Museums’ Tangled Web—Part III

Here is one more suggestion for the websites of museums that want to give more than lip-service to the idea of operating with greater transparency. (My other suggestions for museum websites are here and here):
Museums should consider researching the provenance of antiquities in their collections and posting works with dubious histories on their websites. The rationale (as I discussed in a previous post) is the same as that for identifying possible Nazi loot: to facilitate legitimate claims by rightful owners.
The downside to this is that such research is extremely time-consuming and costly. American museums’ Nazi-loot research has only in rare instances resulted in restitutions. This imbalance between costs and benefits may help to explain why some museums may have slacked off in their Nazi-loot research, as charged in the recent report of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
If researching possible Nazi loot is onerous, the task of sifting through hundreds, if not thousands, of ambiguous antiquities is close to impossible. As I have previously stated, it might be more feasible to limit such an examination to important objects (which are, of course, precisely the works that museums least want to give away). There should also be a cutoff date: i.e., only works acquired after Apr. 12, 1983, the effective date of the U.S. Cultural Property Implementation Act, would be eligible for inclusion on the list.
One thing is certain: If a museum has already performed antiquities provenance research, the findings should be disclosed. The Getty Museum was reported by the Los Angeles Times to have recently conducted an review of its holdings, which revealed “that 350 Greek, Roman and Etruscan artifacts in its museum’s prized antiquities collection were purchased from dealers identified by foreign authorities as being suspected or convicted of dealing in looted artifacts.”
But when I asked Ron Hartwig, the Getty’s vice president for communications, for a list of those objects, he replied, “We certainly are not going to conduct our negotiations in or through the media.” If the Getty is sincere in its stated commitment to operate with more transparency, this is where it should start.