Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
MUNICH, Germany (AP) — Munich police said Wednesday they have seized a large collection of Aztec, Incan and Mayan cultural artifacts that Costa Rican authorities claim were illegally removed from their country.
Art theft specialists from Bavaria's criminal investigations office estimate that the collection, which includes around 1,000 masks, necklaces and ...
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Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
FORENSIC evidence extracted from one of four guns stolen from Busselton’s Old Butter Factory Museum in mid-January has led to a suspect being charged over the burglary and enabled the museum to get one of the guns back.
While the teenage suspect faced Busselton Children’s Court yesterday, where he was remanded ...
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Universal culture can only be achieved when all cultures are able and free to make their contribution but this cannot be done when the guardians of one culture hijack the masterpieces of another culture. (Picture: Mask pwo or mwana pwo, Chokwe, Angola. Ethnology Museum, Berlin.)
In a recent article in a ...
Posted in Dr. Kwame Opoku writings about looted cultural objects | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
By Kevin Mayhood
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Jim Strider, director of collections for the Ohio Historical Society, says the society in the 1990s returned materials to the Hopi tribe, and it has consulted recently with the Miami tribe in Oklahoma as archaeologists prepare for a dig near Piqua. The tribe previously lived in ...
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 2008
Mr Cuno takes the gloves off
James Cuno (left: all links and photos: http://tom-flynn.blogspot.com/), director of the Art Institute of Chicago, has never been backward in coming forward over cultural heritage issues and it's all grist to the mill. But his article in the online Yale Global (Who ...
Posted in International conventions, looting and illegal art traffickers, Mailing list reports, news comments / discussions, Unesco Struggle Against Illicit Trade | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Who Owns the Past? Antiquities from great cultures belong to humanity, not nation states that emerged centuries later All links and images: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10678 It’s a myth that cultural-property laws protect ancient antiquities or archaeological finds. Instead, the nationalist retentionist cultural-property laws are a dividing force, inhibiting regard for the world’s culture as a ...
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Over the past several weeks, this discussion group has received a number of posts about the activities of the Art Loss Register that merit serious consideration. These questions are broader than the operation of a particular organization. They raise general issues about the kind of system that can best protect ...
Posted in Mailing list reports | Comments Off
Monday, April 21st, 2008
BY BILL BLEYER
bill.bleyer@newsday.com
11:52 PM EDT, April 20, 2008
Even as the prosecution continues of the former director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in the theft of historic letters, a surprising revelation has surfaced:
The Oyster Bay organization was ripped off before, but at that time managed to keep it quiet.
Former director Edward ...
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Monday, April 21st, 2008
To follow all links in the text below: http://tom-flynn.blogspot.com/
A couple of weeks ago, Dr Kwame Opoku of African culture website Afrikanet wrote an open letter to European and North American museum directors, posing the question, Is legality a viable concept for European and American museum directors?
In recent months, Dr Opoku ...
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Monday, April 21st, 2008
Reference is made to the letter from Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1), New York, which was published in AFRIKANET on Friday, 18 April, 2008. http://www.afrikanet.info/.
In his letter, Philippe de Montebello refers to my article entitled “Is Legality still a viable concept for European and ...
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Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Wertvolle Kunst scheint in der Schweiz nicht sicher aufgehoben zu sein. Die Schlagzeilen aus jüngster Zeit – in Pfäffikon wurden Picasso-Bilder geraubt, und aus der Zürcher Bührle-Sammlung Gemälde von Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas und Monet – könnten jedenfalls diesen Eindruck erwecken.
Erst recht, nachdem am Freitag ein weiterer Kunstdiebstahl in Zürich ...
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Saturday, April 19th, 2008
PARIS (AFP) — As Indiana Jones gets set to hit cinema screens with a new death-defying adventure in the "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", a Paris museum acknowledged Friday that its own star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be.
One of only a dozen such ...
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Saturday, April 19th, 2008
OUAGADOUGOU (AFP) — France has returned to Burkina Faso a haul of stolen archaeological treasures discovered in a northern French port, the Burkinabe culture minister told AFP Friday.
Filippe Sawadogo said 262 items of "national archaeological and cultural significance" to the landlocked west African nation were returned via the French embassy ...
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Saturday, April 19th, 2008
MOSCOW—Russian art-world headlines often boil down to corruption and conflicts between state and individual interests, and the stories occupying insiders right now are no exception. ARTINFO’s Moscow correspondent reports on the opening of the first foreigner-owned gallery in the country, a national museum owning up to its past transgressions, private ...
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Friday, April 18th, 2008
14 Jahre nach dem Raub von drei wertvollen Gemälden aus der Frankfurter Kunsthalle Schirn müssen sich zwei Männer ab 14. Mai vor Gericht verantworten. Den beiden Beschuldigten im Alter von 64 und 60 Jahren werde Erpressung vorgeworfen, da sie zwei der Bilder an die Eigentümer zurückverkauft hätten, teilte die Frankfurter ...
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Friday, April 18th, 2008
Shay Nordal is beginning to think if it wasn’t for bad luck the Selkirk Marine Museum would have no luck at all.
One year after floodwaters almost forced the permanent closure of the historic site, the museum manager was forced to dial 911Wednesday morning after sparks from a welders torch started ...
Posted in Fire in cultural institutions | Comments Off
Friday, April 18th, 2008
A painting by leading Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler was stolen from a private collection in 2006, it has emerged. The work was taken from a Zurich collector and was destined to go on show at a Hodler retrospective in Bern, the Museum of Fine Arts director Matthias Frehner confirmed on Friday. The ...
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Friday, April 18th, 2008
New Museum Offers the Official Line on Tibet
BEIJING — Not far from National Stadium, the city’s mammoth, just-finished Olympic arena, another construction project is still facing an Olympic deadline. The building, sheathed in a green construction tent, will house Beijing’s first museum exclusively dedicated to Tibet.
Inside, curators will display antiquities, ...
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Just east of Oceanside, a thief is killed in early March, electrocuted while trying to cut live power lines in order to steal a few dollars' worth of copper.
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Sunday, April 13th, 2008
“The restitution of those cultural objects which our museums and collections, directly or indirectly, possess thanks to the colonial system and are now being demanded, must also not be postponed with cheap arguments and tricks.”
Gert v. Paczensky and Herbert Ganslmayr, Nofretete will nach Hause. (1)
Posted in Dr. Kwame Opoku writings about looted cultural objects | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
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Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
1. When and where was the painting stolen, and what proof exists of such ?
a. The painting was stolen in 1979
b. The painting was stolen in Paris in Paola Modiano’s flat
c. German Court a copy of the denunciation to the French Police (annex 1) and also a copy (we have other ...
Posted in stolen Tiepolo in Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum Hannov | Comments Off
Monday, April 7th, 2008
In the coda to a long tug of war, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is bidding goodbye to the Euphronios krater, a 2,500-year-old vessel that has been a showpiece of its collection for more than three decades.
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
Rome's ancient monuments are so poorly guarded that tourists are taking away mementos of their visit to the Eternal City with impunity.
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
For those who are hoping that the British Museum may reconsider its position on the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles and adopt a position closer to the views of the United Nations and UNESCO and thereby contribute towards an acceptable solution to this decades-long dispute on the Parthenon Marbles, the statement issued by ...
Posted in Dr. Kwame Opoku writings about looted cultural objects | Comments Off
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
GRAND RAPIDS, MI.-The Grand Rapids Art Museum announced today that the Museum is returning two Italian panel paintings stolen from the Church of Saint Eustace in Campo di Giove, Abruzzo, Italy in 1902. The museum acquired the panels in 1947 without knowledge they had been stolen.
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Friday, April 4th, 2008
It is becoming increasingly clear that many of the European museum directors are not very convinced of the soundness of the arguments they present in favour of the retention of stolen African cultural objects by their museums. We have shown the illegality, illegitimacy and immorality of the continued holding of ...
Posted in Dr. Kwame Opoku writings about looted cultural objects | Comments Off
Friday, April 4th, 2008
We are reading almost on a daily basis some comment or reply by a European or an American museum director in defence of the holding of stolen cultural objects or objects illegally exported from other countries and now in their museums. However, these defences seem so patently weak or unconvincing ...
Posted in Dr. Kwame Opoku writings about looted cultural objects | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
The case of the Parthenon Marbles has been simmering away for decades. Every now and then an event occurs which prompts the Greeks to half-heartedly drag it forward onto the media front burner. For a few weeks everyone watches it let off steam until it gradually slides onto the back ...
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Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Seven historic Aboriginal paintings were found in bushland in the northern Australian city of Darwin, several hours after they were stolen from a Northern Territory art gallery, police said on Tuesday.
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Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Priceless' artworks stolen from NT museumPhotos and video:http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/01/2204203.htm
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