The Diminishing Role of Museums in Today's Art World

After the five long, tortuous years that it took Italian authorities to make their dubious case against former Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True, the trial is over -- at last.  It didn't prove either the curator's innocence or the validity of the prosecutors' claim that True knowingly acquired for the Getty numerous ancient artifacts which had been illegally excavated and then smuggled out of Italy. In an all-too-familiar example of excruciating Italian bureaucracy, the criminal charges simply exceeded the statute of limitations, and the trial, as the LA Times put it, "ended in a bureaucratic whimper."