Word: krater
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...Quai Branly, whose controversial name alone indicates a refusal to identify itself as an anthropology or ethnography museum. The collections of the Quai Branly museum are beautifully displayed and treated as aesthetic objects rather than as historic artifacts that serve as lenses into the culture. Like a Greek krater or a Renaissance altarpiece, African textiles and Oceanic masks can be stripped of their initial context and function—their use value, in other words—and transplanted into the museum context where they acquires a new kind of value—aesthetic value...
...recent years, another episode of his career at the Met came back to haunt him. It involved the Euphronios krater, a Greek mixing pot from the 6th century B.C. that the Met purchased in 1972 for what was then the enormous price of about $1 million. When it was offered to Hoving, he merrily surmised that it might well have been looted from an archeological dig, as he admitted in Making the Mummies Dance, his typically cocky 1993 memoir. Though he goes on in that book to describe how he became convinced that it wasn't stolen, on another page...
Right after my visit to Malibu, I headed back to New York City and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This time I was paying my last respects to the Euphronios krater, a magnificent painted Greek mixing vessel from the 6th century B.C. The Met bought it in 1972 for what was at the time the enormous sum of $1 million. But even as he was haggling over the price, Thomas Hoving, then the Met's director, suspected the jar had been looted from Italy. He even said so years later in his very cocky memoirs...
Late in 2005, the Met's current director, Philippe de Montebello, a much more saturnine character, duly began negotiations for the return of the krater and 20 other pieces from the Met's great collections. One week after I last saw it, the krater was in Rome, along with 68 other objects recovered from the Met, the Getty, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and other places, all on display as part of "Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces"--nostoi is Greek for "homecomings"--a victory-lap exhibition of repatriated treasures...
...Athens' Parthenon in the early 1800s. Its efforts got a big boost last year, when Italian authorities put former Getty antiquities curator Marion True on trial for trafficking in looted works. Then in February, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to return to Italy the Euphronios krater, a 2,500-year-old vase...