Stolen objects? Shady dealers? Time for a change?

In the latest debacle over the looting of antiquities from Italy, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York is negotiating with the Italian authorities over objects in its ancient Greek and Roman collection, trying to avoid the crisis facing the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, with its former curator of antiquities on trial in Italy. And those aren't the only museums suddenly being scrutinized.

American museums always pretend to be taken aback to learn that some of what they have acquired might not have been legally exported, as if there weren't a longstanding "don't ask, don't tell" policy. For years, museums have permitted art brokered through cities like Geneva and London to come into their collections. Dealers have been given a nod and a wink, so that they would know better than to share dirt on the origins of what they were selling.

The burden was always on the Italians -- or Greeks or Turks or whomever -- to prove the art was illegally sold.

Museumgoers have adopted their own "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Art comes, art goes: the public doesn't raise a fuss when museums sell off what is, really, the public's art. But acquiring looted treasure from abroad feeds into a particularly destructive foreign stereotype of the big, bad United States, exploiting other countries.

It should give every American pause, not just people who care about culture. Instead, politicians, picking up cues from an indifferent public, take the word of museum directors and officials who say, "Trust us. We know what we're doing." Result: politics as usual.

The latest troubles should cause Americans to ask questions about our ethics and practices. Do the Met, the Cleveland Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- places that bring together cultures from around the world, act as safe houses for civilization and provide public access to millions of people -- also have claims to the world's art, claims that legitimately compete with the nationalist goals of countries that cannot always provide the same care and access?

Isn't it better for an ancient pot dug out of some farm in Sicily to end up at a museum like the Met, where it can be studied, widely seen and cared for, than to become booty in some billionaire's safe in Zurich, Shanghai or Tokyo?

At the same time, does encouraging the movement of artifacts into museums stimulate looting and, in the process, impede the circulation of critical information about the provenance, or history, of these objects?

The answer to all three questions is yes. But the Italians are also to blame. For years Italy was notoriously lax in enforcing its own export laws. Officials on the local level often turned a blind eye to the activities of scavengers. Italy has recently poured money into the policing of ancient sites, border control and bureaucratic reform, but the looting goes on.

One proposal put forward during the Met's talks with Italy could serve as a template for other American museums: The Italians would reclaim ownership of disputed treasures in return for long-term loans, a fair compromise. Yet going after American museums won't prevent looters from turning to Japanese or Chinese or Russian collectors who don't care about international law.

That's partly because Italian law, a function of cultural nationalism, encourages criminality. It requires Italians who discover an antiquity on their property to inform authorities. The authorities can then seize not just what was found, but also the ground where it was discovered, for excavation, without compensating the owners.