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INTRODUCTION
This article discusses some of the competing arguments concerning the looted and the faked, and the different perceptions of what legitimacy means for museums in the Western world. The reality facing art museums in the United States is that the era of large-scale collecting of antiquities has come to an end. Collecting unprovenanced art has been aggravated by the dependency of large museums on wealthy private donors and patrons, whose contributions often relate to their collecting interests, not to provenanced art. Now that museums have adopted rules that prevent the acquisition of many ancient objects still in private hands, following their often reluctant acceptance of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (henceforth, the 1970 UNESCO Convention), they are faced with a series of competing concerns in the acquisition of ancient art. However, the latest directive from the American Association of Museums (AAM)1allows a degree of latitude in determining whether this is adhered to or not. Problems created with relatively recent acquisitions continue to arise: Many of the principles agreed to by the attendees, in the document produced by the meeting, known as the Athens Charter, presaged recommendations made by later conservation charters.2In the case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the latest situation arose from the thousands of ceramic sherds left by the former curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum, Dietrich von Bothmer (1918-2009), many of which proved to have been looted.
One way to circumvent these new problems in the acquisition of art is to engage source countries in long-term loans, used to good effect by the Getty Museum, where the conservators and curators are now working extensively on these loaned artefacts, for example, with the recent and highly successful exhibition of bronzes from Pompeii,3helping to keep the conservation and curatorial staff gainfully employed for the next exhibition.
Countries such as Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Colombia on the other hand might have to recognize that national ownership laws following the adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, have often succeeded in driving the trade in art objects further into the clandestine realms,...