Word: original
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mediator! (middlemen), who make their arrangements primarily with dealers in Switzerland or Italy. Important pots and bronzes are smuggled across the Swiss border in car trunks or, if small enough, in air luggage. Once in Switzerland, the hot object can be "washed" (given a provenance, or certificate of origin) and exported legally to any country in the world. For every dollar a tombarolo makes, the mediatoro will stand to get $5-and the final dealer $20 or more...
Collectors often show a frank indifference to the origins of their pots and bronzes. Said an official of the antiquities museum in Basel, Switzerland: "It's public knowledge that 90% of the certificates of origin accompanying such works of art are totally unreliable. Most certificates are manipulated. The Italians can raise a ruckus, as in the case of the Metropolitan vase. But if they cannot prove anything, their claims are worthless. Unless the Italian authorities can come up with something like a photograph showing a work of art in an identifiable Etruscan tomb, they don't have...
...wrong to pick up the 2,500-year-old krater that may have been bootlegged out of Italy? "Ninety-five percent of ancient art material in this country has been smuggled in," Cooney said. "If the museums began to send back all the smuggled material to their countries of origin, the museum walls would be bare." Back at the Met, Curator of Greek and Roman Art Dietrich von Bothmer reacted to Cooney's words. "It's so crude," he said...
...What University is credited with the origin of modern football in the United States...
...thousands of buraku-min have tried to flee oppression by "passing." But the risk of discovery is high -partly because of the diligence of private detectives hired either by corporation personnel managers or by parents who suspect that their offspring's fiance may be of buraku-min origin. Many outcasts, while passing at work in the city, still prefer to live in the reassuringly familiar surroundings of their special hamlets; they must resort to ruses like getting off the bus a stop or two early so that fellow passengers who are not outcasts will not see them entering...