UPDATE: Upcoming auction of "looted" Benin mask CANCELLED

Members of the British Expeditionary Force posing with looted art from

the palace of the Benin King, Nigeria. Source: Myweku.com

 I previously posted about the controversial auction at Sotheby's next month of a Benin mask that was expected to set a record price for an African antiquity. The 16th century ivory mask, "one of the last great masterpieces of Benin sculpture remaining in private hands," is believed to have been looted by British troops from 19th-century West Africa. According to The Independent, "protests against the sale of the mask began at the end of last month on social networking sites and an online petition was circulated by a group calling itself the Nigeria Liberty Forum." The article went on to say that the auction has since been cancelled and a statement released by Sotheby's on December 24 says that "the Benin ivory mask and other items consigned by the descendants of Lionel Galway which Sotheby's had announced for auction in February 2011 have been withdrawn from sale at the request of the consignors." We can only speculate as to what their reasons for doing so may have been. If and when the mask does come up for auction in the future, I wonder if its provenance will have been irreparably tainted as a result of last month's protests or whether the protests will have had the opposite, unintended effect which is to make the object a fetish of the market.

"Neither condemned nor vindicated"

In a previous post last October, this blog reported on how a court in Rome had ruled that the statute of limitations had run on the two criminal charges brought against the former Getty Museum curator Marion True. While the proceedings were a vitally important wake-up call to those operating in the antiquities market, I personally found it exceedingly unfair that True should have been the one to pay the price for the widespread illicit practices so many were engaging in (also, from a legal perspective, the charges were inherently flawed as noted in the post linked above).

Now The Art Newspaper has published Marion True's own account of her trial or lack thereof. True opens up about why she chose not to waive the statute of limitations and wonders why the Italian government decided to mount such an aggressive attack on an institution and a curator with a purported long history of tightening antiquities acquisition policices. Admittedly, the whole affair was hugely politicised and the Italian authorities should probably have simply asked for the return of the disputed objects as Marion True argues. But if they'd done that then the problem of looting and trafficking in illicit antiquities would not have received the international media attention it desperately needed.

See also Paolo Giorgio Ferri, former prosecutor involved in True's case, on the "scourge of looting."

Another auction record price expected, albeit tainted by claims of illicit provenance

2010 was the year of record auction prices: for painting and any artwork generally (the Picasso sold at Christie's for $106.5m); for sculpture (the Giacometti sold at Sotheby's for $104.3m); for rare books (the Audubon classic "Birds of America" sold at Sotheby's for $11.5m) and for Chinese art (the Qianlong vase sold at Bainbridges for $85.9m). The market has undoubtedly shown remarkable depth in buying power emanating largely from Russia, China and the Middle East (it is widely believed that the mysterious buyer of the record-breaking Picasso could only have been either Russian or Middle Eastern) and it is no wonder that this has been accompanied by the rise of art funds, art securitization and even the launch of an art "stock exchange" in Paris.

The Art Newspaper is now anticipating what could be the first record auction price for the new year: £3.5-4.5m for a Benin ivory mask, which would make it the highest price ever paid for an African artwork. The top-end of the market for Chinese art has been dominated by Chinese buyers making patriotic purchases so it will be interesting to see if a similar trend arises in the case of the iconic mask when it is auctioned at Sotheby's in London on February 17. That the mask is believed by many to have been looted by the British "in the infamous punitive expedition of 1897 when the British invaded Benin, looted thousands of artefacts, burnt Benin City and sent Oba Ovonramwen, the King, into exile" makes it much more likely that the buyer will indeed be African. But what of the allegation that Sotheby's is actively participating in trafficking illicit antiquities? When it comes to antiquities, the statistics are staggering -- it's been held that the provenance of approx. 80-90% of antiquities on the market would raise legal issues (S.M. Mackenzie), the resolution of those issues often being impossible given the origins and age of the antiquities. While it would not make sense to freeze virtually all sales of antiquities, sales of those that are suspected to have been illegally exported from their country of origin should not take place unless and until those suspicions are put to rest. Otherwise, the auction houses and dealers involved will be feeding the market demand fuelling looters all over the world (the causal link between market demand and supply for looted antiquities has been conclusively proven in my opinion).

Public photo archive of looted antiquities vital to eradicating grave problem of looting

A reader wrote to the Editor of The Art Newspaper this week calling for the need to have a public photo archive of looted antiquities to aide prospective buyers in their provenance research of potentially looted objects. When it comes to purchasing antiquities today, the volume of undocumented/ looted antiquities (the two terms have become synonymous) on the market is such that tainting an object's provenance by way of publishing photos of similar/identical looted objects will in most cases ensure it does indeed remain unsold. The importance of this reality goes beyond an individual prospective buyer avoiding the purchase of illicit objects -- ensuring that looted antiquities remain unsold is crucial to eradicating looting itself. Results of ethnographic studies around the world have shown that looting is a profit-making business that is the direct result of market demand (see Patty Gerstenblith article) and with the antiquities market being valued at $2-6 billion annually, the stakes are high. The causal link between market demand and looting has, in my opinion, been conclusively proven (as I've previously written in the context of Marion True's trial) and one highly effective way of controlling market demand is through a public photo archive of looted artworks. In fact, this method is probably more effective at combating looting than the body of piecemeal legislation enacted in the US over the last decade with a view to deterring trade in illicit art (notably, the NSPA, the ARPA and the CPIA). The Art Loss Register is the obvious candidate to fulfill the mission of public archive and I would urge it to expand the scope of its valuable services to include this much-needed archive (to some extent it already does as looted artworks are by definition stolen). Much of our understanding of the evolution of human civilization has been attributed to stratigraphic excavation and as Patty Gerstenblith points out, "this full body of contextualized information is a destructible, non-renewable cultural resource," forever destroyed by looters. Not to mention the harm caused to the objects themselves and the distortions to the historical record resulting from flooding the market with undocumented artworks.

Marion True, the scapegoat...

We will never know whether Marion True knowingly "acquired" or conspired to "traffic in" looted antiquities now that a court in Rome has ruled that the statute of limitations on the two criminal charges brought against the longtime curator had expired. The trial had continued on-and-off for five years during which time the prosecution presented its arguments to the court and called witnesses "who, according to Italian court procedure, were rarely subject to cross-examination." This, together with the fact that the defense never made its case nor did the court ever reach a verdict, means it's virtually impossible to draw any solid, substantiated conclusions with respect to the defendant and the specific allegations made against her. Furthermore, whatever limited conclusions can be drawn these have to be at least partially discounted given the politicization of the proceedings as a result of the Italian government's purported use of the True trial as a platform for its efforts to reclaim antiquities from major American museums. I say "purported use" because my understanding was always that the claims made by the Italian authorities had actually largely been "ethical" rather than "legal" but that the distinction had proven irrelevant in practice because US institutions perceived the claims as legal due to the hugely incriminating evidence found at the Geneva warehouse of Giacomo de Medici (convicted antiquities smuggler and alleged associate of Robert Hecht, Marion True's co-defendant and the dealer she transacted with). Marion True herself discusses, among other things, the "gigantic effect" the trial had on American museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in an interview she gave The New Yorker on her "trial and ordeal."

Yet despite no verdict and no airing of the defense, the significance of the case cannot be overstated: it marks the culmination of decades of (unethical, if not illegal) acquisitions by museums (dealers and collectors too) of antiquities of unknown or dubious provenance. It's long been the case that market participants have simultaneously acknowledged the prevalence of looted antiquities in the market while routinely dealing in ancient artifacts that lack adequate provenance and denying the causal link between market demand and the growing profit-making business of looting (evidence of the causal link is practically conclusive). The True trial illustrates this intolerable reality perfectly - the pervasiveness of appallingly low standards in acquisitions of antiquities has been such in the last 20 years that either Marion True thought she could get away with it or even a curator of her knowledge and experience (she served as curator of antiquities at the Getty from 1986 to 2005) could not distinguish between an insufficiently documented antiquity and an illicit one. As the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Maxwell L. Anderson, said, Marion True was being indicted "for what was a practice of American museums."

That a single curator has had to "carry the burden" for the practices of a board of trustees that was fully aware of the risks the acquisitions entailed and approved them nonetheless only to condone them later is undoubtedly unfair, not to mention the fact that the charges were anomalous from the outset since as a curator, True was never the recipient of the objects in dispute- the objects were acquired by the board of trustees on behalf of the Getty museum. However, I want to tell Marion True that her five year-ordeal was not completely in vain. Yes the costs of the litigation were exceedingly high- the personal costs to the defendant as well as the costs associated with the intimidation of American museums by the Italian authorities and the less-than-favorable agreements that resulted- but there were benefits too. In 2008, for example, the Association of Art Museum Directors adopted stricter guidelines for acquisitions of antiquities and, above all, the trial has served as a deafeningly loud "wake-up call" to museums in the US (and, ehem, around the world) that BUYING UNDOCUMENTED OR INSUFFICIENTLY DOCUMENTED ANTIQUITIES HAS GOT TO STOP.