Here’s the second and final part of that interview with Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
LACAYO: Given the anxieties about buying something that might have been looted, and the tighter controls on exports by claimant nations, is it even possible anymore for American museums to buy antiquities?
BRAND: Absolutely. During the past year we made our first antiquities acquisition under our new rules of acquisition. It has a provenance going back to the 19th century. It was published in Germany in the 1880s or 1890s So the objects are out there that satisfy the new policy. But there are fewer of them, and one presumes there’s more demand for them, so they won’t necessarily be the cheapest.
LACAYO: Are there things that have been offered to the Getty that you’ve turned down because of the new policy?
BRAND: Absolutely. But what’s happening now is people just don’t bother offering you things. Once our new policy was announced and everyone knows we’re serious about it, you really don’t get offered certain things, unless you consider getting an auction catalogue to be an offer.
The new rule does mean we’ll be collecting less. But we’re not a large museum. We’ve got a finite space at the Villa. And we’ve always collected carefully, because we want to be able to tell a story. Were not just collecting to become an archive.
LACAYO: I was out at the Getty last spring and saw a wonderful show of Roman mosaic floors from Tunisia. I believe that everything in that show was on loan. Will you have to look more closely into the provenance now even of loan items?
BRAND: It is an issue. For example, I believe that British state museums won’t borrow objects unless those objects have the same provenance as their own acquisitions, meaning that they are traceable back to 1970. And now the British museums are going a step further. They will not lend to an exhibition if other works in the exhibition don’t meet those requirements.
That raises an interesting problem. If I’m doing due diligence on a potential acquisition I can take a year or 18 months and research the hell out of it. But if you’re the third venue of a traveling exhibition, and you’re concerned about the provenance of two objects, you can try to find out the answers but you may not have time. Is it better to cancel the whole show, because of two objects that may or may not have a good provenance?
LACAYO: Let”s talk about The Victorious Youth, the 3rd century B.C. bronze owned by the Getty that Italy also wants returned. Your museum is resisting Italy’s claim to that work, which is one of the centerpieces of the Getty collection. On Tuesday [Italian Culture Minister Francesco] Rutelli told TIME that he was confident that it was stolen and that the statue would be going back to Italy. I know that you’ve agreed not to discuss the case pending a ruling by an Italian judge, but have you agreed simply to accept the ruling of that judge?
BRAND: No. It’s been accepted that that court has no jurisdiction over anyone in the U.S. So we’re going to wait and after that’s out of the way we will continue our discussions.