Does LACMA Have a Looted Art Problem?

Michael Phillips — producer of The Sting, Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — learned in early January 2023 that a Buddha sculpture he owned was plundered. An anonymous online activist collective, Lost Arts of Nepal, had publicized a previously published photo of the object, residing on a low glass table in his Beverly Hills living room, alongside another, older picture revealing it ensconced at the base of a temple monument in Bungamati, a t