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Free market exchanges, by definition, entail the transfer of legal property claims between buyer and seller. When a visitor leaving a museum buys a pair of sunglasses from a street vendor for $20, a legal transfer of property rights assumes the visitor has a legal right to the $20 bill and the street vendor has a legal right to the sunglasses. If the vendor had stolen the sunglasses, he would be legally liable for criminal theft.
But in Indiana, as in most jurisdictions, the sunglasses buyer could be also. Although unwitting buyers of low-value goods stolen by fly-by-night hustlers might not run much risk of prosecution, museums and private collectors of ancient artifacts are under increasing scrutiny to ensure items in their collections have been obtained legitimately.
In New York City, the district attorney has a special unit called the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which a prosecutor and a retired Marine lead. The ATU pursues recovering and repatriating stolen antiquities to their countries of origin. Since 2017, the unit has recovered and repatriated over 5,700 antiques. The ATU isn’t the only “art cop” out there. According to The Economist, “Italy’s Carabinieri Art Squad has a staff of several hundred, compared with the ATU’s 19.”
The issue is always about the artifact’s “provenance,” which is the record of ownership of the work since its creation. If the artifact is an ancient Egyptian statue, it is nearly impossible to trace it back to 500 B.C. So, how far back does one have to go? We asked our friend and colleague Robert G. La France, director of the David Owsley Museum of Art here on the Ball State campus, about the matter: The critical date is 1970 because that is when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established rules on preventing the illicit import, export, and transfer of ownership of cultural property.
Robert told us, “The Museum adheres to the 1970 convention and uses the Nov. 14, 1970, date as an ‘ethical bright line.’ If there is even a hint of evidence that the antiquity was removed from the country of origin after November 1970, it is treated as illegally exported art by the international community. All subsequent transactions of stolen art are null and void.”
Is there something arbitrary about using Nov. 14, 1970, to decide if someone has a legal title? Well, yes, but bright lines in law are necessary for functional markets.•
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Bohanon and Horowitz are professors of economics at Ball State University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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