"Who do these materials belong to?"

Carol Conover, a Manhattan art dealer specializing in Chinese art, asked this apparently rhetorical but exceedingly apropos question in an interview with Susan Adams of Forbes magazine. There are hundreds of news articles sizzling on the internet about this issue, so I won't go into it in any detail, but the essence is that the Auction firm of Christie's sold two bronze animal heads from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent for some $40 million and the buyer reneged. Why the heads brought this kind of money at all is a mystery to me, but maybe that's why I'm still relatively poor :-) The buyer, one Cai Mingchao, was reportedly trying to be a Chinese patriot by "sabotaging" the auction. He is, according to press reports, an advisor to a Chinese heritage group as well as being a private collector and auctioneer who had earlier bid successfully on a $15 million Buddha in a Sotheby's sale. He apparently wanted to keep the objects from being sold to someone outside of China. Or, perhaps he had another intention that did not suit the Chinese government and was forced to reneg? Or, was he actually acting as an instrument of the Chinese government? Whatever the case, the issue brings up some important questions, which are timely for numismatists. Who owns any of this "stuff" that is highly touted as "cultural heritage" and indeed, whose culture is it that's being preserved?

There has been so much hooplah about private collectors "stealing the past" that one would think the past (read that as artifacts) must be pretty clearly defined in terms of ownership. After all, one can't claim that something has been stolen from them unless they can claim ownership in the first place. That is at least the concept of justice that Americans have always understood as a universal truth. But, is it really universal? Many cultural property laws in force today are based not on any traditional ownership claim, but rather on an idealistic national heritage claim. It is really a misnomer to call any of the objects from antiquity residing in the ground in Turkey or Egypt, for example, cultural heritage. The present day governments of these countries bear no semblance at all politically, ethnically, religiously nor culturally to those that formerly controlled these lands. Let's call a spade a spade. These countries, and others like them, believe they "own" the material that they lay claim to because they won that material by conquest—not because it is their heritage. Yet, they deny previous tenants of the same land any claim to art and artifacts from that region—railing often about all the "looted" objects of the past that reside in museums and private collections elsewhere. Nevermind that the supposed "looting" often took place before their own governments even existed, and often with the full knowledge and cooperation of local authorities. Ironically, Greek and Armenian objects still rest in Turkish museums, while Turkish and Greek objects reside in Egyptian museums. It's nonsensical. Can cultural heritage be defined by political authority or GPS coordinates? The whole notion of cultural heritage as a national phenomenon is highly overstated and extremely esoteric in our age.

Does the Chinese government have a right to the rabbit and rat's heads that they claim were "stolen" from their country? Not in the eyes of a French court that failed to block the Christie's sale. Since the objects left China in 1860, the supposed theft is itself ancient history. The People's Republic of China did not exist when these bronze decorations left the country—how could they possibly claim ownership? Kudos to the French court for standing on law and not bowing to politics. Kudos also to Christie's for standing firm and auctioning the items amidst furious objections from the Chinese government. The Chinese, it seems, were caught between a rock and a hard spot. They could have purchased the pieces for the state, it would have amounted to a tiny fraction of the income from exports to the U.S., but this would have been an admission that the objects were not illicit. They couldn't have it both ways! In my opinion, Christie's should offer the items to the underbidder, but that is a matter between the consignor and the auctioneer under any applicable laws in France.

A related question might be: does the PRC own all of the coins struck prior to AD 970 by Chinese rulers—no matter where those coins are found today? Huge hoards of these coins have been found in Vietnam, deposited centuries ago. Should a Chinese coin of the Tang Dynasty found in Vietnam be restricted from importation into the United States? Common sense says no, the coins found in Vietnam are owned by someone in Vietnam, not by the Chinese. But such coins are indeed restricted by the Memorandum Of Understanding between the U.S. State Department and China because there are no records to show when they left China. The presumption that every Chinese coin lacking an export permit was exported illegally from China is an unreasonable assumption and the requirement for an importer to prove legality is a reversal of the burden of proof that rightfully rests upon the accusing party — the state in this case. The answer to Carol Conover's question "who do these materials belong to" is already imbedded in the legal codes of each nation. Trying to construct an ideological model as a replacement for public law is a recipe for disaster. There are already plenty of laws in every civilized country that deal with ownership and theft. There is no need or justification for replacing law with ideological administrative controls that become in essence a law without checks and balances.