Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Getty Museum improves acquisition standards

"Under growing international scrutiny for buying potentially looted antiquities, the J. Paul Getty Museum has dramatically tightened its acquisition standards.The move, announced Thursday, is designed to screen out any item whose history since 1970 is murky. In doing so, two experts said, the Getty is essentially taking responsibility for making sure an item's recent history is clean, instead of challenging critics to prove it's dirty.
The move is not retroactive — if it were, the museum would have to relinquish scores of ancient items from its galleries and storerooms — but some authorities see it as a potential turning point in a global confrontation between curators and archeologists over the way museums do business."
Apologies about this story - I went onto the page linked to in the TinyURL first thing this morning and got access to the article in full, but when I went back to check something it asked me to register. Maybe you'll have more luck.

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