No More Museum Shenanigans

The New York Times reported yesterday that The Association of Art Museum Directors “will announce new guidelines on Wednesday for how their institutions should collect antiquities[.]…The Association … says the new policy will probably make it even more difficult for museums to build antiquities collections through purchases or… through gifts and bequests from wealthy private collectors. But they assert that the change will help stanch the flow of objects illegally dug up from archaeological sites or other places. The new policy advises museums that they ‘normally should not’ acquire a work unless solid proof exists that the object was outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970, or was legally exported from its probable country of modern discovery after 1970.”