The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which recently faced allegations that it failed to consistently conduct due diligence before acquiring works and artefacts, has announced that it is putting in place a team of researchers dedicated to this purpose. The museum will bring together a four-person team – a provenance research manager and three provenance researchers – to review its collection and review the policies currently in place to return any ill-gotten objects. The move should inform the actions of arts and historical institutions across the United States.
“As the preeminent voice of the global arts community, it behooves the Met to engage more intensively and proactively in examining certain areas of our collection,” museum director Max Hollein told staff members. in a letter obtained by the New York Times. Hollein further noted that “the emergence of new and additional information, as well as the changing climate on cultural assets, demands that we dedicate additional resources to this work.”
Other steps the museum is taking include assembling an eighteen-person committee, made up of curators, curators and other staff, that will investigate the institution’s legal and public policies and practices. in terms of collection. According to Hollein, the Met will “also convene thought leaders, advocates and opinion makers in the area of cultural property.”
The museum’s actions follow, most recently, a report by ProPublica suggest that many of the objects in its Native American art collection have incomplete or insufficient ownership histories and may be stolen or counterfeited. A previous joint report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and UK nonprofit Finance Uncovered found that the Met’s holdings include more than a thousand artefacts possibly linked to traffickers. Since 2022, Cambodia has been in contact with the Met and the federal government to request the return of a number of improperly obtained objects in the museum’s collection; that same year saw the epileptic crisis and the repatriation by the Manhattan prosecutor’s office of twenty-seven artifacts held by the Met that were deemed to have been stolen from their respective homes in Egypt, Greece and Italy.
