On 28 April, members of Professor Walsh’s Cultural Heritage symposium and other students and faculty traveled to the Getty Villa for a tour with Jason Felch. Felch is an investigative journalist at the Los Angeles Times and co-author of the 2011 book Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum. The group took a fresh new look at the museum and its collecting practices, including the controversies over such works as the Morgantina Goddess (returned by the museum to Italy in 2011), the Getty Kouros (widely considered to be a modern forgery), and the Victorious Youth (possibly an original work by the 4th century BCE master Lysippos; the Republic of Italy is currently pressing a claim for its return). At the end of the tour, students were broken up into groups to search for unprovenanced (and likely looted) antiquities currently on display, in a trial run of Felch’s proposed “WikiLoot” initiative, which hopes to create a crowdsourced database of potentially stolen artworks in public and private collections.
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