Antiquities Agonistes: Dallas Conference Parses Patrimony

John Merryman, Stanford Law Professor Emeritus

For all you antiquities-collecting controversialists, a conference on The Future of the Past: Ethical Implications of Collecting Antiquities in the 21st Century, organized by Southern Methodist University, Dallas, should keep you agonizing for two days (Oct. 18-19) over thorny questions of due diligence, ambiguous provenance, responsible cultural stewardship and other hot-button issues [via].

The list of speakers is impressively diverse, but it appears that no cultural officials from such antiquities-rich nations as Italy, Greece or Egypt are attending this patrimony party. The closest we come is keynote speaker Donny George Youkhanna, former director general of the Iraqi museums, who fled his war-torn country and is now visiting professor at Stony Brook University, New York. And the U.S. museums that have been most famously vexed by antiquities claims---the Getty, Metropolitan, Boston, Cleveland and St. Louis---are not listed as partaking in the panels.

We can only wonder if Timothy Potts, identified by his soon-to-be-former post, director of Fort Worth's Kimbell Museum, is going to fly in from Cambridge to honor his speaking commitment. And will they correctly spell art-law expert "John Merriman's" (sic) name on the final program?

Maybe I should go to Dallas. I'm tempted to write this typically CultureGrrl-style headline:

Merry with Merryman.