Word: elgin
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...contains the entrance to a cathedral and a lofty balcony from which two putti gaze impishly on the audience below. The cathedral door appears to have been taken from a church in Europe and brought whole to the United States, like the Parthenon friezes taken to England by Lord Elgin. This fact supports the play's and the story's vision of imperialistic thievery, where a powerful country despoils a weaker one of its riches...
...wasn't that Canova imagined himself rivaling the Greeks; practically no one then imagined such a feat was possible. Works like the Apollo Belvedere, let alone the Parthenon marbles (which, abducted from Athens under a veneer of legal transaction by Lord Elgin, went on view in London in 1807), were beyond the reach of living talent; one could only marvel at what Canova, on first seeing the Elgin Marbles in 1815, called "the truth of nature conjoined to the choice of beautiful form -- everything here breathes life . . . with an exquisite artifice, without the slightest affectation or pomp...
...usually overlooked: Jordan's passing. In the grammar of basketball, passes are verbs. More than that, passing is a form of altruism, the unselfishness that transforms an agglomeration of individuals into a cohesive unit. Superb offensive players are rarely good passers. They appear narcissistic, locked inside their own talent. Elgin Baylor, Earl Monroe, Jerry West, Julius Erving often seemed alone on the court with the ball, solo artists in a team sport...
Unlike the case of either the Omaha collection or the Elgin marbles, no one has demanded the return of the Tun-huang pieces. A large number of similar wall paintings remain in the caves, and the pieces are not held to be the "crown jewels" of China...
Many similar cases exist at Harvard museums and at museums around the world. Certainly the categorical return of every work of art to its country of origin is absurd. But some art objects, such as the sacred material of the Omaha, the Elgin marbles and the cave paintings of Tun-huang, are integral to their original culture...