December 22, 2004 (part II)
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- Cultural relics in China are under critical threat from tomb raiders and
thieves supplying a booming domestic and overseas market
- Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts
- A Smithsonian sleuth says counterfeits lurk in museum collections the
world over
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Published on TaipeiTimes
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/12/22/2003216219
Ancient artifacts under threat, government says
AFP , BEIJING
Wednesday, Dec 22, 2004,Page 5
Cultural relics in China are under critical threat from tomb raiders and
thieves supplying a booming domestic and overseas market, one of the
country's top relics officials warned in state press yesterday.
Smuggling and illegal excavations are rampant and the situation is expected
to worsen as the market for Chinese art peaks, said He Shuzhong, director of
law and policy at the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH).
Relics that are illegally excavated, stolen from museum collections or
smuggled used to flow mainly to Europe, Japan and the US but are now also
turning up in private art collections in major Chinese cities.
"Such relics go where the highest prices are offered, but still a larger
part of them have been smuggled abroad," He was cited as saying by the China
Daily.
In 2002 Chinese customs authorities intercepted 8,780 of relics prohibited
from leaving the country and that was just the tip of the iceberg, previous
reports said.
Customs officials check only 5 percent of goods destined for overseas.
Generally traders purchase relics in markets or from large and organized
networks of people, ranging from farmers to sophisticated antique experts.
They use foreign students, expatriates living in China or even tour groups
to smuggle the goods out of China in often unchecked luggage. Many other
pieces are shipped or mailed.
He said authorities had more difficulty than they did a decade ago
preventing relics from leaving the country as those who previously took them
to Hong Kong had now developed more than 100 routes to get them overseas.
Lax management by authorities also contributes to the problem with many
relics simply taken from museums, Buddhist or Taoist temples and other
historical sites.
New laws stipulate that all such cases be reported to the SACH, but that
rarely occurs.
"It often happens that local authorities keep such cases secret and make no
reports, or they simply do not realize their losses," said Liu Qifu, head of
the relic security office of the SACH. One of the most famous smuggled
objects, a bronze "bonanza" tree made during the Han Dynasty nearly 2,000
years ago, fetched US$2.5 million and was unearthed in the Three Gorges area
of southwestern China.
It was sold by an antique dealer from Belgium to an American billionaire in
1998, creating a world record then in Chinese antique prices.
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Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts
By Carol Sims
If you have a taste for the nuts and bolts of art attribution and legal
issues surrounding authentication of art, search no farther. Ronald Spencer
has put together a series of excellent essays written by leaders in the
field and true connoisseurs. Spencer takes a look at this elephant of a
topic from many different points of view and will leave the reader vastly
more knowledgeable. Spenser is an a counselor at Carter Ledyard & Milburn
LLP of New York City. His book dots the I's and crosses the T's as much as
is possible.
This is an essential book for attorneys involved in the art business and a
wakeup call for the industry to provide a forum in which an unbiased
consensus can be made about art attributions by the scholars qualified to
make them - without fear of retribution. Part I of the book is devoted to
authentication and connoisseurship. Part II addresses authentication and the
law.
Essayists include notables such as Francis V. O'Connor, a leading expert on
Jackson Pollock, an artist forgers mistakenly believe is easy to fake; Peter
Sutton, director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich Conn., and an expert on
Northern Baroque art who discusses the Rembrandt Project; Max J. Friedlander
(1867-1958) a leading proponent of connoisseurship who wrote, "After being
unmasked every forgery is a useless, hybrid and miserable thing."
John Tancock, senior vice president in the Impressionist and Modern art
department at Sotheby's New York, discusses issues of authenticity in the
auction house; Michael Find-lay, director at Acquavella Galleries, New York
City, discusses the role of the catalogue raisonné; how the catalogue
raisonné affects the art market is the topic of Peter Kraus, founder of
Ursus Books; Noel Annesley, deputy chairman of Christie's, writes about
discoveries and reattributions of Old Masters.
Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art
Research, talks about IFAR's important role in authenticating art; Rustin S.
Levenson discusses the uses and limits of scientific testing in the
authentication process and in another chapter he discusses the preservation
and authenticity of contemporary art.
Spencer interviews Eugene Victor Thaw, a retired art dealer, collector,
president of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and an honorary trustee of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, and a trustee of the Pierpont Morgan
Library. Thaw addresses the generational movement of art historical
scholarship and connoisseurship and how the market eventually self-corrects
misattributions.
An interview with Samuel Sachs II, former director of The Frick Collection,
New York City, and the Detroit Institute of Arts and Minneapolis Institute
of Arts, brings up the issue of masterpieces without a master, that is,
works of consummate quality that remain unattributed.
In Part II, Theodore E. Stebbins Jr, former John Moors Cabot Curator of
American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and now the curator
of American art at Harvard University Museums, discusses rendering expert
opinions; Spencer covers legal liability for art attributions, the pitfalls
of authentication in court, and a precedent set in the year 2000 protecting
expert opinion. Van Kirk Reeves, a French lawyer, writes about the sometimes
vexing droit moral and other issues of authenticity under French law.
An unequivocal endorsement of The Expert versus the Object is in order. The
industry needs to take the reins of this issue of attribution because the
legal process does not always do a good job of it. Every art museum
director, curator, appraiser, art auctioneer, gallerist and connoisseur
should read this book. Be warned: it will take a while to digest all of the
issues that Spencer raises.
The Expert versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the
Visual Arts, edited by Ronald D. Spencer, Oxford University Press, Inc, 198
Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016; 2004, 241 pages, hardcover, $35.
http://antiquesandthearts.com/
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Hunting Fakes Volume 58 Number 1, January/February 2005
A Smithsonian sleuth says counterfeits lurk in museum collections the world
over.
Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of
Natural History, is best known for her work with museum collections and for
exposing several crystal skulls, once thought to be Precolumbian, as
nineteenth-century German fakes. She is now working with several museums to
create a database that can be used to identify bogus Precolumbian jade,
crystal, and other stone artifacts. She talked to ARCHAEOLOGY about why you
shouldn't always trust what you see at museums.
Can you say how many fakes are in any one museum's collection?
Well, no. But what I can tell you is any museum--I don't care what museum it
is--has fakes, because fakes are ubiquitous. I have a friend who works at
the Holocaust Museum as a conservator, and even they have forgeries--Star of
David badges and prison uniforms that were made for Hollywood films and
later sold by dealers as authentic artifacts.
How did counterfeit Precolumbian jade, crystal, and other stone artifacts
become so prevalent in museum collections?
Museums all over the world began collecting Precolumbian stone carvings in
the 1820s just after Mexican independence, when the country was first opened
again to foreigners. They created a demand, and there probably wasn't a
supply to satisfy that demand. So local artisans, or maybe some Europeans,
started creating the supply. In the beginning, people were unknowingly
collecting the fakes because they didn't know what the things were supposed
to look like.
It seems likely that some forgeries must have made it into serious scholarly
research.
There are a number of very famous pieces that I wonder about, and people
have published on them for a century. And there are plenty of pieces that
are completely anomalous--that don't look like anything else that anyone has
ever dug up--that have made it into scholars' papers. Those publications are
always filled with complicated explanations of why the objects don't look
like anything else. I think there may be an easier answer. I'm not saying
they're all fakes. I'm saying this project may offer the opportunity to make
sure they're not.
Is that what interests you most about looking for fakes?
It's not just that I want to say, "Oh, that's fake!" It comes out of my
interest in collections and what they say about us as much as what they say
about the people we think made the objects. Fakes are sort of creatures of
their time. A lot of them were made in the nineteenth century, which was a
very inventive age--people had absolutely no compunction about taking
something that was 500 years old and changing it to make it look "better."
How will you use the stone artifacts from the Smithsonian, the British
Museum, and Mexico's Templo Mayor Museum to identify fakes?
We want to create a database with documented artifacts from archaeological
contexts that we can use to make comparisons with artifacts in question.
Basically, we'll subject objects to various analyses using silicone
impressions, scanning electron microscopes, CAT scans, and x-ray
fluorescence.
Do you worry that the results of your work may tip off the forgers?
It will get to them. I know it will. Someone 50 years from now will have to
figure out what they figured out. But by then, this technology that I'm
using is going to look like what they used in the nineteenth century. People
will be able to zap a laser beam at an object and tell immediately that it's
from 1963.
How do you think museums will react to your work?
Some people in my department say, "Oh, you are going to be deluged by people
who want you to come and take a look at their stuff." That's not my fear. My
fear is that I'm going to be locked out of collections because people will
be afraid that I'll say their favorite object is a fake.
I'm already sort of dealing with that at the moment. I can't really talk
about it, but I have to say I was surprised. To me it just seems like the
most obvious thing in the world to do is research your collection. Otherwise
it's kind of like having a library where you won't let people take the books
down because they look so nice, stacked up all evenly. Collections really
are like libraries. The objects are like books and you have to open them up
to learn anything. You can't just admire them through glass cases.
by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/0501/etc/conversations.html
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