Looted Dishes Used in Art Project Returned to Iraq – NYTimes.com.
It is interesting that the artist does not appear to reflect upon his own role as a buyer of looted goods in the article or the accompanying short film. 20th century dinner plates may not elicit the same sense of despoliation of heritage that more ancient artifacts do, but it is interesting to contemplate why not?
Is it a quality intrinsic to an object that gives it, over time, an appearance of timelessness, a patina? Or is the difference extrinsic to the thing, located in the social relationships within which the plates circulated?
From a legal perspective, it appears that the federal marshals regard the plates to be equivalent to any kind of looted artifact. However, if the objects had been seized from a dealer in antiquities, I doubt that person would have been brought to the Iraqi embassy and interviewed by an art reporter for the Times.
What is interesting is that although the plates were looted, like thousand of other things stolen from Iraq during the last decade, they were rediscovered acting not like commodities but like art. The plates were performing differently than the typical looted antiquity. If they had been seized from the person who sold them on eBay, the reaction of governmental agents and the Iraqi authorities would have been quite different. So their movement from the commodity field to the art field engenders quite distinct legal and presumably public responses.
But what if after the close of the performance art exhibition, the artist offered to sell the plates as art objects?