Although the 1990s witnessed more than a few episodes of shocking cultural destruction, this text notes a great surge in worldwide consciousness of the unique, irreplaceable character of art, and a significant rollback of the cultural prejudices that have been ebbing away since the 1954 Hague Convention declared all art works, whatever their origin, to be "the cultural heritage of mankind." Whether you need to understand a concept such as who owns the past, or something as mundane as whether a museum can sell part of its collection in order to fix the roof, this book aims to set you on the right course. It combines scholarship with a humanistic approach, recognising that law and art each (in the words of Paul Freund) "impose a measure of order on the disorder of experience without stifling the underlying diversity, spontaneity, and disarray."
