Anybody not familiar with "Antiques Road Show" on a lot of PBS stations?

People bring in crockery, baskets, furniture, paintings, collections of photos and letters, movie posters. . . .

And if you have an interesting antique, antique experts on the "Road Show" will describe and evaluated it for you on camera and you become one of the sections on the broadcast, and may even wind up saying, "Good grief! I bought that old chest of drawers at a garage sale for $25.00, and now you're telling me that it was made in Massachusetts in the early 1800s and it's worth $35,000!!???"

The item has a provenance. "The history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature;" (Merriam-Webster).

It's been around awhile. It's traveled some. It's been used by a number of people. It even shows some signs of wear.

If someone brought in a flower pot and said, "Here is a priceless antique I threw in a ceramics class I took last summer," how much of a chance of getting on camera do you think they would have?

The show usually ends with a half-dozen people saying things like, "My aunt gave me this lamp and told me it was a Tiffany lamp and was worth a lot of money. They looked at it and told me 'Sears-Roebuck Tiffany imitation,' and that it's worth about twenty-five dollars! Oh, well. I'll take it home an put it on my bedside table."

Which is to say that it may look like one, but it is not an antique.

Doesn't mean that it isn't a nice lamp. But it doesn't have the provenance that defines it as an antique.

Don Firth

P. S. And although there are fakes around, in general, you don't have very many people who want to stretch the word "antique" so a whole bunch of newly manufactured items can be included.