Free Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch Page B

acquisition with murky origins would no doubt further outrage archaeologists. The rift between museums and the scholarly world that had spilled over into public view in the 1970s with the Met's Euphronios krater controversy had never healed. Indeed, the animosity had deepened and focused on the Getty, whose aggressive antiquities acquisitions were being denounced by the Archaeological Institute of America as "flagrantly unacceptable." Emily Vermeule, a Harvard professor and one of the leading classical scholars in the country, had recently told Houghton that she would never visit or be associated with the museum in Malibu, which had "compromised everyone who had come in touch with it" and did nothing to promote scholarship, while doing much to hinder it.
    A few weeks after first seeing the kouros, Walsh asked Houghton in a confidential memo how buying it would affect the Getty's reputation. "I am sorry to make you my tutor in the subject of collecting ethics, but you are surely the best informed and the most concerned colleague at hand," Walsh wrote. "What would it be necessary for us to do in the future to secure the approval and respect of those whose opinion we ought to value?"
    In effect, Houghton was being asked to explain a central paradox of American museums: how could institutions dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge justify their participation in an illicit antiquities trade that ultimately destroyed knowledge?
    His answer came in a series of memos laying out the rationalization American museums had relied on for generations. There was a clear link between the demand created by the aggressive buying of the Getty and other institutions and the looting of items in source countries, Houghton acknowledged. The result was beneficial in one way: it brought "very significant material into the market." But most archaeologists believed that it led to irreparable cultural loss through vandalism and destruction of ancient sites. Thus archaeologists would "probably be prepared to come down hard against a museum which demonstrably and visibly engaged itself in supporting this process, however laudable the result."
    Archaeologists believe that objects should be preserved in context at the source, where they can be carefully excavated and studied, Houghton explained. Museum curators have a more practical approach. "They tend to accept the troubling and messy realities of unenforceable laws and of a market in antiquities whose more blatant excesses may be curtailed but which will continue to exist whatever the circumstance." Indeed, curators feel that they have a "special obligation" to acquire, study, and publish information about important antiquities, even if their original context has been lost. The Getty's wealth meant that it was better prepared than most museums in the country to preserve, publish, and make available to scholars and the general public the objects it bought.
    Looting would continue even if the Getty stopped buying, Houghton said. It was an argument that, he acknowledged, "can seem to be little more than a facile rationalization for the unrestrained acquisition of archeological material."
    Ultimately, the ethical question comes down to this: will the acquisition of an object do more to destroy the past or preserve it? Houghton argued that buying antiquities—even those that have been recently looted—does greater good than harm.
    The museum's acquisition policy—which required notifying foreign governments of objects it intended to purchase—was already more rigorous than those of most other American museums. Harvard's Fogg Museum, one of the strictest, required just a "reasonable assurance" that an antiquity had left its country of origin before the 1970 UNESCO Convention. The Met did not require any documentation to support the fact, while the Boston MFA's policy made no mention of the country of origin, instead relying on a dealer's word that an object had entered the United States legally.