Museums' Art Collections - Cultural Heritage Law

"When it comes to collecting, American museums are in a state of crisis. Over the past decade, museums have been repeatedly accused of knowingly acquiring looted antiquities and even conspiring to do so with shady dealers and their networks of tomb-robbers. Under pressure from the Italian government and exposed to much negative press, the Getty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Princeton University Art Museum, and others recently returned treasures such as the Euphronios krater and the so-called Morgantina Aphrodite to Italy. Curators Marion True, formerly of the Getty, and Michael Padgett, at the Princeton Art Museum, have been put on trial by the Italian government, blamed for their respective museums' acquisition of supposedly illegally exported archaeological material."

Holly Flora, "The Quest for the Masterpiece. Traditional Practices of Collecting in American Museums", in: Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law (F. Francioni & J. Gordley, eds.) Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 228.

"Museums acquire artworks via purchase or donation. The application of museum ethic codes (when they have such codes) to their acquisitions reduce the number of works that the museums could and should acquire and at the same time influence the indirect acquisition of works by museums, since future donors are also influenced as far as artworks that they are "allowed" to purchase are concerned.
Certain museums, in order to contribute to the effort of tracking down artworks of unknown provenance, have also decided to publish detailed information on their collections. The situation is not at all simple - it never was."

Elina Moustaira, "Art Collections, Private and Public: A Comparative Legal Study", Springer, 2015, p. 121.

Οι φωτογραφίες είναι από την έκθεση του Θανάση Μακρή, "Τοπίο: Η κυριαρχία του προσωρινού;" (διήρκεσε από 8 Μαρτίου μέχρι 2 Απριλίου) στην Αίθουσα Τέχνης Έκφραση - Γιάννα Γραμματοπούλου.