The LA Times this weekend reports on a collection of artifacts from Papua New Guinea that are currently on loan to the De Young Museum in SF (whose director is John Buchanan, recently of Portland Art Museum), and might include objects that were illegally exported from the country and are listed on that country’s national cultural patrimony list.

Papua New Guinea hasn’t made any official request that the objects be returned, but a curator at the national museum is said to want them back, and an ambassador has made similar suggestions. Meanwhile, the museum touted the objects as a major part of its reopening last year, and would no doubt like the objects to be donated permanently by their owners, John and Marcia Friede, a wealthy couple in Rye, N.Y. Friede sits on the museum board.

This is the tension I like: LA Times writer Lee Romney describes the two men at the center of the controversy, Friede and Barry Craig, an anthropologically minded former curator at the national museum in Papua New Guinea who now is at an Australian museum. (Papua new Guinea got its independence from Australia in 1975.)

There is no love lost between the men, who met in Papua New Guinea years ago. Craig expressed disdain for “Americans of a certain wealth pattern who find their immortality by donating … to art museums.” Friede, meanwhile, described anthropologists as “Marxist types” and attributed the “clamor” to Australian expats “who have a very paternalistic attitude toward the country and believe it’s their responsibility to speak for the poor little natives.”