Provenance and plunder: What museums won't tell us. On how Western museums encourage and abet the smuggling of antiquities.
For the article, click here.
The next time you visit museums, consider what the labels do not say about where the art came from. As the article notes, "Museums fight against having to reveal the provenance of objects precisely because they know that many of the objects in their vast collections have illicit histories behind them."
That being said, it is important to remember that decades ago when museums began acquiring Asian pieces, the world was a different place and removal to a museum often saved pieces from ruin.
