a fundamental flaw of the arguments he advanced in 2008, and it is sad that the new CEO of the Getty still has not taken this idea on board.

Getty's Stolen Goddess Finally Returned to Sicily

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The Aphrodite statue of disputed origin which came on the antiquities market in 1988 and once displayed in the Getty Museum has now been returned to Sicily (Jason Felch, 'Getty ships Aphrodite statue to Sicily', Los Angeles Times March 23, 2011). The statue was taken off display in December and freighted under an Italian diplomatic seal aboard an Alitalia flight to Sicily where it arrived on Thursday. From there it travelled with an armed police escort by ship and truck to the small hilltop town of Aidone, Sicily, where it arrived Saturday to waiting crowds. The town lies next to the remains of the ancient Greek colony of Morgantina, where it is believed that the object had lain buried in archaeological deposits for centuries before it was illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.

When the Getty bought the Aphrodite for $18 million in 1988, the statue's importance outweighed the signs of its illicit origins. "The proposed statue of Aphrodite would not only become the single greatest piece of ancient art in our collection; it would be the greatest piece of Classical sculpture in this country and any country outside of Greece and Great Britain," wrote former antiquities curator Marion True in proposing the acquisition. For years, the museum clung to the implausible story that the statue had been in the family of a former Swiss policeman, Renzo Canavesi, for more than 50 years after being purchased by his father in Paris in the 1930s.

The credibility of that cover story was destroyed with the appearance of evidence of its illicit origins and an alleged link between its appearance on the market through the agency of organized criminal activity.

In 2006, private detectives hired by the Getty uncovered more than a dozen photos of the statue. One shows fragments of the goddess scattered in a pile of dirt on a brown tile floor. In another, pieces of varying sizes were lined up in rows on a large, thick plastic sheet. Another photo showed the statue's marble face still encrusted with grime. It is not clear who took the photos or where they were taken. But the fact that the statue had been in fragments and covered in dirt as recently as the early 1980s — the date on the photographs — was seen as clear evidence that it had been illegally excavated not long before the Getty bought it. The investigators [...] also found evidence connecting Canavesi with an alleged Sicilian antiquities smuggler whom investigators were told had ties to organized crime [...] Canavesi told investigators that he was a friend of Orazio di Simone, who in 1989 Italian authorities charged with smuggling the Aphrodite out of Italy. (The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.) When the Getty's investigators tried to interview Di Simone, they were warned against it by Italian authorities, who suggested he had ties to the Mafia. In an interview [...], Di Simone denied the charge and any involvement with the statue.

It turns out, as a result of a 2007 LA Times investigation which revealed the existence of the photos, that Getty officials had turned down an opportunity to see them a decade earlier. Only then, reportedly, did the Getty send an attorney and a museum official to Switzerland to secure copies of the photos, apparently from Canavesi, and confirm they were of the object they had bought (these images have still not been made public).

The story of the unravelling of the illicit origins of the "Getty" Aphrodite is described in a forthcoming book about the dispute - "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum". The authors are Jason Felch and former LA Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino, the book will be published May 24 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Marion True: “Neither condemned nor vindicated”

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“Neither condemned nor vindicated”. Marion True, the former antiquities curator of the Getty Museum, speaks out on why it is hard for her to accept the lack of verdict after her five-year trial for "conspiring to receive antiquities that had been illegally excavated and exported from Italy" (The Art Newspaper 5th January 2011). The trial began in November 2005. True presents her side of the story:

the prosecutor, fully aware of the statutes, consumed the past five years with the presentation of his case, interspersed with endless delays. [...] During this time, my lawyers were able to cross-examine witnesses but not to present my case. [...] This politically motivated process accomplished its goals long ago. It made headlines with groundless accusations that destroyed my reputation and career, while intimidating other American museums into returning objects without question. [...] The intention was to use the case against me to condemn publicly the collecting of antiquities and to terrorise museums and collectors, especially in the United States. [...] The strategy worked extremely well. American museums chose not to join forces to challenge the Italian position, but silently went their separate ways, with directors travelling to Italy to make private deals to return objects in the hope of appeasing the prosecutor. There was even a sense of relief that I was the only target of the Italians. Yet, it now appears that I will not be the only victim. [...] If the case against Princeton goes forward, perhaps American museums will stand together and not yield to intimidation. Their antiquities collections have been built carefully over more than a century, and are important educational resources in a country that considers the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome fundamental to its own culture. Certainly, methods of collecting in the United States and elsewhere have changed over this time, as have laws and conventions protecting cultural patrimony. But negotiations and collaborations that I and many others promoted with Italian colleagues for years are far more productive in the long run than endless, destructive and expensive litigation.

I suppose the question is just what it is that is to be "negotiated" when a museum is caught out with looted or illegally exported material on its hands. The time for collaboration is before the event, not after. In the case of "Princeton", just what it is American Museums would be "standing together" in defence of and why?

Photo: Marion True in happier days