Preface.

• Author: Shoenblum, Jeffrey A.
• Position: Symposium: International Legal Dimensions of Art and Cultural Property

PREFACE

The market for art and cultural property is international. (1) Demand is intense and not particularly local in terms of consumer preference. (2) Supply responds to this intense international demand. Like most anything else, art finds its way to whomever is prepared to pay for it. Regulation affects how it arrives at its ultimate destination, but generally does not prevent it from getting there.

Apart from this international market, legal and policy aspects of art and cultural property have a distinctly international flavor due to historical circumstance. Since many works over time have been removed from their source by way of conquest, expropriation, or theft, claims for cross-border restoration or restitution inevitably involve international law and policy considerations. Even a simple exhibition agreement at a foreign museum may generate complex issues of domestic and international private and public law.

And yet, there has been a relative dearth of coverage of the international legal dimensions of art and cultural property, the focus of this issue of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law and the symposium held at Vanderbilt Law School on February 18-19, 2005. The keynote presentation of the symposium, the Charles N. Burch Lecture, was delivered by Professor Erik Jayme of the University of Heidelberg, considered by many the premier authority in Europe. In his article, Globalization in Art Law: Clash of Interests and International Tendencies, Professor Jayme frames the inquiry for the entire symposium. He identifies five interests that are potentially in conflict: "(1) the global interests of the international civil society, (2) the national interests of states and nations in preserving artworks of national significance in the home country, (3) the private interests of the owners of an artwork or the artists, (4) the interests of the artworks themselves, and finally (5) the market interests." (3)

In resolving the clash of these interests, Professor Jayme acknowledges that they may at first appear irreconcilable. Nonetheless, he urges compromise through the development of and resort to techniques other than litigation. (4) For Professor Jayme the sine qua non of any resolution ought to be the guarantee of public access, thereby furthering the global interest of international civil society. (5)

The subsequent article by Professor Norman Palmer, Bailment or Derailment: Cross-Border Art Loans and the Specter of Ulterior Title, addresses a clash of interests identified by Professor Jayme in the context of the typical international art loan or bailment. Market interests, along with the more abstract global interests of international civil society, confront the private interests of "owners," who surface as individual or state claimants, seeking to recoup works of art that at some point in the past were allegedly improperly appropriated. Following a thoroughgoing examination of the domestic and international legal landscape, including novel theories of law being invoked to facilitate recovery by claimants, (6) Professor Palmer affords insights into how this particular clash of...