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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtis, post: 24804510, member: 26430&quot;]I understand what you&#039;re saying here, but it&#039;s worth keeping in mind a couple things:</p><p><br /></p><p>1: Museums are the actors hit hardest by cultural patrimony claims and seizures. The actors aggressively pursuing repatriation tend to view museums as &quot;the enemy,&quot; and lump them in with private collectors and dealers as &quot;the other side.&quot; At least in the USA, they dedicate much or even most of their energy to figuring out which museums&#039; objects can be seized (or even used as evidence in criminal prosecution of curators, which happens surprisingly regularly).</p><p><br /></p><p>2: As a policy matter, people recognize there has to some cutoff point, and that the most immediate (and most agreed-upon) concern is <i>future</i> (and very recent) looting/undocumented harvesting of antiquities. So there is a very sound policy reason to de-emphasize objects that have been in collections for a long time. (Likewise, there is a sound reason for collectors to incentivize older, well-documented provenances by paying a bit more for them.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Pre-1970 is the generally agreed upon &quot;gold standard&quot; to leave objects alone in private or institutional collections, except, of course, under extraordinary circumstances. (In fact, museums are usually held to much stricter standards.)</p><p><br /></p><p>So, the stuff you mention like WWII loot taken by governments could definitely still be vulnerable to lawsuits seeking repatriation, if someone &quot;gets a bee in their bonnet.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, Russia doesn&#039;t really care about international legal bodies. If they do return any of it, it&#039;ll be in trade for some other political goal like getting some assets unfrozen in a Spanish bank.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Very similar</i>: Russia wants a bunch of artifacts back that were lost <i>ca.</i> WWII -- including ancient Greek coins, not because another country came and looted them, but because Stalin sold a big chunk of Hermitage coins on the international auction market! (Viz. <a href="https://www.rnumis.com/house_auctions.php?house=SLSS&amp;db_minyr=1844&amp;db_maxyr=2023&amp;dbcountry=All%20Countries" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.rnumis.com/house_auctions.php?house=SLSS&amp;db_minyr=1844&amp;db_maxyr=2023&amp;dbcountry=All%20Countries" rel="nofollow">at least four Schlessinger sales in the 1930s</a>.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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