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.

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.