Interview with Jason Felch, Co-Author of “Chasing Aphrodite” and Founder of the Museum of Looted Antiquities

October 30, 2024

Interview conducted by Morgan Austrich

About Jason Felch

Jason Felch is a former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He now runs a research firm that performs open source investigations, digging into complex issues involving transnational and organized crime for private clients including law firms, businesses, investors and NGOs. He is the author of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum, a non-fiction, Pulitzer prize finalist book that traces the Getty museum’s involvement in the illegal antiquities trade. In June of 2024, Felch launched the Museum of Looted Antiquities, a digital database that interactively displays repatriated antiquities from all over the world.

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The Interview

What is your background and how did you first become interested in looted art and repatriation?

I was an investigative reporter for many years and started looking into the antiquities trade. As a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, in around 2005 we began looking at the Getty Museum. After a year of reporting on that, we discovered that the issues we were looking at, which had to do with nonprofit governance, were important. However, there was a bigger issue going on at the institution which involved their antiquities collection. Without knowing much about the art market or the world of antiquities, I and a team of other reporters started digging in and investigating how the Getty built its collection. I continued to do that as a reporter for about 10 years, writing on and off about the illicit antiquities, trade and the role of museums in the antiquities trade.

I wrote chasing Aphrodite in 2011, left journalism in 2014 and started a research firm that does something somewhat similar to investigative reporting. We do deep dive, open source research, but we do it for private clients, not for journalism purposes. We work with big law firms, doing investigations into complex disputes and fact patterns. A lot of that work involves understanding transnational crime, organized crime and how criminal groups operate around the world. That has run parallel to my work on the antiquities trade, which is mostly something I do for fun on the side, but has a lot of overlap with some of the issues that we see through our research firm.

What was the process of writing Chasing Aphrodite? What led you to write it, and how did writing it inspire you to now start the Museum of Looted Antiquities (MOLA)?

Between 2005 and 2011 we had already done a whole series of investigative stories in the Los Angeles Times focused on the Getty, but also the Met and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and other American museums that have been acquiring looted antiquities over many years from a network of dealers based mostly in Italy and the Mediterranean. What was missing from that news coverage was really the backstory, the context for how the Getty had gotten into so much trouble with its antiquities collection. There was a long history and an internal debate at the Getty, which is difficult to cover in a newspaper, but really gave additional context to the kind of scandal that we had uncovered at the Getty in the newspaper articles. My colleague Ralph Frammolino and I wrote Chasing Aphrodite in 2011 to add that context and to really provide the backstory of how the Getty developed its collection, going all the way back to J. Paul Getty and the founding of the museum, and a lot of the ethical issues that they and other museums have wrestled with over the years around the acquisition of ancient art.

Thanks to internal documents that we got access to, we were able to illuminate information on how museums dealt with the black market, and how they wrestled with questions about ethics and the law and ultimately built their collections. Despite some of those concerns, this kind of research had not been done before in an effort to build up prominent antiquities collections in the U.S.

What is the MOLA and why did you start it?

MOLA is an effort to document, display and analyze data on objects that have been trafficked. These antiquities have been looted and smuggled through various trafficking networks, and ended up all around the world, in museums, auction houses, and private collections. MOLA seeks to preserve and collect data on how those objects move through the market. The project is really a culmination of some efforts that I’ve been making over the last 20 years to build a unique data set on the illicit antiquities trade. One of the challenges in writing about and studying antiquities trafficking is that there has not been a reliable data set from which we can describe the scope of the problem. When you’re a journalist and you’re writing a story, you want to relate one case to the broader trend it is part of. To describe that broader trend you need statistics. You need some kind of data. So MOLA is very much an approach that we have used in investigative reporting for many years, which is where there’s an absence of data, you can build a unique data set by collecting anecdotes and putting them together by systematically collecting information about each case and building that into a rich data set that you can use to do a much broader analysis of a problem. We did that with a number of different issues when I was a reporter. We did that with the Boy Scouts of America and sexual abuse, and the Boy Scouts taking thousands of cases from around the country and building them into a database.

This is a similar effort where we’re taking these repatriations that happen every day and are making news all the time, and trying to sew them together into a data set by systematically collecting information about them. We can therefore make broader statements about the scope of the market, about the trends, about whether there are more or fewer repatriations every year, and about who’s behind these trafficking cases. We can look into the institutions, collectors, trafficking networks, and looters who are involved in fueling this illicit trade.

What is the process of adding cases to the MOLA database? How do you verify cases and track their provenance?

The project started with a data set that I’ve been building for 20 years, which had about 800 or so cases of repatriations and covered about a million objects. A single repatriation case can contain many objects. For example, the Machu Picchu repatriation case from Yale has 40,000 objects.^[1] In other cases there may be a single object, like the Getty bronze Victorious Youth. I collected basic data about these objects for many years, and so our starting point with MOLA was that foundational data set that needed to be updated.

A lot of the effort in the early phase of the project was defining the fields that we wanted to collect data on and identifying types of information that we could collect about each case and that would allow us to make broader analyses about trafficking issues. In the end we came up with several dozen fields that we collect on each case, that range from information about the objects themselves, the institutions they’re in, their provenance and the false provenance that was used to sell them, but also trafficking networks, smugglers, countries, and customs agencies involved in the investigations.

Then, importantly, price information, which I think is unique in what we’re doing. We’ve collected pricing and value data on these objects so we can make estimates about the economic impact of the illicit antiquities trade. We began work on this about a year ago with a small team of other researchers and developed a kind of digital infrastructure for the project. It has a front end, MOLA, which displays individual cases. I think we launched with a hundred cases each displaying a key object or collection that we thought was iconic and reflects the way trafficking cases work around the world. What we’re doing now is kind of building upon that basic data set by adding more cases all the time. To do that, we’ve got our small team in house at MOLA and we’ve also built a community of researchers from around the world. We’re working together in a discord group to identify new cases of repatriation and identify old repatriations that we may have missed from corners of the world that we haven’t monitored as closely.

We then turn all of those cases into data to add them to our database. The back end of the project is this robust database with now far more than a million individual looted antiquities in it, which the public does not have access to. Using this database, we can do some novel analysis about the problem.

How does MOLA receive funding?

The project in its earliest phases was self funded by me. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for many years, and I thought was important. So I used some of my own resources to get us off the ground. We do have a nonprofit called Achilles Research Group that we set up with some colleagues of mine, Katie Paul and Amr Al-Azm, who do similar monitoring of antiquities and trafficking networks and we have 2 projects under that nonprofit. MOLA is one of them and the other is the Athar Project, which is a project in which Katie and Amr do a lot of work monitoring online social media accounts that are selling and trafficking objects every day. Between the two of us we have both a historical archive of repatriated objects, which gives us a really in-depth view of trafficking patterns in the past, and then an ongoing effort to monitor ongoing trafficking through social media and other platforms. What we’ve been doing since we launched in June is trying to raise additional support for the project. We hope to bring on additional team members and add to the number of cases that we’re collecting and publishing every day.

We also want to develop partnerships with groups around the world who are concerned about these issues, trying to combat antiquities trafficking and learn more about how to avoid purchasing looted antiquities. So we’ve done some consulting for museums who are concerned about objects in their collection and want help understanding how to evaluate those risks. We’ve been talking to groups in countries around the world. I just got an approach by somebody in Sudan who is very concerned about the looting of the Sudan museums and is looking for help monitoring the sale of Sudanese artifacts on online platforms.

Now having established the project, we are building collaborative relationships. We’ve had some conversations with folks at UNESCO about both support for the project, and also about how to collaborate with other groups that UNESCO works with on these issues. So it’s a great foundation for us to build from. We hope that in the future we’ll be able to raise some money to support the work and to build upon what we’ve started.

Does MOLA have any in-person components for its staff or is your work completely virtual?

It’s completely online. Like our museum, it’s a virtual community. This is a transnational issue in which countries and objects from all around the world are flowing through different ports and different borders. It’s really important that we be geographically diverse. So, we have made an effort to connect with and involve people from lots of different corners of the world. The best way to do that is with an online platform like Discord, where we can be in a group together and share notes while working in different time zones and in different corners of the planet

What are the professional backgrounds of your staff?

On our staff we have myself, Damien Huffer who is a Phd in archaeology and has had a long career following trafficking issues. Katherine Davidson, who just received her Phd, and has a background in native American repatriation issues. Liv Siefert is in Australia, and she just got her bachelor’s degree in archaeology and forensic intelligence work.^[2] Archaeology is an important area, but one of the unique things about this topic is that it really cuts across a lot of different backgrounds. So our broader community has people with backgrounds in the law, in investigating open source investigations, in archaeology and in anthropology. We also work with some people who are just concerned, citizens in a lot of countries where looting is prevalent and want to get involved and help out. So it’s a really interdisciplinary group that works on these issues. And it has to be because the issues involving antiquities, trafficking cut across a number of different disciplines.

Why did you choose to display the MOLA database in the format of a digital museum?

The purpose of the museum is to preserve objects and to display and analyze those objects for the public for educational purposes and that is very much what we’re doing. It just so happens that the objects and information we’re collecting is information that museums that many museums would rather not make public, because the stories behind these objects, and how they were trafficked is uncomfortable, and in many cases the museums played a role in acquiring these objects, despite evidence that they had been looted. This is an area that we saw where existing museums that collect these objects have omitted a lot of this information from the public discourse. Oftentimes, when an object is repatriated, they’ll delete data about these objects from their websites and that information is kind of being lost to history.

The reason we’re a museum is because we’re basically a public educational institution that’s looking at these objects as a window into a social issue around the world trafficking antiquities. The purpose of our group is to educate the broader public, and to gather and preserve information about these objects and the networks that traffic them. It’s very much in line with what standard museums do. I think it’s a little bit cheeky because this is something that museums would rather not talk about in many cases, and it’s something that for us is really front and center.

That’s really why we’re doing it, because this is information that has been neglected, omitted, oftentimes purposefully deleted by traditional art museums, and because of that, we saw a real need to preserve it.

Have you received pushback from any of these museums, or maybe even any individuals or collectors whose work you’ve put on the site?

I’m somewhat surprised that we really have not. I definitely anticipated offending some people by collecting these things and putting it on display, but to be honest, a lot of the feedback we’ve received has been very supportive, and encouraging. I think that’s for two reasons. One is the cases that we’re collecting and publishing have all been adjudicated, meaning these are cases that have been resolved, I think all parties, including the museums involved, or the private collectors involved, have agreed to give these things back. They are not disputing that these things were looted, and that they deserve to go home. I’m sure they would rather sweep them under the rug in some cases, and we’re not letting them do that, but everything we’re doing is very fact grounded and based on public record documents that we have stored in a database.

The other thing is, there’s a shifting tide around how the world is looking at this issue, and I think a growing awareness that repatriations are not going away. What is driving that is a growing awareness about how museums and private collectors acquired their collections. I think that all around the world there is a growing awareness that this is a real problem, and that there’s a lack of information about this problem. So we’ve created a resource, starting with these one million objects. However, there is a lot more growth to add to that data set. It is a place where people who are interested in this topic, who want to get involved in this topic can come, learn more and contribute.

How has developing MOLA altered your understanding of the art market?

I followed looted and repatriated art cases for twenty years before launching MOLA, so I had a fairly good but mostly anecdotal sense for the trends. Here, I think what’s really been transformative about the work that we’ve been doing is that for the first time anywhere in the world we have data to back up our hunch, which is that this is a growing problem, that this issue is not going away. It’s actually on the rise. I was just last night updating some of our data on 2024 cases which we’re going to be adding to the data set and 2024 is going to be a record year for repatriations. There are more repatriations this year than in any year prior that we’ve recorded data for. So that is a way with numbers and figures and specifics to confirm the sentiment that we feel, which is that this issue is in the news all the time that it’s happening more and more. I think, being able to support those anecdotal senses with real hard data that we’re collecting is a game changer, because for the first time we can not only say it seems like there are more cases these days, but we can really point to the numbers. As a journalist covering this and as a researcher who studies it, that is something I’ve been longing for for years. Having access to this data, including estimates about the total size of the illicit trade, is a game changer.

What vision and goals do you have for MOLA going forward?

Having launched with our initial data set, there’s a few opportunities for us to grow and expand the work that we’re doing. One is just by building on that data set. The data that I collected is biased in some ways by the fact that I live in the United States. I speak English and Spanish, but not Russian, Hindi or any African languages. Our data set is strong in some ways, but it is missing information in other ways. Part of the reason we’ve built this international team to help is to really bring in perspectives from other countries that apply to identifying the cases, but also interpreting cases and explaining what these objects mean to the different communities. Part of that is gonna be building exhibits. We have an initial launch exhibit in which I wrote an essay about why we did the project, and what some of our preliminary findings were.

Over the coming months and years we’re going to be adding a number of other exhibits that we are planning now which are going to highlight different aspects of the illicit antiquities trade and different takes from different communities around the world. Where are these objects today, now that they have been repatriated, what is the context of the countries in which they have been returned? What are some of the trends that we see, such as false provenance and what does that look like? The exhibits feature is a way for us to highlight a key theme or trend in the data that we are reviewing, and bring that to the public in a new way. We are going to be inviting visiting scholars to create some of those exhibits, and also to do some novel analysis. I think there are economists and public policy people who see the potential with having this data set available to do cutting edge research on this issue in a way that hasn’t been possible before. I think you’ll start seeing academic reports and public policy papers citing some of our data, going ahead, because again, it hasn’t been available until now.

Do you have any interesting case studies that you would like to share, or any that stick out to you?

You are making me choose out of my 100 children which one I like the best and it is never wise to choose a favorite child. What is so interesting about this and the reason I have stuck with this topic for twenty years now is because each of these objects in each of these cases is a window into a different world, and it’s a window into the ancient world. I am constantly learning about ancient cultures and about where those cultures were, why they created these incredible objects, how these objects survived and that to me is endlessly fascinating. If you look at the diversity of the type of objects, and where they’re from, one of my favorite features on the website is the map. If you click on the map you’ll see that each of the objects in our data set corresponds with a point on the map for the place where it came from, and it really illustrates how widespread this problem is, and how many different cultures are affected by this. I’ll often browse that map and dip into cases. These are cases I’m familiar with, but it’s a great reminder of incredible cultural places.

We just added an object from Ethiopia that has this incredible story and significance to the people still living in Ethiopia who revere this object as sacred to this day. So I’m not going to pick one object per se. I’ll just say that the diversity of the objects in our database is really exciting to me, and is a window into these ancient cultures and to learn more about each of them. That keeps me interested in this project after years of looking at it.

How can people get involved in MOLA?

There’s lots of ways to get involved. We describe some of them on the site under the about tab. We’re always looking for contributions. We’ve been self funded to date, and we’re looking to find some support to bring on paid staff. For the time being our work is based on the contributions of people from around the world as volunteers.

People who have specialized knowledge or are just really interested in this arena have an opportunity to identify and contribute objects to the data set and to the museum that we, after a peer review process, can put on display. It’s an opportunity for people interested in this world to learn more, to get involved, to study one particular case, do the research on it and publish that research on our website. We also have a visiting scholars program. This is for people who may have more expertise in this area, but who’ve been frustrated by the lack of data available to do some analysis. With visiting scholars, people can apply to become a visiting scholar at the Museum of Literary Antiquities and get access to a piece of our data set that they can use for really novel research purposes. We’ve had a number of people express interest in becoming visiting scholars.

Finally there are visiting curators. Curators are people who want to put together an exhibit on the site that pulls together from different cultures and regions, or from different trends, and create a specific set of objects and information to say more about one aspect of this. This is a complicated world. It’s a world in which a lot of people have different perspectives, and we’re committed to publishing people with different perspectives from around the world. The visiting curator opportunity is a way for people to come and work with us for a few months to design and publish this exhibit where they can highlight issues that are important to them.

The last thing I would add is that if people are really interested in contributing, there’s a contribute tab on the website where people can make a donation directly through the website. If people are interested in having a sustained engagement with the project and want to really get involved, we have a discord community of more than seventy people where we are talking about these cases every day, tracking new cases as they come up, and working together to do some research and analysis of these cases. People who are really fired up about this can reach out to me or through the website contact us and we will consider adding them to the discord community where we’re working on these issues every day.

Conclusion: The Significance of MOLA

This interview demonstrates the importance of investigating and recording the provenance of stolen art. Jason Felch’s MOLA project is an accessible and engaging database of information about repatriated art pieces, creating a useful resource for researchers, reporters, art historians and any individuals interested in studying the history of stolen antiquities. Learn more about MOLA here.

Center for Art Law would like to extend a special thank you to Jason Felch for volunteering his time to speak about MOLA.

About the Interviewer:

This interview was conducted by Morgan Austrich, an Undergraduate Intern at the Center for Art Law. Morgan Austrich is a senior at New York University studying art history on a pre-law track. She is interested in looted and stolen art, repatriation, and intellectual property as it applies to digital and public art.

Sources:

1. In 2010, Yale made an agreement to return objects from Machu Picchu in its Peabody Museum to Peru’s Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco. Read more here. ↑
2. Learn more about the team at MOLA here ↑