Sharon Waxman's "Loot": A Definitive History of the Antiquities Wars

I take it back.

A couple of weeks ago I blasted (without naming it) the new book Loot, a chronicle of the recent antiquities wars, by former NY Times culture reporter Sharon Waxman. The only thing I then knew about the book's contents was the outrageously irrelevant bit of tabloid journalism that was excerpted for advance publication on Tina Brown's recently launched news-aggregating website, The Daily Beast.

To my surprise, after I wrote my diatribe, I was sent a copy of the book. You can't judge an artwork without seeing it, and you can't judge a book without reading it. It turns our that the excerpt was an anomaly and did the rest of the book a gross injustice. That's why I did it an injustice. (But really, Sharon, why sabotage your own book like that?)

"Loot" is a recap and fleshing-out of stories already broken by others, but it's well worth having for its comprehensiveness. It's enlivened by the blunt candor of major and minor figures on all sides of the cultural-property debate who acceded to interviews with this manifestly skilled reporter. Waxman seems to have met with most of the major players in the recent controversies, with two important exceptions. John Walsh, former director of the Getty, and Shelby White, the controversial collector/patron refused to answer her queries. Just about everyone else (except for those under a legal cloud) did, from the directors of the major museums beleaguered by antiquities claims to the cultural officials of source countries to the security guard at the Getty who mourned the departure to Italy of objects that he had admired every day.

Though not breaking new ground, Waxman's book is a journalistic tour de force---an exhaustively researched, even-handed compendium of the disputes roiling museums and source countries, as seen through the eyes of the protagonists. I'm sure that the participants in these struggles will find things to correct. American museum officials will doubtless quarrel with the blanket characterization of their unprovenanced ancient holdings as "stolen."

And there's nothing here about the U.S. State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which considers (and usually grants) source countries' requests for heritage protection. Speaking of which, Brent Benjamin, director of the St. Louis Art Museum, was recently named to CPAC, causing some upset in the cultural-heritage crowd because of his ownership dispute with Egypt over the museum's 3,200-year-old mummy mask. At this writing, CPAC has taken down from its website the names of its committee members, promising that "a revised list will be posted soon."

One passage in Waxman's book that caused me to do a double-take was her description of a public lecture by de Montebello two years ago at the Metropolitan Museum. Although the sold-out event was open to any member of the general public who managed to purchase a ticket, Waxman described the audience as "the carefully groomed and heavily jeweled cultural patrons of Manhattan....It was a sea of white hair and fur coats, men with walking canes, rouged women in high heels and elegant hats, air kisses and familiar faces, the upper crust of the city who number among the museum's most important donors." That makes for a dramatic scene-setter, but there were, in fact, plenty of scruffy culture buffs (including me) filling some of those seats.

I could have wished for a better concluding chapter, with more pointed suggestions for deescalating the antiquities wars. But Waxman is more journalist than thinker, and better minds than hers or mine have applied themselves to these vexing problems without solving them. I do agree with her suggestion for museums to provide complete information on their websites about the provenance (or lack thereof) of the antiquities in their collections. But I don't agree that the permanent-collection galleries are the place for those details (other than a general statement, such as that posted by the Brooklyn Museum) or for mea culpas. (UPDATE: More on this issue, raised again in Sharon's NY Times Op-Ed piece of Dec. 1, is here.)

Waxman's main concluding point is this:

What is required most of all is a desire to collaborate rather than excoriate, to take the measure of where a lack of collaboration has led and pursue a different path [which is...?]. It is possible that each side can win in this battle."

Nice thought (and also appropriate for our Democrats and Republicans to ponder, on this morning after). But goodwill alone can get us only so far.

For what it's worth, CultureGrrl's more specific recommendations for a ceasefire in the cultural-property wars are here, here, here, here and here.

(Now if I can only figure out how do deal with Iraq and Afghanistan...)