Month: February 2000

OWNERSHIP QUESTIONS

British report says some 300 works of art in UK museums have questionable WWII provenance and could have been stolen by Nazis from their rightful owners. – The Guardian

  • NAZI LOOT: British museums and galleries announce a list of art they hold that was looted by the Nazis and never returned to rightful owners. So will the art be returned? Not necessarily. “Arts Minister Alan Howarth told the BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ program: ‘Just as it was wrong to take paintings off Jewish people in the circumstances of the Nazi era, so it would be wrong without a proper basis of evidence to take paintings off the national collections which are held for the public benefit.'” – BBC

  • WHAT’S FAIR? “It is entirely proper that stolen pictures, especially those taken in the appalling circumstances of Europe under Nazi domination, should be returned to the families of their pre-war owners, but publishing lists of this kind invites false claims made, not with mischievous intentions, but through errors of recollection after 60 years or more – one Picasso looks much like another after so long a time. It is possible, even probable, that the list will provoke false memories, and once a false claim is made it may well be difficult for the gallery in question to prove or disprove the claim, leaving ownership in limbo.” – London Evening Standard

AND THEN THEY CAME FOR ME

“Should intellectuals push for a cultural embargo of Austria and try to starve the xenophobic rightists out? Or should they go to Austria and feed the vigorous internal opposition, which made itself apparent in a march of 250,000 protesters in Vienna this month? But such tactics could do a great deal of harm. “I can agree on a boycott on the highly official level,” says one critic and curator. But, referring to the Austrian Freedom Party’s crusade against contemporary art, he says, “it makes no sense to boycott us. We are already under attack inside Austria.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

CORPORATE SUPPORT

Sydney’s Olympic Arts Festival is doing well attracting corporate sponsors. But Australia’s Minister for the Arts says continued corporate support after the Olympics end is crucial to a healthy Australian arts scene. Currently corporations fund only about 10 percent of the country’s arts expenditures. – Sydney Morning Herald

WHAT FALLS TO EARTH…

The American Museum of Natural History in New York goes to court to refuse to give back a 10,000-year-old, 15-ton meteorite to Oregon Indian tribes who say their ancestors once treated the rock as a sacred object. The rock is not the kind of sacred object intended to be covered by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a law covering the “repatriation” or important Native-American cultural objects, claims the museum. – New York Post

A MATTER OF HONESTY

For all Al Taubman’s fabulous success running Sotheby’s these last 17 years, he forgot one thing, writes Thomas Hoving: “the basic point about what Sotheby’s had to be. Honest. The opposite of caveat emptor. Clean. Never-a-scandal. Caesar’s wife. Or, to quote from a renowned 1928 court of appeals ruling, ‘Not honesty alone but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.'” – Artnet

I REMEMBER SYDNEY

In 1964 Harold and LuEsther Mertz, a couple of rich American tourists, visited Australia. They decided to buy four or five Australian paintings but became so captivated by them they bought 148, assembling possibly the finest private collection of Australian paintings anywhere and shipped them off to America. Now they’re for sale, and Australian auction houses are lining up for the privilege. – Sydney Morning Herald

  • Australian auction company competes with Sotheby’s and Christie’s for Mertz collection. – Sydney Morning Herald

PAYING FOR PAST SINS

The Smithsonian has begun renting itself out – its experts, its expertise, its artifacts – in an attempt to earn money to make up for budget cuts. Why? “The federal contribution to our budget has declined to the point that, while it will pay for some (not all) maintenance of our buildings and for about 75 percent or so of our staff, it will not cover any of the costs associated with mounting new exhibitions or educational programs. We no longer have the staff to do work in-house; contracting it out is very costly. And yet the public expects us to continue as we have in the past, and the belief that taxpayers’ money supports everything we do is widespread. It supports the infrastructure, barely, but nothing else. And from this deficit stems a great deal that is troubling, to those of us inside the institution as well as to outsiders like yourself.” – Washington Post