December 26, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Query: CCTV equipment (Netaly Zelcer)
- Looking back at the arts in 2000 by The Associated Press
(Lawyers proved as significant as Rembrandt in 2000)
- You Can't Bring Those Antiquities In Here!
(purchases from a growing list of countries are coming to an end, and for a remarkable
reason: A little known State Department body, the Cultural Property
Advisory Committee)
- more on Stockholm art heist
- Swiss High Court has returned 62-year-old antiquities smuggler Edip Telli to Turkey
- Who knew what about Nazi loot?
A public inquiry into art plunder might be in order Bonnie Czegledi. A lawyer's view.
- Museums and Tribes: A Tricky Truce
- Website helps authorities track stolen art
(stealing art is a growth industry.
Art thieves make off with billions in cultural property every year)
From: "Netaly Zelcer" Japan@aenog.mm-m.ne.jp
Subject: Query: CCTV equipment
I have a question - do you have any study or some figures regarding the investing in security equipment in museums, sorted by countries? I am particularly interested in CCTV equipment.
Thanks,
Netaly
Looking back at the arts in 2000 By The Associated Press
Lawyers proved as significant as Rembrandt in 2000.
The art world spun into the new year with fallout from "Sensation," the 1999 exhibit that created a cultural and political war over Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung. In March, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum dropped their dueling lawsuits, and the city agreed to spend $5.8 million for a museum renovation project. Meanwhile, governments around the world agreed to search for 600,000 pieces of art plundered from Holocaust victims by the Nazis. But at a meeting this fall, art experts, Jewish activists and officials from 37 countries did not decide whether art taken from museums in Nazi- occupied Europe should be returned to the nations of origin or to Israel. The Internet played a key role in tracking down stolen art, while the FBI investigated eBay over "shill" bids self-bidding on an abstract painting. And eBay's rival, Amazon.com, lost a significant partner when Sotheby's ended their joint Web site for big-ticket auctions. As for Rembrandt, the Dutch master's "Portrait of a Lady Aged 62" fetched a record $28.7 million at a Christie's auction this month. Next year? If the current Shanghai Biennale is any indication, expect more cultural rows. A photo of a man eating a dead baby was rejected by the show but seized by police when it surfaced at a local gallery. Brace yourself, Brooklyn Museum.
More:
http://www.telecomclick.com/newsarticle.asp?newsarticleid=85637
You Can't Bring Those Antiquities In Here!
By Nina Teicholz
Visit a museum these days, and if it has a collection of Mayan, Cambodian or Canadian Inuit artifacts, you'll notice something: There are very few -- or no -- new acquisitions. Public and private collections in the United States have long benefited from a vibrant, open international art trade. But such purchases from a growing list of countries are coming to an end, and for a remarkable reason: A little known State Department body, the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC), is working to prevent Americans -- and only Americans -- from buying antiquities. It already has succeeded in ending the import of most ancient objects from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Canada, Cambodia and Cyprus, and it is on course to obtain similar sweeping bans on Greek and Italian artifacts. If the archaeologist-dominated CPAC has its way, Americans who buy a Roman coin or an Attic Greek vase will be breaking the law. You might well ask, what's wrong with keeping antiquities out of private hands? And aren't archaeologists our best defense against the rampant looting and destruction of precious ancient objects? It's true, of course, that archaeologists are committed to preserving the artifacts that are at the heart of their studies. But like a parent who loves so much that the child is smothered, the archaeologists at CPAC are advocating policies that harm the very objects they seek to protect. Specifically, by choking off a legal U.S. market for antiquities, they push that market underground, where objects are lost to scholarship. The objects are also lost to the public, since reputable museums cannot buy objects of suspicious origin. Traditionally, museums purchase about a quarter of all fine antiquities on sale, and much of the rest of their collections come from donations by private collectors. In fact, more than 95 percent of antiquities imported into the United States end up in museums within a generation, according to the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art. Congress never intended to shut down the antiquities trade. When it created CPAC in 1983, it was complying with the 1970 UNESCO convention that sought to combat the plundering of archaeological sites -- such as Sipan in Peru, where gold masks and jewelry were disappearing. Under the law, if Peru or another "source" country wanted U.S. help in reducing the market for such objects, it could apply for a cultural property agreement that would prohibit the U.S. import of "a narrow range" of "significant" objects that were in danger of being looted. CPAC was supposed to review the applications. Congress specified that it should approve them only if the United States was joined by other buyer countries (mainly European nations and Japan). That was because without a concerted international effort, any U.S. ban would lead to a balloon effect, pinching the market in one place only to have it pop up in another.
Congress insisted on other criteria as well, not only to make any bans effective, but also to safeguard free trade: Objects had to be rare and highly important to a source country's cultural patrimony; the country had to show it was taking steps to protect its own sites; and there had to be evidence of a market for the objects in the United States.
Over the past decade, however, CPAC has begun to ignore many of the guidelines. "I never saw any substantial evidence that there was a U.S. market for any of the stuff being banned," I was told by Egyptologist Jack Josephson, who was chairman of CPAC from 1990 to 1995. "I never saw a shred of evidence that a country was taking steps to protect its own objects. And in fact, in Guatemala's case, local people could buy the same things that were being banned in the United States. So a market exists for these looted objects inside the country!" He added, and lawyers who have reviewed committee records agree, that although Canada and the United States have signed a cultural property agreement, Canada never claimed its artifacts were being looted. And bans have been imposed even though no "buyer" countries have ever joined the U.S. effort. Instead of prohibiting the import of specific objects known to be looted from certain archaeological sites, the committee recommends sweeping bans that cover broad categories of important and unimportant artifacts alike. In the past four years it has become illegal, for example, for Americans to buy practically any Indian artifact from Canada, any pre-Columbian object from Peru or Central America, anything Byzantine from Cyprus, and any stone sculpture from Cambodia. Meanwhile, European markets for many of those objects thrive. If CPAC obtains bans in other countries, it is safe to assume they will be equally sweeping. Why has the committee gone so far overboard? There are two likely reasons. One is that its longtime staff director, Maria Kouroupas, is a fierce advocate of the prevailing archaeologist position that any private market for antiquities is unconscionable. According to this view, all such objects should be publicly owned. If there were enough archaeologists to keep up with the tens of thousands of antiquities unearthed worldwide every year -- the recent construction of a new metro in Athens, for example, uncovered more than 30,000 artifacts -- and if there were enough public funds to buy all these objects, this might be a reasonable view. But in the obvious absence of these conditions, a legal market is the only safeguard against a black market. Beyond ensuring that scholars and museums have access to antiquities, a legal market also allows private collectors to step in where governments cannot. In the 1980s, for example, prominent American art collector Dominique de Menil, in coordination with Cypriot authorities, helped salvage the invaluable Byzantine frescoes of Lysi, which had been stolen by smugglers. They are now in a Houston chapel specially built to house them, with the blessing of the Cypriot government. Private collectors also provide a great deal of funding that enables archaeologists to do their work.
Even if one distrusts the virtue of a free market, Congress meant for CPAC to take it into consideration. Of the committee's 11 members -- who are appointed by the president, often after being been nominated or recommended by Kouroupas -- three are supposed to represent dealers or private collectors. However, as seats have come open, they have often either been left vacant or been filled by dealers with expertise in fields unrelated to archaeological antiquities (one, for example, specialized in Old Master paintings). Most of the committee meetings are closed to the public; and even on the rare occasion that public hearings are held, interested parties must file Freedom of Information Act requests to get a transcript afterward. Dealers and collectors express concern that the committee, increasingly antagonistic to a free trade in antiquities, will manage to obtain cultural property agreements banning such trade with more and more countries. Discussions have already occurred, for example, in Greece. U.S. officials are expressly prohibited from soliciting foreign applications for such agreements -- and a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressly denied that such solicitations occur. Nevertheless, when I spoke this fall with Greece's then-minister of culture, Theodore Pangalos, and the ministry's general secretary, Lena Mendoni, they told me that they felt that American officials had pressured them to seek such agreements. Among the officials they cited was Kouroupas. Similar discussions are going on with Italy; Greek officials showed me a copy of the Italian application and said it had been provided by U.S. officials. Another reason CPAC has been able to veer from its mandate appears to be that cultural agreements with foreign nations can be used as bargaining chips by the State Department in negotiations over wholly unrelated issues. In granting the Canadian agreement, for example, Joe Duffy -- then the director of the U.S. Information Agency -- said in a private meeting with congressional leaders that the State Department was trying to appease Canadian anger over the Helms-Burton law of 1996, which punished foreign companies doing business in Cuba. That's not how the system should work. "Source" countries may opt not to export so much as a shard or pot, but Congress never meant for our import laws to force such foreign decisions. As former State Department official Mark Feldman wrote in an analysis attached to the enabling legislation for CPAC, "The power to place import controls on art was seen as an extreme and dangerous step to be used only in cases of great necessity [and] not . . . as a generalized way of dealing with the fact that a large amount of illegal art goes out of a lot of countries." Antiquities enrich our lives by bringing us the beauty and culture of other times and places. During the last congressional session, Sens. Daniel Moynihan, William Roth and Charles Schumer introduced a bill aimed at reining CPAC in. The Senate should preserve cultural freedom for Americans not only by reintroducing similar legislation, but also by taking further steps to steer the committee back to its intended track. Nina Teicholz is a New York writer specializing in the arts.
Stockholm police seek stolen Rembrandt, Renoirs
By Jonathan Lynn
STOCKHOLM, Dec 23 (Reuters) - Police combed Stockholm on Saturday for clues to a daring art theft which robbed Sweden's National Museum of three of its most prized paintings -- a Rembrandt and two Renoirs. An armed gang entered the museum on Stockholm's waterfront just before it closed on Friday. One of them, brandishing a sub-machinegun in the museum lobby, threatened museum staff and visitors, while another two, also armed, ran upstairs and snatched the small paintings, valued by police at about $30 million, from different rooms. They escaped in a light boat which was later recovered, after accomplices created a diversion by setting fire to two cars and strewing the road with spiked mats. "The police are working on the case. We haven't any more to report than yesterday," a police spokesman said. But at the museum, open as usual but with some rooms shut, shocked guards and officials were bemoaning the loss of some of the jewels of their collection. "Nobody has any idea as yet who these people are. It was done the same way as when they rob a bank -- it was very professional," said the museum's director of research, Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman. "It seems a bit overdone to use machineguns when you go to a museum. We think somebody hired them. They can't be art lovers," she told Reuters. The stolen pictures are a self- portrait by the Dutch master Rembrandt and two works by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir -- "A Young Parisienne" and "Conversation." BIGGEST SWEDISH ART THEFT IN SEVEN YEARS
The art theft is the biggest in Sweden since robbers sawed through the roof of Stockholm's Modern Museum in 1993 and stole eight works of art by cubist masters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque worth about $60 million. Putting a value on the pictures is difficult. Last week Rembrandt's Portrait of a Lady was auctioned for $28.69 million, a record for the master, but that painting was larger than the one stolen in Stockholm. Typically a Rembrandt painting would be worth $10 million or more, Cavalli-Bjorkman said. The pictures are state property and not insured. And museum officials believe it is impossible to tighten security to cope with the kind of criminal who is willing to use light weapons during opening hours. What is clear is that the gang knew exactly what they were after. Firstly they took small pieces to make their getaway easier. "With a gun in one hand it's not easy to take large paintings," Cavalli-Bjorkman said. Secondly they had already inspected the museum. One of the guards recognised one of the robbers, even though he was masked, by his clothes, as he had been there earlier in the day. It would be virtually impossible to sell such well-known masterpieces, suggesting the robbers intend to blackmail the museum or were hired by a private collector abroad. At least one of the robbers appeared to be from Sweden, shouting a warning in perfect Swedish to a family cowering in the lobby to take care of their child, Cavalli-Bjorkman said. Most of the works stolen in the 1993 Modern Museum robbery were subsequently recovered without payment of a ransom. The beautiful Self-Portrait, acquired in 1956, is one of Rembrandt's earliest works, dating from when he was still in Leyden. It is signed 1630 when he would have been 23 or 24. Like an etching it is on copper plate, painted over with gold to make the light more luminous. Rembrandt executed only two other paintings of this kind. The Renoirs are also important, acquired in 1913 and 1918 shortly after the museum started to collect impressionists.
More reports:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1083000/1083831.stm
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,1547676%255E1702,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1083000/1083770.stm
http://www.msnbc.com/news/507270.asp?cp1=1
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2000-12/raid231200.shtml
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,415159,00.html
also read:
The Art of Art Theft:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_587000/587183.stm
From: Jonathan Sazonoff Subject: Re: Art Theft at Sweden's National Museum
Dear Subscribers,
Friday's theft of three paintings from Sweden's Stockholm National Museum raises many issues and questions beyond the obvious, "Who done it?" For those on the mailing list who are interested in such things, there are several interesting aspects to this crime.
First the Modus Operandi, the MO was armed robbery. Three men entered the museum Friday evening about 5:15 p.m. One man displayed a submachine gun, issued a threat, and stationed himself in the lobby. The other two accomplices then spread out to loot separate galleries.
An old master "Self Portrait" c.1630 by Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606- 1669) was taken from one gallery. Two paintings by Renoir (French, 1841-1919) "Conversation with the Gardener" c.1875 and portrait of a "Young Parisian" c.1874 were taken from another gallery. All together the stolen art was reportedly valued around $ 32,000,000. Keep in mind that such infamous art works are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to fence.
Next, the exit of the thieves was also quite interesting. As a diversion two parked cars were set ablaze, providing an explosion and flames. Another news account mentions the thieves throwing nails on the ground to impede any chase. Equally unusual, the thieves fled in a boat that was later found abandoned.
I must admit, I've never heard of such a theatrical get away. Diversions have been used in the past, but again I can't think of anything as bold as blowing up cars. Perhaps the perpetrators were influenced by too many movies. Such flamboyance is usually the exception rather than the rule. Then again, the Ashmolean theft of 1/1/2000 might have been the beginning of such movie inspired criminal theatrics.
In all, this was an unpleasant though not unprecedented crime. Museums have been held up at gunpoint before. In 1999 armed robbers hit the Nivaagaard Collection in Denmark, the York Gallery in the UK, and the Russian State Museum. However, none of these other robbers displayed a sub-machinegun. It should be noted that all of those aforementioned crimes have been solved. When thieves up the ante with armed robbery, it increases the public pressure and police desire to solve the crime.
At least we can all be thankful that nobody was physically harmed.
Best wishes and good holidays to all,
Jonathan Sazonoff
Saz Productions, Inc.
http://www.saztv.com
For links to more complete coverage of this crime:
In English see the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1083000/1083831.stm
In Swedish, a newspapers web-page showing all three paintings: http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,20176,00.html
WILL "BLIND EDIP" SING? Alleged smuggler Edip Telli (Özgen Acar)
The Swiss High Court has returned 62-year-old antiquities smuggler Edip Telli to Turkey. Arrested in the town of Alstaetten in March, he was extradited on October 30. Known as "Blind Edip" because he has vision in only one eye, Telli was the mastermind in the smuggling of the 1,900 fifth-century B.C. silver coins found at Elmal1, near Antalya, Turkey, in April 1984. Edip, his brother Nevzat (now serving time for smuggling 92 kilos of heroin into England), and Munich antiquities gallery owner Fuat Üzülmez had set up a consortium to buy and sell the hoard. Edip Telli was taken into custody in Munich following the circulation of an Interpol bulletin in 1985 requested by Turkey, but was released by the local prosecutor because he was judged to be a "respectable German citizen." He was again arrested in Italy, but, with mafia assistance, he managed to return to Germany a few days later. Meanwhile, both Tellis took on the nationality of their wives, German and British. Because he had taken foreign nationality without obtaining permission, Edip Telli was stripped of Turkish citizenship in 1989. Telli remained in Munich until he thought the warrant had expired. He was unaware, when he traveled to Switzerland in March, that as a result of his involvement in the smuggling of 531 antiquities in Istanbul on June 12, 1991, the warrant had been renewed. The Swiss court examined the file sent by Turkey and decided that Telli should be extradited. Following the rejection of his lawyers' appeals, he was handed over to a police team from Turkey. According to reports in the Turkish media, other ringleaders in the country's antiquities mafia--afraid that Telli might reveal the details of various smuggling activities and the people behind them--have fled to Europe. Telli has been named in many cases, among them one of a statue of "Weary Hercules" (see "Turkey's War on the Illicit Antiquities Trade," March/April 1995).--ÖZGEN ACAR
http://www.archaeology.org/curiss/newsbriefs/edip.html
To: securma@xs4all.nl
From: Bonnie Czegledi czegledi@worldlaw.com
Subject: "Who Knew What About Nazi Loot - Article in National Post, Canada, December 15
Below is an article which I wrote, which was published last week in the National Post newspaper, Canada, on December 15. Readers may find it of interest, particularly with respect to criminal liability in the Canadian jurisdiction.
Best regards.
Bonnie Czegledi
International Art Lawyer, Klotz & Co.,
International Business Lawyers
Who knew what about Nazi loot? A public inquiry into art plunder might be in order Bonnie Czegledi National Post
The topic of Nazi-looted art and war plunder has finally become a hot one in Canada. Until now, Canadian galleries, museums and institutions have been silent on whether their collections might contain any works plundered from Europe. The plea for information on this matter was finally acknowledged last week when both the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario announced they will post a list of paintings they feel have questions regarding provenance. Yesterday, the National Post revealed the role that Anthony Blunt, a notorious British/Soviet double agent, played as chief advisor for new European acquisitions to the National Gallery of Canada immediately after the Second World War. This suggests Canada might have had a larger role in the trade in looted art than was previously known. The National Gallery has described 1939 to 1955 in its own catalogue, as being the Great Years of Collecting. During and shortly after the Holocaust era, the National Gallery purchased many European paintings at low prices. What was the process by which Canada came into possession of these paintings? What were the legal obligations of the galleries and their buyers? Should galleries have suspected at the time that some of these paintings might have been wartime plunder? These questions are important to answer; and where plunder is found, restitution should be made. Collectors may be unclear on the law in Canada on this matter. The Canadian Criminal Code specifically makes it a crime to possess or deal in property obtained by crime, even if the transaction took place outside Canada. There are no limitation periods. The Canadian Criminal Code clearly requires mens rea, or knowledge, as a requirement for an offence. Having said this, can a person hide behind the excuse of being an innocent buyer? Under Section 354 of the Canadian Criminal Code, "everyone commits an offence who has in his possession any property or thing ... knowing that all or part of the property ... was derived directly or indirectly from an act or omission anywhere that, if it had occurred in Canada, would have constituted an offence punishable by indictment." The question is: What is "knowing" for the purposes of the Criminal Code? What if a person has a suspicion of questionable provenance of a painting, but asks no questions? Is he safe from criminal prosecution?
The answer was enunciated in 1998 in the Ontario Court of Appeal case Regina v. Duong, which outlines the conduct that constitutes wilful blindness. A party will be found criminally responsible where he has actual knowledge of the offence. Actual knowledge includes actual suspicion, combined with a conscious decision not to make inquiries that could confirm or disprove that suspicion. Where a person chooses to make no inquires, and instead prefers to remain deliberately ignorant of the offence, that person is culpable. Speculation as to what the person might have learned, had he chosen to make the necessary inquiries, does not affect the culpability. In the case of Nazi-looted art, the question is: Did a buyer of a painting purchased at below market value, during or right after the Holocaust, have an obligation to be suspicious, and to satisfy himself that the title of the painting was satisfactory? Under these circumstances, it would be difficult for public galleries to fulfill their obligations by using their own judgment to decide what paintings have questionable provenance. They may be too close to the subject. How can it be that many of the paintings that Blunt was involved in purchasing were not included in the National Gallery's list of works with questionable provenance? The Canadian government might wish to follow the example of the United States and Europe. For example, in 1998, the U.S. Congress created the Presidential Advisory Commission for the purpose of finding Holocaust assets located in the United States. A public inquiry might be in order for Canada, too. This would allow an impartial and transparent investigation of the questions now raised.
Bonnie Czegledi practises law exclusively in the area of
international art law, the recovery of stolen art, and import and
export of cultural property, at Klotz & Co., International Business
Lawyers, Toronto.
Bonnie Czegledi, LL.B.
International Art Lawyer
Klotz & Co.
International Business Lawyers
347 Bay Street, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada M5H 2R7
Tel: 416-360-6600 Fax: 416-360-6601
E-Mail: czegledi@worldlaw.com Website:
http://www.worldlaw.com
Museums and Tribes: A Tricky Truce
By STEPHEN KINZER
ON a cold afternoon a little more than a year ago, members of several Tlingit Indian clans in southeastern Alaska gathered for a transcendently emotional ceremony that few of them had ever dared to imagine. An intricately carved wooden beaver that plays a central role in their history and culture was coming home after an absence of nearly a century. This carving once graced the prow of a war canoe that ferried supplies to these clans in the wake of a bombardment of their communities by the United States Navy in 1881. One clan member, acting on his own, later sold it to a traveling collector, and it disappeared. In 1998, a clan elder was visiting a storeroom at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when, he later recalled, he heard an "inner voice" calling him to one shelf. When he found the shelf, he was astonished to see the wooden beaver staring out at him. Under the provisions of a sweeping law enacted 10 years ago, Tlingit clans asked the museum to return the carving, and museum officials complied. "The day it came back was something you couldn't even imagine," said Leonard John, a clan member who helped arrange the return. "The whole village was at the dock. People were crying and weeping.
"This is not just art to us," Mr. John continued. "It's something far deeper, something with a healing and spiritual aspect. When our artifacts left us and were scattered across America, they left a void. We lost our honor and our value system. We were overwhelmed by social problems like suicide and alcoholism. Now that they're coming back, people look at them and feel their honor and their self-respect coming back as well. There are still a lot of festering wounds, but the process of healing has begun."
The law under which the beaver prow was repatriated, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, was signed by President George Bush in November 1990 after years of discussion among scientists, museum curators and Indian groups. It seeks to reconcile two profoundly different value systems, one based on the primacy of reason and science and the other revolving around spiritual and religious values.
In the decade since the law was passed, it has had a profound effect on museums and the philosophy on which they are based. At the same time, it has had incalculable emotional and social impact on Indian tribes across the country that have recovered long-lost artifacts, many of which have enormous spiritual significance, as well as the remains of thousands of their ancestors.
When the law was first enacted, some Indian leaders feared that they were about to begin a period of bitter clashes with defiant museum curators. Some curators feared that their collections would be gutted as they were forced to return huge numbers of artifacts. Ten years later, however, both sides agree that their fears were exaggerated, and many say the law has actually increased understanding between tribes and museum administrators.
"I've visited quite a few museums and generally found them to be very friendly and welcoming," said Dorothy Davids, who directs repatriation efforts for the Stockbridge-Munsee band of the Mohican Nation, now based in Wisconsin. "It was rough going for a while because museums really kind of hate to give up what they have, but now there's a law. Most of them respect that."
There are still some areas of conflict, especially over efforts by some tribes to recover remains that are many thousands of years old and that scientists say should be studied for vital clues about the history of human migration to the American continent. But many curators have come to agree that Indians have a right to recover their sacred artifacts and the bones of those they can legitimately claim as ancestors.
Indians involved in the reclamation process have also come to respect the role museums have played in preserving and displaying artifacts that might otherwise have been lost.
In some cases, museums have reached agreements with tribes under which the museums keep artifacts but agree to treat them in special ways. Some have been taken off public display, others are stored in rooms that face in a particular direction, and still others are periodically sprinkled with chopped tobacco or ground corn.
The 1990 law affects every museum and federal agency that owns "Native American human remains and associated funerary objects" as well as "unassociated funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony." It requires each museum and agency to compile an inventory of its holdings, identify them by tribal origin and notify existing tribes of objects that appear to come from that tribe's tradition.
Under the law, museums must return all remains and artifacts to any tribe that requests them and that can prove a "cultural affiliation" with the tribe from which they came.
American museums hold the remains of an estimated 500,000 Indians as well as millions of Indian artifacts, many of which come from graves. In the 10 years since the law was enacted, according to the National Park Service, museums and federal agencies have returned about 20,000 sets of human remains and more than 385,000 funerary objects, sacred objects and "objects of cultural patrimony."
Specialists say the number of objects is misleadingly high because it includes every bead and pottery shard found in an Indian grave. But among the returned objects are also hundreds of important and beautiful artifacts that have been prizes in museum collections.
Some scientists and curators say the return of these artifacts has hurt their ability to explain the American past to visitors and researchers. Many concede, however, that their fear that the law would result in the wholesale dismantling of museum collections has proved unfounded.
Debate over questions that the 1990 law raises has remained intense. "It's a big issue that's very important for museums, for scientific researchers and for Indian tribes," said Keith Kintigh, an anthropologist who is president of the Society for American Archaeology.
"Native Americans have interests in the past and in the material remains of the past," Mr. Kintigh said. "Some people argue that this is religion trying to assert itself over science, but we don't see it that way. Our position is that there are Native American rights, but that science and research are also legitimate. They have to be balanced. That's exactly what the law tries to do, and I think it's been pretty successful.
"Take these beautiful pottery vessels that were interred with Indians a thousand years ago," Mr. Kintigh said. "On the one hand, there are people who think those objects should be underground beside the people they were buried with. But most museums with Indian collections display funerary objects. They're enormous cultural achievements and have a lot to tell us. In many cases, they've even been used as models for the revival and continuation of traditional artistic styles.
"People's feelings on questions like this are evolving. My guess is that to the extent tribal people get together with curators and scientists, pressure on existing collections is going to lessen. We don't see their claims as illegitimate, but they come to see that there is value to learning about the past in a systematic way."
The recognition by some Indian leaders that funerary and sacred objects can serve a positive purpose if they remain in museums is only one of several factors that have moderated their demands for repatriation.
Indian tribes receive little financial support for offices that organize claims for sacred objects. As a result, many objects that might be claimed have not been.
In some parts of the country, especially in Western states, Indian cemeteries are being found regularly as roads are built and flood waters recede during droughts. Indian tribes often work vigorously to protect those remains. Since much of their energy is devoted to these urgent cases, little is left to deal with objects that are safely in museum vaults or display cases and will still be available to be claimed years or decades from now.
According to several museum curators, it was common practice for curators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to treat masks and other Indian artifacts with strong chemicals, including arsenic, to protect them from decay and insect infestation. As a result, they are now toxic and cannot be used in the ceremonies for which they were made.
At public meetings, tribal leaders have criticized federal agencies, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, for what they say are failures to devote enough money and energy to processing repatriation claims. They have also complained that while some museums are evidently committed to complying with the 1990 law, others seem less than enthusiastic.
Some Indian leaders maintain that all objects from all non-European cultures in North America belong in the hands of Indians, regardless of whether those alive today can claim kinship with the cultures that produced the objects. The 1990 law, however, rejects that so-called "pan-Indian" argument. It requires that the claimant tribe prove it is a "lineal descendant" of the tribe from which the artifacts or remains came.
As a result of this provision, the law has served some tribes better than others. Southwestern tribes like the Hopi and Navajo, for example, have maintained cultural continuity over centuries and therefore have strong claims to objects in museum collections. Other tribes, including many in the Eastern United States that were decimated by successive waves of European settlement, have more trouble proving their descent from tribes that existed long ago.
"It was never the intent of the legislation to bring in trucks and haul away museum collections," said Jonathan Haas, a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, which has one of the country's richest collections of Indian artifacts, and which has returned about a dozen important artifacts in recent years. "It was intended to provide a mechanism for the return of a very small number of very important pieces that never should have been taken from their place of origin in the first place.
"One very positive result of the law is that museums have become much more consultative with tribes about our use of objects," Mr. Haas said. "It has made us more sensitive, and it has also shown the tribes that we are becoming better keepers of this material and indeed have been good keepers in terms of the physical well-being of the pieces."
Although Mr. Haas and many other curators say tribes have good reason to reclaim some artifacts, that opinion is not unanimous. Curators who are unhappy with the law and its implications, however, normally speak only if assured of anonymity. They fear appearing anti-Indian or drawing attention to their collections.
"The language of the law is very loose," said a curator whose museum has grudgingly returned several artifacts to Indian tribes. "In effect, it says that museums have to return anything of religious or cultural significance, which arguably covers everything we have. The standard of proof is very low. It doesn't matter how we got it. If it's in a public collection and claimants want it back, we have to enter into negotiations.
"This contravenes the whole notion of us being able to assemble objects from different cultures," the curator said. "It assumes that we did something wrong and that we should give back what we have collected. But a lot of people think museums display cultural artifacts better than anyone else. That's our mission. And as this process proceeds, many tribes are starting to agree."
The debate over the law and its implications has involved not just curators but also scientists and Indian advocates. It has been a hot topic at many conferences and has filled reams of paper in specialized newspapers and journals.
G. A. Clark, a professor of anthropology at Arizona State University, staked out one side of the debate in a recent article in the Society for American Archeology Bulletin that has attracted much attention. He said laws like the one passed in 1990 reflect a "paroxysm of national guilt" and "strike at the heart of a scientific archaeology because they elevate the cultural traditions and religious beliefs of Indians to the level of science."
"I think archaeology is, or should be, a `sciencelike' endeavor as opposed to a political enterprise, an industry, a platform for promoting a social agenda, or a public relations exercise," Mr. Clark asserted in the article. "We all lose if, for reasons of political expediency, Indians rebury their past. One of the many ironies in the situation is that many Native American groups who favor the preservation and study of archaeological and skeletal collections are being co-opted by the actions of small but vocal activist minorities in cahoots with ignorant legislators willing to sell the profession down the pike for the sake of short-term political gains."
In response to views like this, other scholars and Indian advocates assert that according to Indian theology, disturbing the remains of the dead threatens not only tribal spirits but the harmony of the whole world. "To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their final resting place is sacred ground," Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe told an interviewer in the 1850's, "while you wander far from the graves of your ancestors, and seemingly without regret."
One apparently unintended consequence of the law has been that Indian tribes have laid claim to several sets of very old human remains that have been found in the United States since the mid-1990's. Indians claim these as remains of their ancestors, since their religious tradition tells them that they were always present on the North American continent. Many scientists say that claim is dubious at best, and complain that potentially thrilling discoveries about the early peopling of the Americas may never be made if they do not have the chance to study the remains they unearth.
This issue has come into public view largely because of an intensifying legal controversy over the skeleton of a man, apparently about 9,000 years old, that was found in 1996 in Kennewick, Wash.
Five Indian tribes in the Northwest have collectively claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor and want to rebury his remains. Scientists are protesting. They say the skeleton has features suggesting that it may be of Japanese or Polynesian origin, and that in any case no tribe or ethnic group in the world can trace its ancestry back 9,000 years.
In September, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit ruled in favor of the tribes, saying he believed they were "culturally affiliated" with the Kenewick skeleton. A group of anthropologists, however, has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the reburial.
"When the law was passed, no one had any idea that we would be discovering remains this old," said Cleone Hawkinson, an Oregon-based physical anthropologist who is president of Friends of the American Past, an organization that is fighting Indian claims to Kennewick Man and several other sets of ancient human remains. "Native Americans are putting in requests for things that go way beyond the intent of the law, which says that an existing group has to prove cultural affinity with a prior group before it can make a claim.
"It's nonsensical to say that one group which is in the geographical area now is the only group that ever got here, and it negates the complexity of our past," Ms. Hawkinson said. "The whole issue has become extremely political as Indian movements have gained power and political clout. There's a desire to reach politically correct conclusions that will take us an extra mile toward righting the wrongs of the past. We're pulling a dark curtain that's as bad as what happened during the Middle Ages in Europe. To be human means to ask questions about ourselves and our origins. We're so inter related that it's a shame to have one narrow slice of humanity take so much control over what is becoming a really fascinating branch of scientific study."
Despite this debate and a handful of others like it, many scientists, museum curators and tribal leaders, more than a few of whom had expected to be locked in bitter battles over ownership of valuable artifacts, say the opposite has happened.
"We were told that there was going to be terrible conflict, but instead we're holding hands with them and it's been great," said Diane Palmer, an official of the Cape Fox tribe in Alaska who has worked to repatriate artifacts and remains from several museums. "A lot of our people had wrong ideas about museums, and museums had wrong ideas about some of the tribes. This has been a really positive experience. Until the law was enacted we had no way of even knowing where this stuff was, and now we can not only find it but have it returned."
Many scholars consider the collection of Native American artifacts at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of the American Indian in New York City to be the finest in the world. Over the last decade, the museum has returned about 2,000 objects to Indian tribes across the United States, in Canada and in several Latin American countries.
"We have a collection of 800,000 objects, so in a quantitative sense the law has had a very small impact," said Rick West, the museum's director, who is a Cheyenne Indian. "But from a qualitative standpoint I do think it has an impact, and that impact is absolutely positive.
"As institutions of culture, museums that house these materials have a vital interest in buttressing those cultures and supporting them into the future," Mr. West said. "To the extent that we believe maintenance of these cultures is important, and I think it is, museums have an obligation to support that cultural diversity. And secondly, this process has directly benefited museums themselves. Even a collection as great as ours is very spottily documented, and through this process of repatriation we've had people from native communities visiting our collection who can inevitably tell us a great deal about objects that are not subject to repatriation.
"When the law was first enacted in 1990 there was practically hysteria in some parts of the museum community about what was going to happen," Mr. West continued. "Now most of that has faded away. Both sides have been deliberate and thoughtful, and it has ended up benefiting both the native and museum communities. We're talking about a huge paradigm of cultural authority. This is not just words. It has real impact."
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/23/arts/24KINZ.html
Website helps authorities track stolen art
SANDRA ABMA - The World This Weekend - CBC Radio
TORONTO - It appears stealing art is a growth industry. Art thieves make off with billions in cultural property every year.
In the past year, thieves have stolen paintings and sculptures from art galleries in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Anna Kisluk works for Artloss.com. With headquarters in New York City, Artloss.com is a database website that registers stolen art. It was set up to help victims of theft post a notice about their stolen art. The registry is a source for auction houses and collectors who contact the website to see if suspect merchandise is hot. Kisluk says the list of burgled items is constantly expanding. She says world-wide art theft estimates run from $2 billion to $6 billion annually: "Things are stolen literally every day. It ranges from masterpieces, works by the names that I think most people would recognize, such as Picasso, Chagall, Miro -- all the way down to the silver coasters from someone's home." And the possibility of getting your prized possession back is slim to none. Recent UNESCO statistics show that only five to 10 per cent of stolen cultural goods are ever recovered. There are success stories. Sarah Dawson is with the London branch of Artloss.com. Her office specializes in researching Holocaust art that was looted by the Nazis, but it also handles contemporary thefts. Dawson tells a story that demonstrates the international nature of art theft: "We received in the London office a search [report] from the police in Montreal. They'd stopped a car and found a picture in the car. I think the car was stopped for a traffic offense. They checked their local records and there was no mention of it [the picture]. So they checked it with the Artloss register, through the London office, and we were able to confirm for them that the picture, which was a Van Dyke, had in fact been stolen from Ireland and was now in Canada. Presumably the people with the picture were trying to find a buyer for it. We were able to put all the parties together -- the police in Ireland, the police in Montreal. And again, that picture was successfully returned."
Montreal is the hotbed of art theft in Canada. The city is home to many art galleries, and it's also the intersection for the smuggling of European art into the U.S.
Alain Decoursier is a Montreal police officer with a Master's degree in art history. For the past decade, Decoursier has been investigating art crime in Montreal. He says most art theft in Montreal falls into two categories -- home burglaries and 'grab and runs.'
"Grab and run -- they go in a museum and grab a painting, or break a window and grab a bronze or a painting -- and they sell it the day after in France or the U.S. The museum doesn't want to put it in the newspapers [because they fear it will] create a bad reputation. "In Montreal and Toronto we can see a lot. Last year we arrested a bunch of people... just in Montreal, they stole from more than 15 galleries -- grab and runs during the night or the day. Someone goes inside, takes a little painting and they run away with it." Some of the stolen works of Quebec painter Jean Paul Riopelle have been returned.
Decoursier says most of the art crime in Montreal has links to organized crime. But, he adds, art theft isn't a high priority for most police departments because it's seen as a frivolous crime, a crime that only affects wealthy collectors and dealers. But he says it's usually the artist who gets hurt: "My first job is to defend or protect the artist. That's why I spend a lot more time on the dossier for the artist than a dossier of a million dollars from a private collector who has lots of insurance ... It's important for me to protect the first resources in the art market -- that's the artist. And usually they don't have any other resource." Artist Mitch Cantanski knows that from personal experience. He's had two of his sculptures stolen -- a loss of $3,000: "I don't have the resources to go hire a lawyer to go chase somebody for $3,000. It ends up being too expensive. So it happens. Artists get hit." Occasionally, Decoursier gets to help the artist. One time he returned some stolen paintings and drawings to the aging and ailing Quebec painter Jean Paul Riopelle. But Decoursier doesn't always get his men. He estimates that of the $20 million or so of art that is stolen each year in Montreal, he only recovers between $2 million or $3 million worth.
He says the rate would be higher if Canadian law was stronger. That's because laws on stolen property vary from province to province. Unless the art is stolen from a national institution, in some provinces there is as little as three years for the art to be found and returned to the original owner
http://infoculture.cbc.ca/archives/visart/visart_12192000_artloss.phtml