Sharon Waxman's New Book May Be Off To A Rocky Start
Over at Modern Art Notes, art writer Tyler Green takes umbrage with something Times reporter Sharon Waxman wrote recently on her blog. (Waxman, on book leave, is keeping a blog in the course of writing a book, which is about museums and antiquities.) Waxman wrote a passage about former Getty antiquities curator Marion True, who's on trial in Italy for conspiring with antiquities dealers who trafficked in looted antiquities. Nice! But Green points out that Waxman seems to equivocate about True's guilt.
It is a tragic tale, however you slice it: either the insidious corruption of a Harvard-educated, lover of history by the prevailing norms of a see-no-evil antiquities trade. Or the public crucifixion of a competent curator who played by the rules — and the rules lived in a grey zone — and then found herself in the cross-hairs when the rules changed to black and white.
"Except that's not true. True played outside the rules," says Green. Well, we're sure everything will be long fact-checked before publication. And you know: blogs and their disregard for journalistic rules. Bloggers just don't get enough fact-checking, that's what we always say!
