Chasing Aphrodite
Jul. 29th, 2011 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessOk, since LJ seems to be back, let's try to celebrate with a long post that's been waiting on my computer for a bit. Sure, I know that most of you would rather celebrate with chocolate and booze, but this is what I have.
EditOk, LJ is NOT back. Not only is this not crossposting but when I tried to manually post this in LJ I kept getting an internal service error. THUNK. THUNK. Damn you, DDOS attack, go away. What did I ever do to you???
Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Art museums generally fascinate me. Not just the collection of beauty, but the why behind it, with the explicit attempts of some modern art museums to stretch the definition of what most of us would call art and many of us would call seriously ugly, to the less explicit political agendas behind many museums and displays.
This is particularly true at some of the world's great art museums, all of which were formed with the ostensible purpose of showcasing beauty and the development of art, but many of which also had the political purpose of showcasing just how great and wealthy the museum's host country was – the Lourve, in particular, had a theme for awhile that "all great art leads to France," (considerably softened these days), while the British Museum showcased, in the great phrase of someone else, "the spoils of empire," and the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased "the spoils of money."
So I was quite interested in this book, which discussed a relative newcomer to the arts and antiquities scene: the very wealthy Getty Museum, founded by industrialist and oil magnate J. Paul Getty, known for his miserly ways. (Although he was one of the world's richest men, he installed a pay phone on his estate and insisted that house guests use that for outgoing calls. That kind of thing.) Getty did not get along at all well with his children and left most of his vast fortune to the Getty Museum, instantly transforming it into one of the world's wealthiest.
(Left out of the book is the saga of how one of Getty's children, continuing to bear a grudge against Getty and the museum, frequently outbid the Getty Museum on various works of art Just Because.)
Along with other artworks, Getty collected classical antiquities, and after his death, his museum decided to continue this trend under the guidance of various curators and directors, most outlined in this book, which also discusses the issues with collecting classical antiquities: major pieces are worth millions, creating vast temptations for thieves, looters and questionable dealers – and museums and collectors with the money to talk to these deals. Much of the book assumes that the Getty was a leader in very questionable activities, particularly taking advantage of poor, poor, Italy. This should, and does, create a fascinating read.
And yet. The New York Review of Books (not the New York Times) has issues with the book. I have some of the same issues, and quite a few more.
The first and most minor problem is with the title, which refers to a statue that the Getty called "Aphrodite." The problem – and this problem is clear from the text – no one has any idea what goddess the statue actually represents, since the statue is missing its head and the hand that might have carried an identifying emblem. So, this statue could be Aphrodite, or Hera, or Demeter, or Persephone. (It looks like your average headless woman in a clingy, dampened dress to me, but I am by no means an expert in classical art.) I call this a minor problem, but in fact, insisting on naming the book after a questionable designation is representative of the entire problem with the book: it wants to identify things before all the facts are known – even assuming all of the facts are known.
And as I read, I started to feel more and more uncomfortable. No, not because of the nasty little bits of gossip dropped here and there to help distinguish one wealthy person from the next wealthy person (very few people in this book, other than the occasional Italian cop or poor but gentle fisherman, are even aware of the middle class, much less the working class).
No, what got me was the conviction that what I was actually reading wasn't so much a lofty book about the proud and honest but poor cops of Italy chasing after the mean and evil and rich curators of the Getty to recover the antiquities that they had not had the money to protect, but rather, a book about wealthy men essentially tossing considerably poorer women under the bus.
To begin with, Italy is not a Third World country. Indeed, one of the reasons Italy was able to recover some of its looted antiquities was because Italy has a number of well funded, state of the art museums perfectly capable of collecting, preserving and showcasing classical art. Given that major European and American museums have long argued that they should keep antiquities because they have the money and resources to protect them (an argument repeated in this book and dismissed by its writers), mentioning this about Italy is an important point, especially since the Italians themselves pointed out, correctly, that they were perfectly capable of caring for their own antiquities. (I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with this argument; I'm just saying that it doesn't apply to Italy, and comparing Italy to Egypt is not necessarily helpful, given the very different economic systems.)
This raised a related point, not discussed in this book but which I have seen elsewhere, which basically comes down to that the Italians have a lot of nerve demanding back artwork that they weren't bothering to protect from thieves, when they had the money to do so – but just didn't bother to hire them. (It is true that Italy in the 1970s, when I lived there, had a high number of robberies, and three of the five times that I've been robbed happened to be in Italy. To be further fair, on one of those three occasions I was robbed by an American tourist, who also just happened to be in Italy, but now I'm getting off-track.) Also mostly left out of this book is awareness that some of these looters were cops.
And although the authors want us to believe that this is all just a bunch of looters stealing from archaeological sites and then selling these artifacts to crooked dealers, at least some of the art of questionable provenance at the Getty was directly stolen from the private collections of wealthy Italians, some of whom did not announce the thefts out of false pride, or World War II, or the slight problem that they themselves had stolen the art, or collected it from haphazard archaeological digging before rules for what to do with antiquities were created. In other cases, the thefts were announced, but people failing to remember in 1984 a theft of a fairly obscure bowl back in 1826 is not exactly the worst moral crime ever, and the Getty did return these articles of clear theft, usually without compensation and at a loss to them – something this book does not detail.
And further further complicating the situation, much of the classical art in Italy was itself looted from Greece, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Turkey and so on. This is not to say that the Romans didn't create their own art, or that the Greek colonies in Italy didn't have a flourishing art culture – they did. But unless the statue in question was found with a nice letter or stone from somebody detailing exactly where and how it was obtained/commissioned, we often don't know. (We do with many of the objects found within Rome since the Romans tended to brag about what they brought back, but we're more shaky on the objects found outside of Rome.) Excavations in Pompeii, as just one example, found several objects not made in Pompeii. The Romans also exported art – Roman statues can be found in Egypt and Libya and Britain. And, to add a further touch of complication, the medievals and later people also enjoyed logging art around or burying it or changing it or whatever. Moving art around, whether paid for or plundered, is not an activity that began in the 19th century.
In other words, when the Getty Museum points out that their statue of Aphrodite, which is probably not Aphrodite, may not have been dug up in Sicily and could have been found elsewhere, they have a point, and the authors' dismissal of this as ludicrous does not lead me to think kindly of their research into classical art and culture, which would be fine if it were not a center part of the book. But then again, this sort of stuff is a lot less fun than the breathless descriptions of looters stealing statues from archaeological sites or hardworking fishermen out on the Adriatic.
But back to the sexism.
Much of the book focuses on the allegations against the Getty's curator and antiquities expert, Dr. Marion True, who worked her way up from a working class background through a PhD program to become a Getty curator, forming friendships with various antiquities dealers along the way. As a Getty curator, she led calls to return objects of dubious provenance back to their home countries – or, at least, Italy (see my discussion above; curators more than willing to return objects to Italy have balked at returning objects to Jordan or Egypt, let alone Iraq), while, according to this book, herself engaging in unethical purchases of various objects that she knew were of dubious provenance, and taking bribes from wealthy dealers and donors wanting her to overlook the questionable paperwork on the antiquities they were donating to the Getty.
It makes a great story, with just three little problems.
One, as the New York Review of Books notes, Dr. True was never convicted. The book slides past this, telling us that because the statute of limitations expired her guilt or innocence remains in doubt. What actually happened was that the statute of limitations expired because the Italian government did not have enough evidence.
Two, as the New York Review also notes, Marion True did not purchase these antiquities alone. She had bosses, who had to approve each and every one of her purchases.
One boss was a woman named Deborah Gribbon, a deputy director at the Getty, who – this is very important – settled with the Getty for a $3 million settlement for sexual harassment. The other bosses were all male. None of these bosses were prosecuted or indicted in any way; they all pocketed large salaries, and in one case, Barry Munitz, pocketing considerably more in what I have to agree were some very questionable expenses.
About Barry Munitz. In one of its many gossipy moments, the book cheerfully details Munitz's work habits, or rather, lack thereof: he hated coming into the office so would instead sit at a pool and dictate things to various secretaries and assistants; he was unable to use a VCR, so took weekly trips to get specially taped for him episodes of the West Wing and so on. He had several affairs with various women, lying to his coworkers and his chief assistant, Jill Murphy, about these. When the Los Angeles Times began their investigation, he told Jill Murphy that she had to get out; she demanded two years salary in severance pay – and got it.
Interestingly, the book details all of these actions – the loans Marion True took out to buy property (one of which, admittedly, was her one documented action of questionable ethics, if not illegal, since the loans came from an antiquities dealer the museum worked with and one of the donors); the $3 million sexual harassment case settlement paid to Dr. Gribbon; and the two years severance pay paid to Jill Murphy as evidence of the same thing: these women were greedy.
Call me, I don't know, naïve about the federal court system, particularly since California is not, like Florida, a right to work state, but when a woman begins a sexual harassment suit, and said suit is almost immediately settled for three million dollars (on a salary of about $90,000), it is just barely possible that, I don't know, she was actually sexually harassed. Given that this settlement was made as the Getty was announcing that it had just had some financial setbacks with the Getty Trust (in the stock market) and cutbacks would need to be made, the slight possibility that just maybe Deborah Gribbon had actual and incontrovertible evidence of sexual harassment becomes probable. And when the text even admits that she had a nine page letter from her male boss, a letter which led another man to ask, "How could you put that in a letter?" "It was her performance review," the same boss that, according to this book, had numerous inappropriate relationships with various women, then this becomes less "probable" and more "certainty."
And yet, even though Gribbon, to repeat, received a three million settlement for sexual harassment, with a boss that sounds awfully like a sexual harasser, the authors of this book
(and to a lesser extent the New York Review of Books article, which seems to have missed the sexual harassment part and accepted the $3 million as a sort of a general hush up payment) completely dismiss any thought that just maybe these women were, indeed, sexually harassed.
Meanwhile, their male bosses? Well, admittedly this book does not do much for the reputation of Barry Munitz, who is undoubtedly speaking to a few attorneys as I type. But, otherwise, Barry Munitz kept his top salary and most of the extras he expensed. None of the other male attorneys or directors suffered at all, although a female attorney was considered a bit overwrought and emotional, and was fired.
(One man, an antiquities dealer living in Italy/Switzerland, was prosecuted and convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten years in jail in Italy, but he's a minor character in this book.)
The book even details one case where True did tell a dealer that a specific object was too hot – and the Getty purchased it anyway. The book assumes that True changed her mind, but, again, True could not authorize the purchase of this object. It seems far more likely that True raised her concerns and was overruled by directors eager to keep their cushy jobs by fulfilling the museum's mission – to have an outstanding antiquities collection, something difficult to achieve when most of the world's major pieces are already settled in major museums. And that she cultivated relationships with antiquities dealers not because she was unethical, but because that was her job. And since her passionate speeches on behalf of source countries embarrassed some of the Getty directors, and since she was a woman, they threw her under the bus. She was only person the Italians investigated. And, as I noted, in the end, those charges were dropped. (It would be nice if Wikipedia updated this information.)
But these more likely considerations are never brought up by the authors. Instead, they revel in making True out to look as awful as possible. You can easily skip over the fact, sidelined here, that Dr. True did, in fact, earn her doctorate – from Harvard, no less. If it took her more than three years to do so, the reason is clear: she had to earn her way through undergraduate and graduate school, without fellowships. (I hear graduate students wincing.) It is not at all surprising or unusual that, under the circumstances, it took her some time to finish her PhD. The authors also add some entirely unnecessary and nasty gossip about her first marriage (completely irrelevant to the case at hand, since the marriage ended before Dr. True joined the Getty) and fail to say anything about a second seemingly more successful marriage.
So, yeah.
Adding to the frustration: the book is not exactly lacking in actual wrongdoing. The first few chapters detail a breathtakingly audacious tax fraud scheme (where the wealthy bought various antiquities and then donated them to the Getty at inflated values, taking the charitable tax break for the inflated value; it was enough to make me wish that I had a million dollars to spend on a nine million dollar tax break). Later chapters detail some very questionable dealings by more than one museum with certain antiquities dealers. But all of that, along with the genuinely interesting questions of the purposes of museums, and the provenance of art, is overlooked in this book's desire to tell a good story – even if it's not entirely a true one.
EditOk, LJ is NOT back. Not only is this not crossposting but when I tried to manually post this in LJ I kept getting an internal service error. THUNK. THUNK. Damn you, DDOS attack, go away. What did I ever do to you???
Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Art museums generally fascinate me. Not just the collection of beauty, but the why behind it, with the explicit attempts of some modern art museums to stretch the definition of what most of us would call art and many of us would call seriously ugly, to the less explicit political agendas behind many museums and displays.
This is particularly true at some of the world's great art museums, all of which were formed with the ostensible purpose of showcasing beauty and the development of art, but many of which also had the political purpose of showcasing just how great and wealthy the museum's host country was – the Lourve, in particular, had a theme for awhile that "all great art leads to France," (considerably softened these days), while the British Museum showcased, in the great phrase of someone else, "the spoils of empire," and the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased "the spoils of money."
So I was quite interested in this book, which discussed a relative newcomer to the arts and antiquities scene: the very wealthy Getty Museum, founded by industrialist and oil magnate J. Paul Getty, known for his miserly ways. (Although he was one of the world's richest men, he installed a pay phone on his estate and insisted that house guests use that for outgoing calls. That kind of thing.) Getty did not get along at all well with his children and left most of his vast fortune to the Getty Museum, instantly transforming it into one of the world's wealthiest.
(Left out of the book is the saga of how one of Getty's children, continuing to bear a grudge against Getty and the museum, frequently outbid the Getty Museum on various works of art Just Because.)
Along with other artworks, Getty collected classical antiquities, and after his death, his museum decided to continue this trend under the guidance of various curators and directors, most outlined in this book, which also discusses the issues with collecting classical antiquities: major pieces are worth millions, creating vast temptations for thieves, looters and questionable dealers – and museums and collectors with the money to talk to these deals. Much of the book assumes that the Getty was a leader in very questionable activities, particularly taking advantage of poor, poor, Italy. This should, and does, create a fascinating read.
And yet. The New York Review of Books (not the New York Times) has issues with the book. I have some of the same issues, and quite a few more.
The first and most minor problem is with the title, which refers to a statue that the Getty called "Aphrodite." The problem – and this problem is clear from the text – no one has any idea what goddess the statue actually represents, since the statue is missing its head and the hand that might have carried an identifying emblem. So, this statue could be Aphrodite, or Hera, or Demeter, or Persephone. (It looks like your average headless woman in a clingy, dampened dress to me, but I am by no means an expert in classical art.) I call this a minor problem, but in fact, insisting on naming the book after a questionable designation is representative of the entire problem with the book: it wants to identify things before all the facts are known – even assuming all of the facts are known.
And as I read, I started to feel more and more uncomfortable. No, not because of the nasty little bits of gossip dropped here and there to help distinguish one wealthy person from the next wealthy person (very few people in this book, other than the occasional Italian cop or poor but gentle fisherman, are even aware of the middle class, much less the working class).
No, what got me was the conviction that what I was actually reading wasn't so much a lofty book about the proud and honest but poor cops of Italy chasing after the mean and evil and rich curators of the Getty to recover the antiquities that they had not had the money to protect, but rather, a book about wealthy men essentially tossing considerably poorer women under the bus.
To begin with, Italy is not a Third World country. Indeed, one of the reasons Italy was able to recover some of its looted antiquities was because Italy has a number of well funded, state of the art museums perfectly capable of collecting, preserving and showcasing classical art. Given that major European and American museums have long argued that they should keep antiquities because they have the money and resources to protect them (an argument repeated in this book and dismissed by its writers), mentioning this about Italy is an important point, especially since the Italians themselves pointed out, correctly, that they were perfectly capable of caring for their own antiquities. (I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with this argument; I'm just saying that it doesn't apply to Italy, and comparing Italy to Egypt is not necessarily helpful, given the very different economic systems.)
This raised a related point, not discussed in this book but which I have seen elsewhere, which basically comes down to that the Italians have a lot of nerve demanding back artwork that they weren't bothering to protect from thieves, when they had the money to do so – but just didn't bother to hire them. (It is true that Italy in the 1970s, when I lived there, had a high number of robberies, and three of the five times that I've been robbed happened to be in Italy. To be further fair, on one of those three occasions I was robbed by an American tourist, who also just happened to be in Italy, but now I'm getting off-track.) Also mostly left out of this book is awareness that some of these looters were cops.
And although the authors want us to believe that this is all just a bunch of looters stealing from archaeological sites and then selling these artifacts to crooked dealers, at least some of the art of questionable provenance at the Getty was directly stolen from the private collections of wealthy Italians, some of whom did not announce the thefts out of false pride, or World War II, or the slight problem that they themselves had stolen the art, or collected it from haphazard archaeological digging before rules for what to do with antiquities were created. In other cases, the thefts were announced, but people failing to remember in 1984 a theft of a fairly obscure bowl back in 1826 is not exactly the worst moral crime ever, and the Getty did return these articles of clear theft, usually without compensation and at a loss to them – something this book does not detail.
And further further complicating the situation, much of the classical art in Italy was itself looted from Greece, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Turkey and so on. This is not to say that the Romans didn't create their own art, or that the Greek colonies in Italy didn't have a flourishing art culture – they did. But unless the statue in question was found with a nice letter or stone from somebody detailing exactly where and how it was obtained/commissioned, we often don't know. (We do with many of the objects found within Rome since the Romans tended to brag about what they brought back, but we're more shaky on the objects found outside of Rome.) Excavations in Pompeii, as just one example, found several objects not made in Pompeii. The Romans also exported art – Roman statues can be found in Egypt and Libya and Britain. And, to add a further touch of complication, the medievals and later people also enjoyed logging art around or burying it or changing it or whatever. Moving art around, whether paid for or plundered, is not an activity that began in the 19th century.
In other words, when the Getty Museum points out that their statue of Aphrodite, which is probably not Aphrodite, may not have been dug up in Sicily and could have been found elsewhere, they have a point, and the authors' dismissal of this as ludicrous does not lead me to think kindly of their research into classical art and culture, which would be fine if it were not a center part of the book. But then again, this sort of stuff is a lot less fun than the breathless descriptions of looters stealing statues from archaeological sites or hardworking fishermen out on the Adriatic.
But back to the sexism.
Much of the book focuses on the allegations against the Getty's curator and antiquities expert, Dr. Marion True, who worked her way up from a working class background through a PhD program to become a Getty curator, forming friendships with various antiquities dealers along the way. As a Getty curator, she led calls to return objects of dubious provenance back to their home countries – or, at least, Italy (see my discussion above; curators more than willing to return objects to Italy have balked at returning objects to Jordan or Egypt, let alone Iraq), while, according to this book, herself engaging in unethical purchases of various objects that she knew were of dubious provenance, and taking bribes from wealthy dealers and donors wanting her to overlook the questionable paperwork on the antiquities they were donating to the Getty.
It makes a great story, with just three little problems.
One, as the New York Review of Books notes, Dr. True was never convicted. The book slides past this, telling us that because the statute of limitations expired her guilt or innocence remains in doubt. What actually happened was that the statute of limitations expired because the Italian government did not have enough evidence.
Two, as the New York Review also notes, Marion True did not purchase these antiquities alone. She had bosses, who had to approve each and every one of her purchases.
One boss was a woman named Deborah Gribbon, a deputy director at the Getty, who – this is very important – settled with the Getty for a $3 million settlement for sexual harassment. The other bosses were all male. None of these bosses were prosecuted or indicted in any way; they all pocketed large salaries, and in one case, Barry Munitz, pocketing considerably more in what I have to agree were some very questionable expenses.
About Barry Munitz. In one of its many gossipy moments, the book cheerfully details Munitz's work habits, or rather, lack thereof: he hated coming into the office so would instead sit at a pool and dictate things to various secretaries and assistants; he was unable to use a VCR, so took weekly trips to get specially taped for him episodes of the West Wing and so on. He had several affairs with various women, lying to his coworkers and his chief assistant, Jill Murphy, about these. When the Los Angeles Times began their investigation, he told Jill Murphy that she had to get out; she demanded two years salary in severance pay – and got it.
Interestingly, the book details all of these actions – the loans Marion True took out to buy property (one of which, admittedly, was her one documented action of questionable ethics, if not illegal, since the loans came from an antiquities dealer the museum worked with and one of the donors); the $3 million sexual harassment case settlement paid to Dr. Gribbon; and the two years severance pay paid to Jill Murphy as evidence of the same thing: these women were greedy.
Call me, I don't know, naïve about the federal court system, particularly since California is not, like Florida, a right to work state, but when a woman begins a sexual harassment suit, and said suit is almost immediately settled for three million dollars (on a salary of about $90,000), it is just barely possible that, I don't know, she was actually sexually harassed. Given that this settlement was made as the Getty was announcing that it had just had some financial setbacks with the Getty Trust (in the stock market) and cutbacks would need to be made, the slight possibility that just maybe Deborah Gribbon had actual and incontrovertible evidence of sexual harassment becomes probable. And when the text even admits that she had a nine page letter from her male boss, a letter which led another man to ask, "How could you put that in a letter?" "It was her performance review," the same boss that, according to this book, had numerous inappropriate relationships with various women, then this becomes less "probable" and more "certainty."
And yet, even though Gribbon, to repeat, received a three million settlement for sexual harassment, with a boss that sounds awfully like a sexual harasser, the authors of this book
(and to a lesser extent the New York Review of Books article, which seems to have missed the sexual harassment part and accepted the $3 million as a sort of a general hush up payment) completely dismiss any thought that just maybe these women were, indeed, sexually harassed.
Meanwhile, their male bosses? Well, admittedly this book does not do much for the reputation of Barry Munitz, who is undoubtedly speaking to a few attorneys as I type. But, otherwise, Barry Munitz kept his top salary and most of the extras he expensed. None of the other male attorneys or directors suffered at all, although a female attorney was considered a bit overwrought and emotional, and was fired.
(One man, an antiquities dealer living in Italy/Switzerland, was prosecuted and convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten years in jail in Italy, but he's a minor character in this book.)
The book even details one case where True did tell a dealer that a specific object was too hot – and the Getty purchased it anyway. The book assumes that True changed her mind, but, again, True could not authorize the purchase of this object. It seems far more likely that True raised her concerns and was overruled by directors eager to keep their cushy jobs by fulfilling the museum's mission – to have an outstanding antiquities collection, something difficult to achieve when most of the world's major pieces are already settled in major museums. And that she cultivated relationships with antiquities dealers not because she was unethical, but because that was her job. And since her passionate speeches on behalf of source countries embarrassed some of the Getty directors, and since she was a woman, they threw her under the bus. She was only person the Italians investigated. And, as I noted, in the end, those charges were dropped. (It would be nice if Wikipedia updated this information.)
But these more likely considerations are never brought up by the authors. Instead, they revel in making True out to look as awful as possible. You can easily skip over the fact, sidelined here, that Dr. True did, in fact, earn her doctorate – from Harvard, no less. If it took her more than three years to do so, the reason is clear: she had to earn her way through undergraduate and graduate school, without fellowships. (I hear graduate students wincing.) It is not at all surprising or unusual that, under the circumstances, it took her some time to finish her PhD. The authors also add some entirely unnecessary and nasty gossip about her first marriage (completely irrelevant to the case at hand, since the marriage ended before Dr. True joined the Getty) and fail to say anything about a second seemingly more successful marriage.
So, yeah.
Adding to the frustration: the book is not exactly lacking in actual wrongdoing. The first few chapters detail a breathtakingly audacious tax fraud scheme (where the wealthy bought various antiquities and then donated them to the Getty at inflated values, taking the charitable tax break for the inflated value; it was enough to make me wish that I had a million dollars to spend on a nine million dollar tax break). Later chapters detail some very questionable dealings by more than one museum with certain antiquities dealers. But all of that, along with the genuinely interesting questions of the purposes of museums, and the provenance of art, is overlooked in this book's desire to tell a good story – even if it's not entirely a true one.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-29 04:51 pm (UTC)