Major U.S. Museums Have a Ban Chiang Problem

While I raided the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s website, the indispensable Jori Finkel was engaged in a far more sweeping raid, excavating Ban Chiang objects from websites of museums around the country. Although they likely didn’t acquire these pieces through the particular sources who are now subject to federal investigation, major museums around the country appear to have a Ban Chiang problem.
In an article (accompanied by a 11-object slideshow) for next Sunday’s NY Times “Arts & Leisure” section, online now, Finkel writes:
In essence, the paperwork [for recent federal raids on four California museums] states, antiquities that left Thailand after 1961, when the country enacted its antiquities law, could be considered stolen under American law. And since Ban Chiang material was not excavated until well after that date, practically all Ban Chiang material in the United States could qualify.
Among the many American museums with Ban Chiang artifacts are the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. And that roster includes only institutions that have published highlights of their collections online.
“I believe that virtually every big American art museum that collects Asian art has some Ban Chiang material,” said Forrest McGill, chief curator at the Asian Art Museum.
McGill also commented that “it’s not as easy as you would think to be up to date and conversant with different countries’ laws and to know which foreign laws the U.S. is committed to enforcing and which not.”
Now here’s a project where the Association of Art Museum Directors could have a timely and beneficial influence: Commission an updated edition of Bonnie Burnham‘s out-of-print The Protection of Cultural Property: Handbook of National Legislations (1974), which included the relevant Thai laws. Then ignorance of foreign laws will be no excuse.
I think the Ban Chiang can of worms my have an impact far more significant than the relatively unimportant objects themselves. It shows that repatriation has legs: The problem won’t go away with the return of a few stellar objects to Western European countries.