Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 25(1) – Spring-Summer 2016 23
activities that collectively have enriched knowledge and paved the way for collaborative projects. The Art of the Past cases illustrate the art market’s susceptibility to corruption, and the importance of international cooperation in the detection and restitution of illicit art. Archive photographs and art loss registers — essential in proving and publicising losses but themselves open to fraud — urgently need to be extended, secured and made accessible. To this end, the NGA has procured funding for digitisation and online access to archived records of the French Institute of Pondicherry. Having been inadvertently involved in art crime, the NGA and AGNSW are committed to improving due diligence, legal and ethical standards, and provenance research necessary for the ongoing development and use of their collections. The next challenge will be ensuring that historical Asian art continues to be collected and publicly displayed in Australia, through careful acquisitions, loans, exhibitions — and perhaps further selected purchases from source countries when there is secure evidence against the possibility of art crime. [ ]
References Allicott, S., 2015. ‘Upper East Side collector returns million-dollar statue after learning it was stolen’, in Eye Witness News (July 1, 2015). Angeleti, G., 2015. ‘Flood of restitutions deepens as museums investigate objects bought through Subhash Kapoor’, in The Art Newspaper (October 21, 2015). Gruber, S., 2012. The fight against the illicit trade in Asian cultural artefacts: Connecting domestic strategies, regional cooperation and international agreements (AsianSIL working paper, 2012), pp.3-8. Gruber, S., 2014. ‘Perspectives on the Investigation, Prosecution and Prevention of Art Crime in Asia’, in Saskia Hufnagel and Duncan Chappell (eds), Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime: Australasian, European and North American Perspectives (Ashgate, 2014), pp.221-235. Jenkins, C. and Ramanathan, A., 2012. ‘The temple raiders’, on Live Mint (September 12, 2012). http://www.livemint.com/Specials/bir2aNHcarLs6Iw8sWAGTM/The-templeraiders.html Kramrisch, S., 1981. Manifestations of Shiva (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1981), p.150. Mackenzie, S. and Yates, D., 2015. ‘Collectors on illicit collecting: Higher loyalties and other techniques of neutralization in the unlawful collecting of rare and precious orchids and antiquities’, in Theoretical Criminology (Sage, 2015). Mashberg, T., 2015. ‘Museums Begin Returning Artifacts to India in Response to Investigation’, in The New York Times (April 7, 2015). Mashberg, T., and Bearak, M., 2015. ‘The Ultimate Temple Raider?: Inside an Antiquities-Smuggling Operation’, in The New York Times (July 23, 2015). Matthews, A., 2013. ‘The man who sold the world’, in GQ Magazine (December 5, 2013).
Lucie Folan is the National Gallery of Australia’s Curator of Asian art, and a researcher on the NGA Asian art provenance research project. Dr. Natalie Seiz is Assistant Curator of Asian Art at AGNSW where she is carrying out provenance research on the Asian collection. Citation: Lucie Folan & Natalie Seiz, ‘Art crime and its aftermath: Australia’s response to the Subhash Kapoor cases’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 25(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring-Summer 2016, pp. 16-23.
Menon, Amarnath K., 2011. ‘Easy pickings: A series of robberies at remote Buddhist sites in Andhra Pradesh exposes the neglect of excavated treasures’, in India Today (30 July 2001). Moynihan, C., 2016. ‘Federal Agents Raid Christie’s, Seizing 2 Ancient Sculptures’, in The New York Times (March 11, 2016). Neal, J.T., 2014. ‘Provenience, Provenance and the UNESCO 1970 Convention: Two Schools of Thought on the Publication of Indeterminate Artifacts. Middle East - Topics & Arguments’, 3, pp.19-28. O’Keefe, P.J., 1997. Trade in Antiquities: Reducing Theft and Destruction (Archetype, 1997). pp.87–88. Selveraj, A., 2012. ‘Antique smuggler Subhash Kapoor to be extradited from Germany’, in Times of India (July 8, 2012). Sivakumar, 2015. ‘Germany returns Durga statue stolen from J&K’, in The Times of India (October 2, 2015). Subrahmanyam, B. and Reddy, E.S., 2008. Buddhist Archaeology in Andhra Pradesh, Department of Archaeology and Museums Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad. Subramanian, L., 2016. ‘Gods forsaken’, in The Week (April 3, 2016). http://www. theweek.in/theweek/cover/illegal-trade-of-art-and-artefacts.html Shroff, C. and Shroff, R., 2015. ‘India’s antiquities laws: An antiquated relic?’, in Trusts & Trustees, 21 (1-2), pp.75-85. Thappar, B.K. (ed.), 1979. Indian archaeology 1973–74, a review, Archaeological Survey of India. https://india.gov.in/official-website-archaeological-survey-india