Museums Prepare to Announce New Rules Governing Acquisitions

Directors of the country’s largest art museums will announce new guidelines today for how their institutions should acquire antiquities, a controversial issue that has led in recent years to several highly publicized art restitution cases, as well as political battles among some of the world’s most august museums, The New York Times reports.

The Association of Art Museum Directors acknowledged that the new policies will make it more difficult for museums to build antiquities collections, yet they stressed that the new rules will help cut down on the number of objects illegally dug up from archaeological sites around the world.

Under the new rules, museums will be advised not to acquire a work unless tangible 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, the year Unesco ratified a convention banning traffic in illicit antiquities and which has become the accepted cutoff date of antiquities collecting.

However, while a previous guideline had established a rolling, 10-year cutoff, the new rules leave the final decision on whether to buy or accept such objects up to individual museums.

The association said it also plans to establish a new, centralized Internet database through which its members can provide detailed information about newly acquired antiquities.

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