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Course: Art of Asia > Unit 8
Lesson 2: Cambodia- Angkor Wat
- Angkor Thom, The Great City
- The Bayon: A temple with many faces
- Angkor (UNESCO/TBS)
- The Looting of Cambodian Antiquities
- The scourge of looting: trafficking antiquities, from temple to museum
- Sotheby's Returns Looted 10th Century Statue to Cambodia
- The Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati
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Sotheby's Returns Looted 10th Century Statue to Cambodia
Archaeologist and legal expert Tess Davis (CAS'04) talks about Sotheby's attempt to auction an ancient Cambodian statue that had been looted by the Khmer Rouge in 1972; and the statue's eventual return home.
Want to join the conversation?
- Sotheby's is not the owner, just a middleman, so why do they negotiate the statue's return to Cambodia? Isn't that the job of the actual owner? Also, did they get paid for their time since their income comes from a commission on the auction sale, but it didn't go to auction?(2 votes)
- As the video states, they were in possession of stolen property and they had been warned ahead of time that this was the case.(1 vote)
Video transcript
3 years ago, Cambodia learned that Sotheby's Auction House in
Manhattan was attempting to sell a thousand-year-old masterpiece for $3
million, the feet of which were still at the
temple in Cambodia. Sotheby's was warned by the
very expert they hired to appraise the statute that it was quote
"definitely stolen." They knew the feet were still there. Despite what their
expert told them, they decided to put the statue on the front of one of their more prominent
auction catalogs of the year. The Royal Government of
Cambodia intervened and demanded that the sale be halted
and the piece be returned to Cambodia. Sotheby's did halt the sale, but it
refused to return statue. I've long been involved in an effort to research Cambodia's
cultural heritage loss. We've been focusing on what the law
currently is now, but when I heard that Sotheby's was contesting Cambodia's legislation, we started to
focus our efforts more on the historical loss. And it turns out that the temple of Koh Ker and the
sanctuary of Prasat Chen, which was the site from which the Sotheby's statue was stolen, were specifically protected under law that said that the site and all of its statues were the
property at the state. After the story broke in the New York
Times in February of 2012, the US Attorney's Office actually filed
a civil forfeiture suit seeking to recover and repatriate the
statue to Cambodia. With discovery on the horizon,
Sotheby's agreed to settle and send the statue back home to
Cambodia, and we hope this will just be one of
many. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York voluntarily returned two statues, and we hope that
other museums with these statues in their collection will follow.