Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 09:18:47 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Ancient Crash, Epic Wave
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/14/healthscience/web.1114meteor.php?page=1

 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

L O O T - Sharon Waxman

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: L O O T - Sharon Waxman  (Read 367 times)
0 Members and 36 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« on: December 13, 2008, 08:39:08 am »









 
                                                Sharon Waxman, On The Trail Of "Loot"






by David Beard,
Boston.com Staff
December 2, 2008

Sharon Waxman, a former Washington Post and New York Times culture reporter, appears in Cambridge on Wednesday to speak about "Loot'' (Times Books), her account of the US and European plunder of Third World antiquities -- and the return home for some of the art. She spoke from her home in Los Angeles.

Q: Your last book, "Rebels on the Backlot,'' was about six Hollywood bad boy film directors of the 1990s. Could "Loot" be any more different?

A: I wasn’t trying to choose a subject that was half a globe away from my last book, but it did turn out that "Loot" took me back into foreign correspondent territory, where I started my career. I ended up going to eight countries to report this book, which was both incredibly fun and deeply exhausting. But totally rewarding.

Q: After this art book, to paraphrase a quote about your town and movies, didn’t you feel you’d never have lunch in this museum again?

A: Touche. I got real pushback from the J. Paul Getty museum, which was somewhat understandable, since I tell a number of embarrassing episodes in the museum’s not very distant past. But the other museums, including the Metropolitan in New York, The British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, have not put my picture by the guardpost -- as far as I know.

Q: It would be easy to brand a few of the figures in your book as cultural pirates, remnants of an age when tourists plundered Roman ruins. Yet you offer a more nuanced view. Can you elaborate?

A: Sure. The reality of the creation of the great, universal museums of the West is not pretty. The collections were largely based on plunder, or at least appropriation of artifacts taken without the permission of the local populace for the glory of the French or British empires, for example. At the same time, these museums have served – and I’m stating the obvious – an incredibly important role in preserving ancient cultures where they may otherwise have been destroyed. And there is an undeniable value in the educational role they play, in scholarship, in elevating the civil life of our society. But the question is, have they done so at the cost of someone else’s cultural identity?

Q: I notice Boston doesn’t escape your scrutiny.

A: The Museum of Fine Arts is in the crosshairs of Egypt at the moment, because the chief archeologist of that country, Zahi Hawass, has demanded the loan of the bust of Prince Ankhaf, the architect of one of the great pyramids. Boston has turned him down on the basis of its fragile condition, a position that Hawass rejects. He has threatened to ban further loans to Boston and to take other punitive measures. It should be noted that Ankhaf was acquired legally, but it’s this kind of perceived arrogance (of museums) that makes source countries angry and resentful.

Q: Can you understand how curators could covet a piece of art? Was there a piece you ever yearned for?

A: My childhood is really framed by visits to the Museum of Art in Cleveland, which incidentally just returned a number of artifacts to Italy. One of Rodin’s Thinkers sits outside that museum, and nearly every Cleveland child including me knows it well. But as an adult the artifact I would wonder at for hours is probably the gold Macedonian wreath that used to be at the Getty, which is in “Loot.” It is believed to have belonged to the father of Alexander the Great, and is in pristine condition, made of thousands of tiny gold leaves. It was looted, and sent back to Greece in 2007, where I visited it with nostalgia during the reporting of the book. I can definitely understand how the drive to possess beautiful objects can overwhelm good sense or better angels.

Waxman appears at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Cambridge Forum at First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #1 on: December 13, 2008, 08:40:34 am »

















                                         Karl E. Meyer on Sharon Waxman’s ‘Loot’
 





Posted on Oct 24, 2008
 By Karl E. Meyer

I devoured “Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World” with particular zest, having published in 1973 an earlier account of the same cultural underworld, “The Plundered Past.” A seasoned reporter with an Oxford degree in Middle East studies, Sharon Waxman has updated and surpassed my explorations, in part because the outcry over the illicit traffic has reached fever pitch, provoking voluble, angry and indiscreet utterances from curators, collectors, dealers and a new breed of watchdogs, viz.:

“You end up thinking we’re all a bunch of looters, thieves, exploiters, that we’re some kind of criminals … but who would be interested in Greek sculpture if it were all in Greece? These pieces are great because they’re in the Louvre.” So protests Aggy Leroule, the Louvre’s press attaché, and so complain directors, trustees and publicists at the many great temples of art and archaeology. Yet there are also dissidents, an unlikely example being Thomas Hoving, once the acquisition-obsessed director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now a fallen Lucifer who recalls, almost with relish, his prevarications past.

“Don’t be taken in,” he comments to Waxman. “ ... It’s the old nineteenth-century ‘encyclopedic museum’ specious argumentation. It’s generally hogwash. I used to talk about it all the time when I was trying to finish a wing. It has nothing to do with reality, it’s just a phase of Westernization.” Actually, he goes on, in the 1950s and ’60s, European museums “didn’t much care about what they had.” Half of their collections were locked in storage, and “if you tried to see something on a scholarly basis, it took seven weeks.” So why shouldn’t American museums snap up antiquities, no matter how shady their provenance? “You did it because you wanted to boost your collection with beautiful things—and screw it. If you were a collecting curator back in the ’60s, of course you knew where it came from. This stuff is not found in Malibu.”

Hoving joined the Met in 1959 and reigned as director from 1966 until his forced resignation in 1977. Even as a novice curator, he recalls spending $850,000 a year on “stuff to be smuggled out of every country, mostly into Switzerland.” His superiors rationalized their complicity in this traffic in the belief that “we were saving something and putting it on view for an enormously wider audience. And we’d publish it. We thought we were adding to our collection, increasing our ego, getting promoted, and saving the world.” His signature coup was the purchase in 1972 of a peerless Greek vase, said to be from an old private collection, for a record $1 million. In truth, the calyx krater, painted and signed by Euphronios, was pillaged in Italy from an Etruscan tomb, sold to an expatriate American dealer of shady repute, spirited to Switzerland, secretly offered to the Met, flown to New York for its celebratory debut, and—following decades of charges and denials—finally returned to Italy in 2008 after each link in this chain had been conclusively established.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2008, 08:41:54 am »









The first merit of Waxman’s book, the best on its subject, is her verbatim account of conversations with everybody who matters in the antiquities trade. This is especially true of her candid exchanges with the staffs and their overlords at the Louvre, the Met, the British Museum and the mega-endowed (circa $6 billion) J. Paul Getty Museum. As revealing are her encounters with the new flock of restitution hawks, led by Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who demands the return or loan of such stellar prizes as the British Museum’s Rosetta Stone, the Louvre’s Zodiac ceiling and Berlin’s bust of Nefertiti. When the Boston Museum of Fine Arts declined to lend Egypt its sculpture of Ankhaf (the reputed architect of the second-largest Giza pyramid), which it acquired legally in 1925, claming it was too fragile for export, Hawass raged over the telephone: “I’m going to make this museum’s life especially miserable. They’re assholes. Everything—they get for free. They should be punished. I will ban them from working in Egypt, completely, officially.”

Hawass is every major museum director’s nightmare, an avenging prosecutor, an agile politician and insatiable self-publicist. Continually visible on Egyptian television, he is also among the most formidable of the post-Nasser governing elite: at home with Americans, having earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, and wondrously able to energize the world’s most ancient and torpid bureaucracy. Almost single-handedly, Waxman writes, he succeeded in getting the Egyptian parliament to permit the King Tut treasures to travel abroad for the first time in 26 years, wresting terms for their multi-city tour that brought tens of millions back to Egypt. Yet with all that money (so my wife and I found in January), Cairo’s cavernous Egyptian Museum remains humid, ill-lit and badly labeled, much as it was when I first saw it in Nasser’s time. On the other hand: There are plans for a new archaeological showcase near the pyramids; Hawass has creditably established a fine new antiquities museum in Alexandria; and the recently opened Coptic Museum in Cairo, developed on his watch, deserves three stars. 
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #3 on: December 13, 2008, 08:42:52 am »










In short, as Waxman emphasizes, the looting controversy does not lend itself to glib moralizing: “[T]here are no easy answers here. No clear right and wrong as there was in the case of looted Nazi art. Context matters. Details matter. The broad brush-strokes of polemic end up distorting the picture rather than clarifying it. For one thing, it must be asked: is it fair to view events that date back 200 years through modern eyes? Is it appropriate to use words such as ‘stolen’ and ‘plundered’ for things taken when archeology was in its infancy, and when pioneering explorers did what they believed was best? … It is only in our modern age that the notion of ‘spoils of war’ has taken on a negative connotation. … And for those interested in balancing the scales of justice, where does it all end? The ancient Romans stole obelisks from Egypt, to which Renaissance sculptors added their own adornments. Should these be dismantled to return the obelisks to Egypt?”

Granted, we now have the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Export, Import and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, currently binding 130 countries. Not only are signatories obliged to bar the importation of smuggled or stolen cultural artifacts, but they are encouraged to enact specific bans on imperiled antiquities from specific areas—as the United States has commendably done at the request of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Mali and Cambodia. These bans have curtailed if not eliminated the traffic in monumental stelae and sculptured fragments chopped, even dynamited, from ancient edifices.   
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #4 on: December 13, 2008, 08:44:12 am »









However, while the convention does provide new legal weapons to countries seeking the return of looted or smuggled art, there is a less welcome downside. It also provides a cloak of virtue for nationalist politicians whose concern for the display and protection of ancient cultural treasures ceases once they
have been restituted. A shaming case in point concerns the Lydian Hoard, a collection of 219 Hellenic gold and silver pieces smuggled from Turkey and acquired in the 1970s by the Metropolitan Museum. The Turks boldly sued the Met in 1987, and the case was strong enough to win back the treasures five years later in a negotiated settlement—an outcome that Turkey hailed as a national victory. But once returned, as Waxman relates, the long-sought hoard was negligently exhibited and its prize object, a golden hippocampus, was stolen from its case in a provincial museum in Usak and a crude counterfeit substituted in its place.

Of Turkey’s 93 government-operated museums, only 78 have electronic security systems, many of them defective. In 2007, Turkey devoted merely $66 million to operate all these museums and their staffs, plus 140 state-managed archaeological sites—a paltry two-tenths of 1 percent of the national budget. As in other antiquities-rich countries, inveighing against theft and smuggling is cost-free populism; seeking more funds for conservation and security finds scant reward in glory or votes. Let it be said in Dr. Zahi Hawass’ behalf that, whatever his thirst for publicity, he has pulled dynastic Egypt out of its musty tomb in the world’s popular imagination. And let it be said that while Sharon Waxman’s study offers no novel answers, she poses all the right questions.

Karl E. Meyer, a former staff member of The New York Times and The Washington Post, is the author of numerous books, including “The Plundered Past” and, most recently, with Shareen Blair Brysac, of “Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East,” published by W.W. Norton.



http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20081024_karl_e_meyer_on_sharon_waxmans_loot/
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #5 on: December 13, 2008, 08:45:27 am »















                                                    Give Me Back My Ancient Art






Judith H. Dobrzynski,
12.12.08,
Forbes.com



A battle rages between museums and countries of origin.
 
Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World 
By Sharon Waxman



From time to time, the battle for antiquities that rages between museums, collectors and dealers on one side and governments and archaeologists on the other breaks into the headlines--"Bail Set in Greece for Ex-Getty Curator," "Antiquities Trial in Rome Focuses on London Dealer" and the like.

The coverage rarely lasts long or goes deep; it tends to sympathize with the countries making claims. Most people probably shake their heads in disapproval of the looters, smugglers, museums and collectors, and turn the page.

Many antiquities cases are not open-and-shut; they have two sides worth hearing. Sharon Waxman, a journalist who has worked for the Washington Post and the New York Times, set out to air them in Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World.

The subject is huge, so Waxman focused on four museums--the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum--and four claimant countries, Egypt, Italy, Greece and Turkey. "Who ought to own the trophies of history, Western museums or the countries that were plundered over 200 years?" she asked.

Waxman can't--and shouldn't, really--answer the question herself, though she, too, generally sides with the plundered, especially Egypt. She seems particularly taken with the arguments and flamboyant personality of Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who is listed in the acknowledgments as sparking the book.

The truth is, had it not been for many of the adventurers who went to Egypt, Greece and Turkey (Italy is a separate case), some of these treasures would not be with us today. Of the pharaonic tombs in Upper Egypt, Waxman writes, "The Qurna villagers long ago…stole anything that could be stolen, and the unpleasant byproduct of their lack of running water has meant sewage runoff into the tombs themselves. I am not in favor of looting tombs, but it is true that the artifacts [Giovanni] Belzoni took, and those the villagers sold to collectors, have at least a chance of survival. What is in the tombs today has little similar chance." The current condition of many museums in poor countries like Egypt and in Turkey, which Waxman also describes, adds to the concern.

Full disclosure is in order here: Aside from reporting on these issues in the past, I am a program consultant--though not on ancient art--to the foundation established by the late Leon Levy, who with his wife, Shelby White, collected antiquities and provided the naming gift for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Greek and Roman galleries. On the other hand, one of my grandfathers came from Sicily, not far from the important Morgantina archaeological site, and I've been pleased when museums here have agreed to return pieces stolen by tomb-raiders to a museum there. Maybe the plunder will now stop.

Waxman's biggest contribution to this subject lies in the history she tells. Some is swashbuckling: French and British imperialists vying with each other in the sands of Egypt; a Met founder and U.S. consul in Cyprus evading an export ban by using the title he simultaneously held as Russian consul on the label of 360 treasure-filled packing cases; and other acts of trickery to get the goods.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #6 on: December 13, 2008, 08:46:24 am »









Some is deeply disturbing. For example, to obtain for the Louvre the 2,000-plus year-old "zodiac ceiling," Frenchmen used gunpowder to extract it from the Temple of Denderah in Egypt. Asked about that, the Louvre's Egyptian curator said, "How else would you remove a stone ceiling?"

Balancing these accounts, Waxman mentions the mixed motives of some of today's claimants: Many have political ambitions at home, and the archaeologists who take their side are also dependent on them for dig permits.

She also explores the contradictions that weaken their cases--today's Egyptians care little about their ancient past; half of Athenians have never set foot on the Acropolis; the Turks of today have little ethnic connection to the ancient Greeks, Lydians and others who lived in what is now Turkey.

Italy was itself an imperialist country that brought home war booty from Ethiopia and Libya. While exhibition in major encyclopedic museums brings these gorgeous displays of human achievement to millions of visitors, their return to dusty provincial museums upon restitution may consign them to viewings by a couple dozen people a year--if they aren't put in storage.

On the whole, though, Waxman believes her target museums have behaved badly, particularly by hiding the history of the objects in contention. She succeeds at conveying their arrogance, particularly at the Louvre. "Who would be interested in Greek sculpture if it were all in Greece?" asks the Louvre's press attaché. "These pieces are great because they are in the Louvre."

Later, Françoise Cachin, the former director of France's museum authority, inexplicably compares the Louvre's disputed Egyptian antiquities, which were basically stolen, to Seurat's masterpiece, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," which was purchased by a collector and given to the Art Institute of Chicago. "It should never have been allowed to leave the country…But I would not ask for it back. We have to be responsible for our own past." And so, she added, do the Egyptians.

"Loot" unfortunately bears some traces of slapdashery. Waxman makes little mistakes (calling investor Michael Steinhardt a Met trustee, when he is not; calling modern Egyptians "not the actual forebears of the ancients," a neat trick were it possible).

She occasionally repeats herself, telling a tale twice in difference contexts. She employs boilerplate copy from time to time, obviously drawn from Web sites. And she oddly often sets the scene with weather reports not on the day when something momentous happened, but on the day she visited in the course of her reporting.

While Waxman concludes by arguing for museum transparency--and visitors should indeed know when objects they're examining have a sordid past--she acknowledges that there's no easy solution. But anyone who wants to think intelligently about these battles should know the ground Waxman covers, and she has provided a highly readable way to do so.



Judith H. Dobrzynski writes frequently about culture and the arts.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy