Lick These Links: Getty/Italy Truce; Mega-MoMA, German Trophy Art

Here, as promised, are a few links worth tasting during my wild, self-indulgent August:

Italian Culture Minister Franceso Rutelli on the significance of the Getty giveback, as reported in Bloomberg. He calls this agreement "an irreversible precedent for the restitution of works." Have the floodgates now opened? Civil charges against Marion True are dropped; criminal charges, not.

These links (on the Italian Culture Ministry's site) to Rutelli's Getty press conference yesterday keep crashing my computer. Maybe you'll have better luck. (If so, you'll need to understand Italian.)

Christopher Knight, art critic of the LA Times comments on the win-win aspects of the Getty/Italy rapprochement. But it could be a lose-lose if the California Attorney General, as previously threatened, considers going after the Getty for its the waste of assets in buying the 40 relinquished works in the first place.

Yesterday's Felcholino report on the Getty settlement. They put a less positive spin on it than their LA Times colleague (above).

Another LA Times-er, Christopher Hawthorne, on why critics flip-flopped in their assessments of architect Yoshio Taniguchi's Mega-MoMA. I have a different take: Here's what I wrote previously on why the critics were so favorable initially, only to turn against it later.

Will this be the next front in the art repatriation wars?