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.”