Policing the Art Trade

The worldwide traffic in stolen and illegally exported art and artifacts has reached an estimated 92 to 6 billion per year. Efforts to control this flourishing trade, notes Schwartz, a Washington Post writer, raise some surprisingly complicated issues. An international accord drafted in Rome last year, requiring documentation of the provenance of all art and artifacts bought and sold on the international market, has run into strong opposition from dealers, auction houses, and many major museums in Europe and the United States.

The accord, drafted under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), would require owners to show documentation of an object's provenance, Owners who exercised "due diligence" in trying to determine that provenance and were required to return the object would be compensated--and the dealer who sold it to them might have to foot the bill. This prospect alarms dealers, who were already disturbed by a U.S. federal court ruling in an unusual 1989 case.

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