Making creations property does not promote creation: fashion this time

It’s difficult in this era in which “property” is considered the source of liberty for people to get their heads around the idea that treating the products of creativity as part of a “cultural commons” is in fact more conducive to creativity and innovation than is strict copyright protection. Here’s some strong evidence of exactly that:

There is no copyright protection afforded to fashion designs. As a result copying is a matter of course in fashion design. You don’t exactly see a dearth of creativity and innovation in fashion design, do you?  In the video below, Johanna Blakely expands on this point. Of course, fashion designers are seeking federal legislation extending copyright protection to their designs. I hate it when ideology (here, that without the worship of “property” our way of life is doomed) trumps reality.

Property is not always the foundation of liberty: fashion and copyright.

It’s difficult in this era in which “property” is considered the source of liberty for people to get their heads around the idea that treating the products of creativity as part of a “cultural commons” is in fact more conducive to creativity and innovation than is strict copyright protection. Here’s some strong evidence of exactly that:

There is no copyright protection afforded to fashion designs. As a result copying is a matter of course in fashion design. You don’t exactly see a dearth of creativity and innovation in fashion design, do you?  Here, Johanna Blakely expands on this point:

And yet, of course, fashion designers are seeking federal legislation extending copyright protection to their designs. I hate it when ideology (here, that without the worship of “property” our way of life is doomed) trumps reality.

Ideas, originality, and copyright. Coldplay accused of infringement again.

One of these days we’ll learn what the KLF long ago tried to teach us about pop music: “Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality.”

Let’s get a basic point straight: copyright does not protect an idea. As the U.S. Copyright Office puts it: “Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section ‘What Works Are Protected.’”

So it may be true, as Consequence of Sound reports, that “just days after settling with Joe Satriani over plagiarism allegations, [Coldplay] is now being accused of copyright violations by UK musician Andy J. Gallagher for borrowing from Gallagher’s “Something Else” video with their video for ‘Strawberry Swing.’” But being accused of copyright violations and having those accusations deemed worthy of anything other than contempt are two entirely different things. As the Guardian explains, “there’s no doubt that [Gallagher's] and Coldplay’s music videos offer ‘an awful lot of similarities’. Or rather, one big similarity: they both show people interacting with animated chalk-boards.” And it may even be true that, as Gallagher complains, it seems “less than fair that [Coldplay's] video will win numerous awards and receive industry praise when [Gallagher's] director Owen Trevor had the idea the year before.”

But the answer is: so what? You cannot copyright the idea of a video involving people interacting with animated chalk-boards. As the producers of Coldplay’s video point out (pdf), the idea was hardly original with Gallagher. Nor do they claim originality; rather, they claim to have worked hard at making the Coldplay video:

We’re aware of those videos, and I don’t wish to denigrate them, but we thought there was more mileage in the technique than they had explored. We never claim to be original, just rigorous. So we wrote a story we thought would be entertaining and went about making it. It was a lot of hard work.

The specific video they produced may be original, but it hardly precludes anyone else from making videos involving people interacting with animated chalk boards.

Faking it in Amsterdam

In “Bamboozling Ourselves,” Errol Morris asks, “Why do people believe in imaginary returns, frauds and fakes? Bernard Madoff, A.I.G. , W.M.D.’s … How did this happen? Do we believe things because it is in our self-interest? Or is it because we can be manipulated by others? And, if so, under what circumstances?”

To explore these questions, Morris writes about Han van Meegeren, “arguably the most successful art forger of all time.” Van Meegeren, “a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring – essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis.” Van Meegeren, however, claimed he had forged the Vermeer, as well as several others. As Morris concludes:

Han van Meegeren forged 11 Vermeers, a Frans Hals, a couple of de Hoochs and a Terborch. But . . . Van Meegeren’s greatest forgery was not any of his paintings. It was his biography. It was his success in convincing Joseph Piller, the Jewish agent of the Dutch Resistance who arrested him, and eventually the rest of the world that he was a folk-hero – a gifted artist who conned Göring – not a Nazi-sympathizer or collaborator. As such, forgery is similar to sleight of hand. You misdirect attention, emphasize certain details and suppress others. 

To catch a thief . . . crowdsourcing?

BostonHerald.com’s Blog is using “crowdsourcing” in an effort to solve the 1990 theft of 13 paintings and other artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Now, the blog reports, a “twitter.com user named GardnerTheft has been posting links to our articles and others.  Check out the info-tweets at twitter.com’s web site (search: GardnerTheft).  With just a click you’ll see frequently updated news, insights, ideas and blog posts.”

As the Boston Herald Blog explains, its effort to capture the collective effort of interested internet users was inspired by the success of an earlier online effort in connection with the case.

When medical illustrator Nicole C. Wolf produced her digital paintings to update the renderings of the two Gardner thieves, the public got the best images of the robbers ever produced.  Wolf’s work, done in anonymous collaboration with one of the Gardner guards on duty during the theft, has led to dozens of new leads for the museum’s investigator, Anthony M. Amore.

With those tips in mind, it’s time to provide more information about the two thieves’ physical descriptions. Each detail is aimed at jarring the memories of people who know the behavior patterns of many in the criminal underworld.

In 2005, the Boston Globe ran its own detailed review of what was known about the Gardner art heist, summing up the events as follows:

Museum officials say they take heart in the fact that some masterworks stolen from other museums have surfaced after many years. But like the investigators, the museum’s leaders are baffled by how little progress has been made since thieves entered the museum in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, as St. Patrick’s Day festivities in the city wound down.

They are baffled especially because the thieves, though bold and clever, were hardly meticulous professionals. They took no great pains to avoid being seen, nor were they careful to avoid damaging the masterpieces they were stealing.

They posed as Boston police officers, and even though they flashed badges and wore insignias, their long coats were not part of any official uniform. The Globe located several passersby who remember seeing them sitting quietly in a red hatchback near the museum’s side entrance, perhaps waiting for a St. Patrick’s Day party in a nearby apartment building to break up before making their move. And their disguises left their faces uncovered, giving the guards a good look at them. 

Once inside, the thieves ripped a Vermeer, three Rembrandts — including his only seascape — five Degas drawings, and a Manet from their wall placements, smashing them out of their frames and leaving shards of glass and remnants of canvas behind. The thieves took some of the museum’s greatest treasures but left behind some even more valuable objects.

When they were done for the night, they made two trips to their car with the loot. Then they vanished.

Where the paintings were, empty frames now fill the museum’s walls.

Online markets may be doing more to reduce the looting of antiquities than the always feuding museum directors.

Archaeology reports on the unforeseen consequences of “the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artifacts.” The looting of archaeological sites has always been a problem, but before the internet reduced the costs of showing, selling, and transporting the loot, archaeologists “could at least take some comfort that [the market in illegal artifacts] was largely confined to either high-end dealers on one end of the economic spectrum or rural flea markets on the other.” Thus, the new technology raised the specter the democratization of trafficking and, as a result, widespread looting. “This seemed a logical outcome of a system in which anyone could open up an eBay site and sell artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. We feared that an unorganized but massive looting campaign was about to begin, with everything from potsherds to pieces of the Great Wall on the auction block for a few dollars.”

But instead, looting has diminished. Why? “The short answer is that many of the primary ‘producers’ of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities.”

The economics of these transactions are quite simple. Because the eBay phenomenon has substantially reduced total costs by eliminating middlemen, brick-and-mortar stores, high-priced dealers, and other marginal expenses, the local eBayers and craftsmen can make more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing. It is true that many former and potential looters lack the skills to make their own artifacts. But the value of their illicit digging decreases every time someone buys a “genuine” Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling. In other words, because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object would cost, the value of the real artifacts has gone down as well, making old-fashioned looting less lucrative. The value of real antiquities is also impacted by the increased risk that the object for sale is a fake. The likelihood of reselling an authentic artifact for more money is diminished each year as more fakes are produced.

Another economic factor–risk of arrest–is also removed by eBay fakes, since you can’t be arrested for importing forgeries. Should you import what you think is an illegal antiquity but it turns out to be a fake, you run little risk of prosecution. The risk from lawsuits or criminal charges is effectively removed from the sale of antiquities when they are not really antiquities, a fact that reduces the cost and risk to both buyer and seller.

Transport cost is also dramatically reduced by commerce on the Web. One vendor on eBay advertises a Greek marble head dated to around 300 B.C. For this “rare artifact,” the shipping costs from Cyprus are a whopping $35 to anywhere in the United States. This is a far cry from the old days when a real illegal antiquity had to be couriered by a specialist who not only knew how to care for the piece, but how to doctor it up to avoid being arrested at customs. The same is true for objects from just about every well-known ancient culture in the world. Chinese, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Peruvian, and Mexican workshops are now producing fakes at a frenetic pace.

I have written previously of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over our Ancient Heritage and the ongoing debate over the ownership of antiquities, particularly those antiquities housed far from their origins in the museums of the Western powers. Cuno has published another volume addressing the issues, Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Aniquities, a collection of essays by other art historians arguing in favor of housing these treasures in “Encyclopedic Museums” charged with the stewardship on behalf of all of humankind. Cuno would argue that, for example, artifacts produced by the Hittites belong no more to the Turks, in whose territory those artifacts are found, than they do to the entirety of humanity.

Hugh Eakin reviews both of Cuno’s books, discussing many of the issues I raised in my earlier post. But he also makes the important point that recent moves by U.S. museum directors make many of these difficult questions  far less important as a practical matter, despite the passions inevitable in the conflict between those who claim to be defending their national heritage against those who claim to stand up for the sanctity of art and its preservation.

Last year “the directors of the leading art museums of the United States agreed to limit their acquisitions of antiquities to works that have left their “country of probable modern discovery” before 1970, or that were exported legally after that date.” Eakins points out the importance of this agreement:

[I]n choosing 1970 as a cutoff date-the symbolic year of a UNESCO convention against the illicit circulation of material deemed by particular nations to be their cultural property-the museums have eliminated the possibility of acquiring most of the ancient art available for sale today. In effect, the museum directors have made it clear that, for American museums, collecting antiquities has largely come to an end; and with it the system of private collectors and dealers that has sustained it since the late nineteenth century. (emphasis added)

There are several implications to the end of large-scale collecting of antiquities by U.S. museums. First, many antiquities (most likely looted) are in the hands of wealthy private collectors, precisely the patrons on whom major museums depend for donations. “Now that museums have adopted rules that prevent the acquisition of many ancient objects still in private hands, they must find other ways of retaining that support.”

In addition, countries that have asserted ownership over any art found within their borders have to face the failures of those laws, which primarily have worked to drive the trade in looted antiquities even further underground.

And now we know too that the trade in antiquities is being squeezed by the trade in fakes.

Germany: we’ll still return art stolen by the Nazis.

In connection with yesterday’s post regarding art looted by the Nazis, the Art Law Blog announces “that Germany has rejected Sir Norman Rosenthal’s call for an end to Nazi restitution cases.”

Is it time to get on from where we are and stop returning art stolen by the Nazis to the heirs of its original owners?

My friend and former student John Kelley — who now is Compliance Manager for Baystate Health but has had extensive experience in the art market — points me to an article in the German magazine Spiegel Online, which discusses British art connoisseur Sir Norman Rosenthal’s call for an end to the return of artworks looted by the Nazis to the heirs of the original owners. Although it was not until the late 1990’s that an international consensus was reached that artworks should be restored to the families of the people from whom the Nazis had stolen them, since then, according to the article, the idea has ” seemed undisputed”; after all, “[w]ho would challenge the legitimacy of the claims of the heirs of Nazi victims to their family property?”

But, as the article points out, Museums have at times disputed their obligation to return such works on the grounds that “they acquired the works in question legally and in good faith.” Individual owners have made the same argument. More recently, though, at least one prominent German member of the art world has argued that the practice of returning the art to the families of the original owners should stop because the families have been motivated by money, not by their love of the artworks:

The best-known opponent of restitution in Germany is Bernd Schultz, 67, the director of the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach. In a speech at the Chancellery two years ago, Schultz accused the heirs of having a purely financial interest in looted art: “They say Holocaust, but they mean money.” He has never retracted the statement.

That argument seems on its face, to me, a bit disingenuous. The works that are fought over, of course, are works that are worth an enormous amount of money. If they weren’t, the issue would not be the huge one it’s been. Why shouldn’t a family who, but for the Nazis, would have had a work of art or the right to dispose of it as they had seen fit not have a better claim to it than someone who succeeded to the claim of someone who succeeded to the claim of the original thieves and murderers?

But Sir Norman’s argument is different: “[h]is motives include the desire for reconciliation” and the desire to settle issues that leave current owners who have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of their ownership rights subject to claims. It does indeed seem that at some point the sheer passage of time ought to settle one’s rights. But have we reached that point? And are we really at a point at which the vast majority of current owners have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of their rights?

The fact Sir Norman, who is himself the child of survivors and has no desire to downplay the importance of Nazi crimes, may well mean where getting closer to the day when, in his words, we must get on from where we are and “[w]e can no longer wipe history clean.”

Should museums return antiquities to their countries of origin?

The headline on Stephen Litt’s piece in yesterday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Analysis: Museums often pay the price for looted antiquities,” is misleading.  As Litt explains, it is more the exception than the rule that museums return antiquities to the countries from which those pieces have been looted.  Why?  “[I]f an object was looted, there will be no record of its existence. Many museums, including Cleveland’s, have collected and shown ancient works whose exact origins remain unknown.”

Nonetheless, the Cleveland Museum of Art recently agreed to send 14 objects back to Italy, where they’d been illegally dug up, cleaned, and restored before being put up for sale on a market that eventually lands them in museums around the world.  Litt explains that this agreement is part of a new wave of scrutiny museums are exercising over their collections.  Nonetheless, many consider the museums complicit in activities that are both illegal and immoral.  Cases such as the one involving the Cleveland Museum are the easy ones because there was clear proof the pieces were looted, not just an absence of documentation about where the pieces came from:

To experts such as Ricardo Elia, a Boston University archaeology professor and a close observer of the antiquities trade, such lack of documentation is proof that an object was looted. He estimated that as much as 90 percent of the antiquities purchased in recent decades by American museums are the product of looting.

But Timothy Rub, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, said that lack of exculpatory evidence about an artwork’s origins doesn’t prove a wrongdoing was committed — or that the work should be relinquished on demand.

“If I’ve inherited as director custody of an object that doesn’t have a provenance before a certain date and somebody says, ‘It’s ours, give it back,’ that’s a pretty tough thing,” he said. “I’ve got to ask you to make a case.”

The difficulty of arguing such cases makes it unlikely that the recent wave of repatriations to Italy will lead to a vast purge of artworks from American museums.

Instead, if the negotiations show anything, it’s that museums, including Cleveland’s, are willing to part with antiquities only when foreign governments provide persuasive evidence connecting the works to recent criminal wrongdoing.

That’s a difficult threshold to reach, and it’s rare. The art bust in Switzerland, for example, documented the precise trail taken by specific objects from the looters who dug them up to the middlemen who cleaned and restored them, provided them with phony ownership histories and put them on the market.

“You may not see another case this dramatic for 20 or 30 years,” Elia said. “They found bags of Polaroid photographs and information from Hecht’s diaries.”

As I wrote in September in connection with the arguments going on over whether pieces like the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone should be returned to Greece and Egypt, Litt points out that antiquities are big, and illegal business, dominated by organized crime.

Foreign law, the Federalist Society’s view that the U.S. is better than the rest of the world, and censhorship

I now have a bit better idea of where the opposition to citation to foreign law (discussed in my last two posts) comes from.  It’s the belief that the U.S. is so exceptional there’s no point in looking to the “socialist constitutional courts of Europe.”  That’s what Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern and co-founder of the Federalist Society writes in the September 20 New York Times:

Those of us concerned about citation of foreign law — your article quotes me as one of them — believe in something called American exceptionalism, which holds that the United States is a beacon of liberty, democracy and equality of opportunity to the rest of the world. We think that it is a good thing that constitutional liberties like freedom of speech and of the press are protected more vigorously in the United States than in any foreign country. . . .

The country that saved Europe from tyranny and destruction in the 20th century and that is now saving it again from the threat of terrorist extremism and Russian tyranny needs no lessons from the socialist constitutional courts of Europe on what liberty consists of.

I think that considering the U.S. so exceptional it has no need to even consider the views of foreign courts xenophobic is, after all, not off base.  The first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Marshall, himself stated that the opinions of British courts “are entitled to that respect which is due to the opinions of wise men who have maturely studied the subject they decide.”

Merely dismissing the decisions Western European countries have reached on profound legal and moral issues (including the execution of juveniles) as the decisions of “socialists” unworthy of even being considered by us “exceptional Americans” is not argument — it’s name calling and egocentricity.  I don’t see what the difference is between law review articles, British courts, or any other source that might be considered the opinion of  wise people who have maturely studied the subject they are opining on.  Foreign court decisions may be politicized, but of course U.S. court decisions, laws, and regulations are exceedingly political too: it’s all politics, whether in the foreign courts, the law reviews, or the U.S. Supreme Court.  By that I don’t mean to be a cynic or a hard core Legal Realist — rather, I mean it’s all argument.  If one is persuaded that the fact the U.S. was the only western industrialized nation that permitted the execution of juveniles made doing so “cruel and unusual,” then why should one not be permitted to consider that fact?  Justice O’Connor explained why she wasn’t convinced by that fact, but she explained why with counter-argument, not by suggesting the argument was illegitimate.

Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts all are or have been members of the Federalist Society, of which Professor Calabresi (a former student of Scalia) was a co-founder.  I presume, therefore, that Calabresi speaks for them when he states that the U.S. is just too exceptional (and other countries too “socialist”) to even allow the courts to look at other countries’ laws in determining what U.S. law is or should be.

It is their views I consider un-American.  Their views suggest the courts should be censored.  It is one thing, as I’ve written, to not be persuaded by the views of other countries.  It is censorship, however, to suggest judges cannot even consider those views.  Who better represents the source of American Jurisprudence than John Marshall?  Are no jurists from other countries wise men who have maturely studied the subjects they decide?  And if we forbid reference to foreign law, why not forbid reference to law review articles, which, after all, generally advance the idiosyncratic views of their authors and rarely have any influence whatsoever on an actual lawmaking?

The sooner we get over “American Exceptionalism” and realize we learn more and make better decisions the more we consider the opinions of other wise men who have studied the same subjects we are studying, the sooner we’ll be better off.

But one more word on the Federalist Society.  If you pay attention, its members spout an unerring common line on issues they’ve identified as important.  They sometimes remind me in their methods of organization of Bolsheviks, who went out into the world with their marching orders to spread the Soviet Communist Party’s word.  Professor Calabresi in his letter to September 20th’s Times makes clear the Federalist Society leadership’s view on whether U.S. Courts should even be allowed to refer to foreign law.  Is it any wonder that in the Times article provoking Calabresi’s letter quoted Scalia, Roberts, and Alito in ways entirely consistent with Calabresi’s and the Federalist Society’s views?

Where should art be, and how does it often get where it is?

Ingrid D. Rowland in the New Republic writes a terrific review and critique of Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage, by James Cuno. Cuno’s publisher describes the book like this:

Whether antiquities should be returned to the countries where they were found is one of the most urgent and controversial issues in the art world today, and it has pitted museums, private collectors, and dealers against source countries, archaeologists, and academics. Maintaining that the acquisition of undocumented antiquities by museums encourages the looting of archaeological sites, countries such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and China have claimed ancient artifacts as state property, called for their return from museums around the world, and passed laws against their future export. But in Who Owns Antiquity?, one of the world’s leading museum directors vigorously challenges this nationalistic position, arguing that it is damaging and often disingenuous. . . . The first extended defense of the side of museums in the struggle over antiquities, Who Owns Antiquity? is sure to be as important as it is controversial.

As Rowland explains in her review, “Noting that modern laws about the import and export of antiquities did not exist when Napoleonic troops discovered the Rosetta Stone, Cuno suggests that under modern conditions British soldiers might not have been able to . . . spirit it away to the British Museum, with the result that Jean-François Champillon might not have been able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic script. The point of this exercise . . . is to demonstrate a larger point, which is that antiquities laws as currently drawn impoverish rather than enrich the global level of culture.” In addition, Cuno argues that nations who retain and reclaim their archaeological heritage are advancing harmful nationalistic agendas, not the preservation of cultural artifacts with global relevance:

The emotional, “national cultural identity” card played by some proponents of nationalist retentionist cultural property laws is really a strategic, political card. National museums are important instruments in the formation of nationalist narratives; they are used to tell the story of a nation’s past and confirm its present importance. That may be true of national museums, but it is not true of encyclopedic museums, those whose collections comprise representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy.

Rowland will have none of it. First, she points out that the “encyclopedic museums” whose interests Cuno is advancing are themselves the products of nationalism. As she puts it, “[t]he founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago [where Cuno is museum director] imperiously took it for granted that those cities belonged to a United States of America that stood as beacon to the world–the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is either naive or tendentious to argue that those institutions were founded instead to serve some great multicultural vision of human fraternity.” She also goes to some length to counter Cuno’s criticisms of Italy, the source of so much of the looted art spread through museums throughout empires past and present.

Rowland also points out that, while the “encyclopedic museums” might have preserved some of the antiquities they obtained over the years, they have also taken away a lot:

It is a different thing to see the ancient statue called the Spinario right there in Rome where Pope Sixtus put it in 1471, where many of the great artists of the Renaissance drew it, where Winckelmann and Goethe saw it, than it is to see an ancient bronze in the Met. It is one thing to stand in the theatre of Ephesus, right there where the riot broke out among the silversmiths who made votive trinkets for the Temple of Artemis, who feared the impact that a wandering preacher named Paul of Tarsus might have on their business–and it is quite another matter to see a column from that temple in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles have been spared the foul air of modern Athens, but they were not spared a good British scrub down with soap and water when they arrived in the early nineteenth century, and neither fate has been kind to the polished surface of the Parthenon’s sculpture.

With respect to moveable antiquities, Rowland emphasizes that their removal from their geographic origins robs their audience of an appreciation for their true significance. We see Greek pottery in the Metropolitan Museum, for example, without realizing it came from Italy and reflects the market demands of the ancient Etruscan culture that imported it as much as it does the culture of the Greek exporters. She also wonders why Cuno focuses on the value of one donor’s contributions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art while ignoring that donor’s landmark agreements to return some of her collection to Italy. Rowland, in short, reads Cuno’s book “as a brief for outright possession–that we own antiquity as much as the Italians, Greeks, Chinese, and Iraqis do, and therefore we have an equal right to their archaeological wealth–rather than as some abstract idea of respect for a shared human cultural tradition.”

Rowland also has her own problems with the system that passes antiquities to “encyclopedic museums,” including the fact it is dominated by organized crime.  She also questions whether nationalism is such a bad thing. It has allowed Italy to modernize and become the home of the best experts on antiquities from the Italian peninsula. And with respect to Egypt, she writes, with some sharpness:

[A] growing number of modern Egyptians are no longer illiterate fellahin. The new Library of Alexandria stands across the street from the University of Alexandria, with its 140,000 students; its alumni include the Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, now at Caltech and one of the most imaginative chemists working today. Zahi Hawass may be a baron in his position as head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, but he serves notice to the barons who dwell in the world’s encyclopedic museums that they must now take the bright, eager young people of Egypt into account.

Rowland acknowledges that Cuno represents a new generation of museum directors who improve significantly on their predecessors’ arrogant destructiveness. But she begs for squarely addressing the problems posed by “the hubris, greed, and lust for possession that beautiful things have always exerted on our own breed of gregarious primate.”

She’s certainly right about the greed and lust for possession of beautiful things. The London TimesOnline reports that”[a]rt theft is big business. The FBI estimates that it is a global industry worth $6 billion (£3.3 billion) a year. In France it is reckoned the fourth most lucrative criminal activity.” Reviewing Stolen: The Gallery of Missing Masterpieces, by Jonathan Webb and Julian Radcliffe, Rachel Campbell-Johnston explains:

The art world is a rarefied place. Discretion is prized. Dealers prefer not to discuss client lists. Collectors can be very secretive. On top of that, art works are usually whisked out of the country a few days after being stolen. Often they will not emerge again for years. When they do they may well be in the hands of a bona fide person. . . .

Art theft, as Stolen makes clear, is frequently connected with the crimes with which it competes for police attention. . . . Criminals in Dublin, for instance, pulling off a spectacular heist in a country estate, corralled Rubens, Vermeer and Goya into providing venture capital for a drug-dealing ring. In Buenos Aires at the time of the Falklands conflict, Cézanne helped a brutal dictatorship to pull off an illicit arms deal.

To get a sense of what’s been lost, you can read the Guardian’s descriptions of the greatest art you’ll never see.

Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

Distributing the Art of a Dead Thief (and matters of attribution)

The death of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, born Melvyn Kohn, is rife with questions of law and art. Mr. Kohn, it was discovered, was a fraud, neither once married to French nobility, educated at Groton or Harvard, nor living on Fifth Avenue.

And while his small apartment on East 72^nd Street was full of art, he appears to have stolen most of it. The New York County Public Administrator’s Office, which handles the estates of people who die without wills, put the art up for auction through Christie’s and another auction house. But it was only after the buyer of one of the pieces looked into it’s provenance that he discovered it had been stolen. Experts at Christie’s soon discovered several other of the pieces had been stolen.

Mr. Kohn apparently really did own a few of his pieces; the receipts were found in his apartment. But there are still 105 pieces unaccounted for. If no one comes forward to claim them, they will be auctioned and the proceeds will go to Mr. Kohn’s heirs, several of whom seem to have turned up.

So what has the FBI done? Just what any fifteen year old would in 2008: posted a website containing images of all the contested works, hoping their true owners will turn up.

Needless to say, however, return of the works to their rightful owners will be no easy task. The FBI agent in charge of the case described the conversations with potential leads as discussions of “prehistoric history.” And then, of course, there’s that old bugaboo: authenticity. The agent said of a drawing listed in the collection as a Corot: “Well, you know what they say about Corot, don’t you? He did 500 pictures and there are 2,0000 of them in the United States.”

I’m sure this isn’t one of the paintings that ended up in Kohn’s collection: