Underneath the Glam of the Illicit Trade of Art and Antiquities — Who Benefits?
Why has looting ⛏ and illegally selling valuable artefacts 🗿 become easier than re-selling a Rolex Daytona watch?
In October 2020, Fu Chunxiao, a high profile collector of art from the Chinese Communist revolution ⚒🇨🇳 got robbed in Hong Kong 🇭🇰 for a total cost of $645m💰💰💰💰🤑, which is perhaps the most expensive burglary in HKSAR to date. Amongst the stolen artefacts was an authentic calligraphy scroll 🧧📜 with Mao Zedong’s original handwriting. The robbers most certainly did not know that the founder and spiritual father of the PRC was also a calligraphy artist, which made this piece even more valuable, USD $300m to be precise. In fact, a calligraphic autograph letter by Mao dating from 1948 was sold for £519,000 at Sotheby’s London auction last year. Fu Chunxia’s purchased this parchment for an astonishing price of $65m 🤡💥 on the black market. I wish that’s how prices wee negotiated on the black market…🚬🌿🎰. Now, the story doesn’t end here. The even more astonishing part is that, after the transaction was finalised, the new owner realised how little he paid for his newly acquired treasure 🎁. Disappointed, he assumed it was a fake 🧐😲🤬 and cut ✂️ the parchment in two. He then surrendered himself to the police👮♂️👮♀️ when he realised what he actually got himself into. Don’t steal and don’t deal with dodgy ninjas. Karma 🎐🎑 is a bitch 👊💥.
Original works by renowned artists 🖼 🎨and artefacts from important heritage sites🗿 from all around the world easily find their ways not only in foreign museums, but also in private hands, personal collections and galleries🤝 particularly on the Western markets of the US and Europe. Individuals acquire art for various reasons, ranging from personal pleasure 👀 to complete one’s collection out of passion 🤩, to show off 🤙🏻 or to investing in art as a financial asset 💎📈. Some also trade art as a way to make pocket money 💵 #намороженку 🍦 just like when you re-sell a Rolex Daytona⌚watch to those who prefer not to wait for decades before they can get hold of one from the brand factory, only here we talk millions of profit share.
Prices at the art market skyrocket at auctions. The most expensive art sale to date cost $450m for Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century Salvator Mundi in 2017. Imagine how much the informal art market generates 🤑. Truth be told the painting was presumably made by one of Leonardo’s pupils (a fact that provoked controversy in public opinion) and was also stolen before it was recovered by the Agents of the Crimes Against the Heritage Section of the Naples Flying Squad, hidden in a room of an apartment in via Strada Provinciale delle Brecce in Naples in January 2021.
The informal art market is very international and versatile. You can steal a statue/fresco piece/artwork in Vietnam, travel with it to China, forge documents💱🧧🛃🛄, then go to the UK or Luxembourg, sell the goods to a collector🧮💰, who would then travel to the US to either re-sell or to place the trophy ⚱ at home.
The proliferation of illegal trade of art and antiquities is partly due to the lack of common legal framework of such transactions. Some administrations do not at all value their artefacts, like in the case of ruins from the original Shah-I-zinda complex and the Shahrisabz Timurid heritage site in Uzbekistan, which were bulldozed prior to their reconstruction at the time, leaving sites unsupervised for looting. Other administrations also won’t judge all artefacts as equally valuable, focusing on the protection of only one type (I.e ‘masks’, ‘tiles’, ‘paintings of one particular period in history’). One other problem is the ambiguity in legal processes when a trial occurs between two countries, which implement very different approaches to illegal excavation or trade of unprovenanced artefacts.
Currently, very few countries include a specially designated category for illicit trade of art, antiquities and artefacts in their legal codex. Therefore their theft, illegal export or illegal sale in most cases is legally considered as ‘private property’. The closest attempt to somehow regulate the informal economy of the trade of antiquities looted from heritage sites and art stolen from victims of war, is UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property ⚖. Like all international treaties, this convention is only valid in a dispute between countries that both ratified the document 🖋. This means that if the intercepted object 🕵️♀️👮♂️is proved to have been obtained illegally, it will not matter whether the theft was committed in or outside the country, the offence will be judged accordingly. The subsequent trade and export of the artefact are also tried in the same way.
The advantage of the 1970 Convention is also that it offers some common guidelines for the legal framework on court rulings and on the prevention of looting and theft. Given that these were formulated in a way that each signatory state could integrate in their own regulatory models, the wording of the document remains very abstract and hence leaves room for bypassing 🤫. The three major hubs for formal and illicit art trade, namely the US 🇺🇸, the UK 🇬🇧 and China 🇨🇳. They were one of the latest to ratify he Convention, which enabled them to legally allow illegally exported art and antiquities 📦 on the national soil and in private collections or public museums prior to ratifying the document.
Many of our beloved museums, including the Peggy Guggenheim and the Metropolitan in NYC, London’s British Museum and the Quai Branly in Paris, still display hundreds of looted or illegally exported artefacts and hundreds of thousands more circulate on the black market, in private hands. The ones displayed in museums were partly inherited from the colonial conquests, such as the British Museum’s Parthenon marbles, also known as the Elgin marbles. Between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who was appointed as British envoy to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time included modern Greece, managed to export almost half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon. He affirmed that he had the official authorisation of the Ottoman ruler to do so, but this claim is still disputed to date, as no evidence to that has been found. Centuries later, the UK and Greece are still in dispute over the ownership of those stones, but London’s mecca of the British colonial heritage is not ready to give them up just yet.
The Rosetta Stone was taken by the British army as a trophy for its victory over Napoleon’s army in Egypt in 1801 and then placed in the British Museum. Although Egypt filed a request for the stone to be transferred to the new Grand Egyptian Museum, like for the Greeks, this request has not been yet fulfilled and unclear if ever it will be.
Another case of contested artefacts. The Benin Bronzes. Back in 1897, the British Empire sent a troop of 1,200 men on a punitive expedition under Sir Harry Rawson. Benin City was stormed and the royal palace was razed to the ground in the process. Where there is destruction of property, there is looting. As a result, an array of bronze reliefs, carved ivory, and other sculptures were stolen from Benin City and found their way in European museums. In 2017, French President Macron declared that France would restitute the 90,000 artefacts looted from sub-Saharan Africa that are held in national collections, including from Benin. Yet, since then only one object, a 19th c. sabre that returned to Senegal in 2019, has been restituted from France at all.
In March 2021, Germany opened a dialogue with the National Museums of Nigeria regarding the repatriation of the 440 Benin Bronzes exhibited at the Berlin Ethnological Museum. To date, hundreds of pieces are still held in the British Museum and several museums in the United States.
Things get worse. The Louvre is showcasing artefacts seized by the French Authorities illegally trafficked from Iraq, Libya and Syria, between 2012 and 2016 during the War against the terrorist organisation known as the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/DAESH) in a new exhibition entitled ‘Traffic d’Antiquités’ through December 2021. The presented artefacts include funerary statues from the Libyan region of Cyrene and Byzantine-era reliefs likely from Palmyra.
Surprisingly, since 2016, the French law allows its national museums to publicly exhibit looted art pieces while under investigation. The curators of this New Exhibition at the Louvre indulge the media in bold noble statements framing it as an effort to sensitise people in the West to the immorality of looted art, to raise public awareness on the importance of protecting the cultural heritage in conflict areas and how looted artefacts have got to be ‘some day’ ‘hopefully’ be returned to their place of origin, where they belong and where ‘they are needed to tell their story’.
Who in the end gets paid from the media coverage and the exhibition? Who gets to keep them? Who decides for how long they stay and when they are to be repatriated? The national museums of Iraq, Libya and Syria, do you think? Their governments? NO. The Louvre will benefit from it. The French government will decide when and under what circumstances they will be returned, if at all. A self-proclaimed judge for when it is safe for the artefacts to return to where they belong. Do you think the revenues from this exhibition will go towards rebuilding the Archaeological Museum of Palmyra or its heritage sites? Or towards the communities who lived in the war-ravaged areas? Or to rebuild the infrastructure there? NO. They will go towards the Louvre. To pay the utilities and some restoration works, given that the museum suffered some revenue losses during the lockdown. All these talks of restitution since 2017, for what? 60 years in since the first post-colonial critiques and we are back to Square 1. Quotes are taken from the interview of the co-curator of Louvre’s exhibition ‘Traffic d’Antiquités’ Vincent Michel: https://youtu.be/ozS7aulu8nk.
For a restitution initiative to really be implemented, one needs strong public and political pressure, with corporate interests at stake. In this way, the strong lobbying for the restitution of art stolen from Jewish private collections during World War II 🕍, which was then sold and spread worldwide, had the auction giant Sotheby’s open a designated department for the restoration of Nazi looted Art.
A good source for the latest information on stolen and recovered art is* Art Recovery International *, a private company that provides due diligence, dispute resolution and art recovery services to the international art market and cultural heritage institutions. They themselves conduct the investigations 👨💼🕵️♂️ and work with national and international police forces, such as INTERPOL.
The International alliance for the protection of heritage in conflict areas, known as ALIPH Foundation is an international fund aimed to protect heritage in the context of armed conflict. Coincidentally, ALIPH was established in Geneva in 2017 based on an idea that was born from the report presented to French President Macron by Jean-Luc Martinez, at the time President of the Louvres, in 2015, entitled Fifty proposals to protect the cultural heritage of humanity. Although the specialisation of this organisation is as very important as it is niche, it has to be perceived with a grain of salt, given its close ties to the Louvre and the governments of France and the United Arab Emirates, which made its establishment possible.
