by Jon Lackman | 9 March 2006 | Crime, Museums
Thomas Hoving, who was director of the Met when it purchased the Euphronios Krater, talks to Time Out: “the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has 40,000 antiquities. Of that, I’d say 35,000 are suspect [provenance-wise] … Museums have too much shit anyway! All these pompous museum directors say, ‘We’re the showplace for civilization.’ Bullshit! They are just a showplace for greedy, grabby curators — the more they collect, the more they get promoted.” And: “The only person I ever told directly [that he owned a fake] was the owner of a [supposed] Renoir. He said, ‘I don’t care. I love the thing and nobody else is going to have the guts to say what you just did.”
