Responses to LA Times Op-Ed, “Make Art Loans, Not War”

My LA Times Op-Ed piece yesterday about cultural property issues elicited some thoughtful responses:
—A prominent curator at a major museum (not the Metropolitan or the Getty) brought the elephant into the room:
What would happen if Greece were to move to claim the Euphronios Krater from Italy, on the potentially logical basis that it was made in Greece and emotionally and morally belongs in Greece???
Let’s even not go there. I doubt that Greece wants to mess with Italy. The source countries want to fight the common enemy—the antiquities-importing countries.
—David Gill, in his Looting Matters blog, says this in reaction to my Op-Ed:
Returns [of antiquities] from North America have not been about objects derived from scientific excavations. They are objects that have surfaced on the antiquities market without a documented history. “Universal museums” have a place, but not at the expense of destroying unrecorded archaeological sites. And that is what lies at the heart of the issue about the recent returns to Italy. Wherever the Sarpedon krater resides, we will never known its precise last resting place and the complete archaeological assemblage.
So these returns are symbolic of unethical curatorial behaviour that was indifferent to the material and intellectual consequences.
I think “symbolism” is, indeed, a big factor in these transfers. I hope we can eventually move beyond the symbolic to the synergistic.
—Derek Fincham in his Illicit Cultural Property blog says this of my Op-Ed:
It’s a well written piece, but it strikes me as a compilation of a lot of other scholarship. I suppose it’s a journalist’s prerogative to take the work of scholars and researchers and reconfigure it in a more digestible (i.e. better written) form, but it does strike me as a bit unfair that she gets to take credit for some ideas which have been persuasively and compellingly articulated elsewhere.
He goes on to cite the arguments set forth by John Merryman and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others. I think this is a case of “great minds think (somewhat) alike, although I have differences with both of these thinkers.
Fincham likes the notion of “citizen-archaeologists” and has himself written favorably here about that partial remedy to illicit digs.
We need more of this—creative thinking, not contentious grandstanding.