The Association of Art Museum Directors has voted to strengthen rules requiring museums to publish pictures and information about antiquities they have acquired that might be subject to questions of looting.
In 2008 the group wrote sweeping guidelines advising museums that they “normally should not†acquire a work unless solid proof exists that the object was, prior to 1970, outside the country where it was discovered in modern times, or was legally exported from that country after 1970.
That is the year Unesco ratified a landmark convention prohibiting traffic in illicit antiquities, and it has become a widely accepted cutoff for collecting. Objects that appear on the market without documentation leading back that far are much more likely to have been stolen or illegally dug up and smuggled out of their countries.
Maxwell Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art and the chairman of the directors’ association’s task force on archaeological material and ancient art, said the change, made at the association’s meetings this week in Kansas City, Mo., makes the publication rule “really into a sunshine law now.â€
“It gets the information out there, and if there are claimants then they can come forward,†he said.
But some cultural property experts who have questioned museum practices in the past warned that while the publication requireme! nt is a positive step, it still might not be enough to discourage some museums who have skirted the 1970 rule since it was put in place.
“What I want to see is the museums not acquiring these things in the first place,†said Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law at DePaul University in Chicago. “It remains to be seen how they enforce that part.â€
