When oil tycoon J. Paul Getty died in 1976, he left his boutique Malibu museum nearly his entire $700 million dollar personal fortune–transforming it overnight into the world’s wealthiest art institution. Over the next two decades, the Getty used that fortune to build a world-class collection of ancient art by buying aggressively from an art market awash in recently looted objects. Those acquisitions sowed the seeds for an international scandal that, like sexual abuse in the Catholic Church or steroid use in Major League Baseball, forever changed the way we think about a cherished institution. In the end, American museums were forced to return looted antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars. No museum paid a higher price than the Getty, which gave up 40 of its most prized pieces of ancient art — including its iconic cult statue of Aphrodite. “The international scandal followed our series of investigative exposes in the Los Angeles Times. Now we’ve uncovered its roots in our new book, “Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum.”
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on June 16, 2011. Filed under News.
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Posted by
on June 16, 2011. Filed under