What’s an antiquities-collecting American museum to do?
In one important respect, the American Association of Museums’ Standards Regarding Archaeological Material and Ancient Art, issued yesterday, substantially differences from the standards announced on June 4 by the Association of Art Museum Directors. This may confuse the issue for U.S. institutions trying to do the right thing.
Like AAMD, AAM wants museums to “require documentation that the object was out of its probable country
of modern discovery by Nov. 17, 1970,” the date of the UNESCO
Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit
Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
But while AAMD seems to allow for acquisition of objects known to be out of their source countries by Nov. 1970, no matter how they originally left those countries, AAM goes much further, saying that “museums should not acquire any object that, to the knowledge of the museum, has been illegally exported from its country of modern discovery or the country where it was last legally owned” (even if that illegal export occurred before 1970). AAM acknowledges in its statement that this sweeping recommendation goes “beyond the requirements of U.S. law.”
Interestingly, most of AAM’s 10-member Task Force on Cultural Property came from art museums, including: Graham Beal, director of Detroit Institute of Art; Sharon Cott, secretary and general counsel of the Metropolitan Museum; Gail Harrity, interim CEO of the Philadelphia Museum; Gary Vikan, CEO and director of the Walters Art Museum, among others.
Did they realize what they were saying? Presumably a prominent museum lawyer like Cott must have understood the full import of this divergence in wording.