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The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is one of the greatest museums in the world, with a history stretching back over 300 years. Largely inaccessible to Western visitors during the Soviet period, the Museum's inner workings have remained hidden from view in the intervening years. Now, for the first time, the longstanding Director of the Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky and journalist Geraldine Norman lift the lid on the scandals of different kinds which have beset the Hermitage during its fascinating history, from the era of the Museum's founder Catherine the Great to the present. Through the lens of scandal, the book seeks to draw parallels between the recent problems of the Museum and earlier periods of its rich history. Covering restitution issues, controversial sales and purchases, thefts, fluctuating attributions, the fight over new art, corruption associated with the construction of the Museum's buildings, politically motivated scandals, and the 'scandal' of the Covid-19 pandemic, the book provides unique insight into the challenges of managing a world-famous institution in a country which has undergone huge political upheavals in the modern period.
A colorful and fast-moving account of how postwar London became the global center of the art market—a story of Impressionist masterpieces, dodgy dealers, and ground-breaking financial transactions. On October 15, 1958, Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an "event sale” of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh, and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for £781,000—at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world center of the art market and Sotheby's as an international auction house. It began a shift in powe...
The former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the world of art forgery, from ancient times to the present, sharing anecdotes about some of the costliest, most embarrassing forgeries ever, as well as the motives of the fakers.
From tabloid headlines to scientific discoveries to investigative documentaries, the claim that truth is being revealed is commonplace today. Such attention-grabbing claims can conjure allure, sell products, launch careers, cement authority and much more besides. And yet, despite the familiarity of revelation-talk, this notion has been subject to limited academic theorizing to date outside of matters divine. Revelations sets out to examine how the making available through revealing is accomplished as well as the implications of revealing. In other words, it is concerned with how revelations are realized and what is realized through them. Central to the argument will be treating attempts to make available as processes that can entail mix – that is, as processes that combine treating truth as publicly demonstrable but also as beyond simple verification, as alternately intelligible but also as unknowable. In taking the pervasive appeal to revealing as its topic, and through drawing inspiration from a range of disciplines, this book should appeal to a variety of audiences, including those interested in secrecy, conspiracy, expertise, celebrity, science and technology.
60 Minutes brings its award-winning journalistic skills and unmistakable broadcast style to the page, delving into its archives to present stories on one of the program's most popular subjects: the con man. Con Men exposes a truly eclectic group of swindlers and rogues: the extraordinary characters of ABSCAM, pyramid-scheme millionaires and stock-market crooks, snake-oil salesmen and art forgers. Many of them are diabolical -- all of them are intriguing. Here 60 Minutes captures each one in vivid detail: self-proclaimed con man Kirby Hensley, the illiterate purveyor of church ministries to millions via mail-order; Clifford Irving, who fabricated Howard Hughes's "autobiography" for hundreds o...
Ratu Sir Kamisese's thoughtful and entertaining memoir of his personal and political life candidly outlines significant events in the development of Fiji, a plural society for which The Pacific Way holds a special and evocative meaning. The phrase inspired his 1970 partnership with the Indian opposition leader to produce a constitution whereby, in his own words, "people of different races, opinions and cultures can live and work together for the good of all, can differ without rancour, govern without malice, and accept responsibility as reasonable people intent on serving the interests of all." After leading Fiji through 17 years of multiracial harmony, he found it ironic that his defeat in ...
The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in art forgery, caused both by the advent of national museums and by a rapidly growing bourgeois interest in collecting objects from the past. This rise had profound repercussions on notions of selfhood and national identity within and outside the realm of art. Although art critics denounced forgery for its affront to artistic traditions, they were fascinated by its power to shape the human and object worlds and adopted a language of art forgery to articulate a link between the making of fakes and the making of selves. The Deceivers explores the intersections among artistic crime, literary narrative, and the definition of identity. L...
According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo often borrowed drawings of past masters, which he copied, returning his imitations to the owners and keeping originals. Half a millennium later, Andy Warhol made a game of "forging" the Mona Lisa, questioning the entire concept of originality. Forged explores art forgery from ancient times to the present. In chapters combining lively biography with insightful art criticism, Jonathon Keats profiles individual art forgers and connects their stories to broader themes about the role of forgeries in society. From the Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto who faked a Raphael masterpiece at the request of his Medici patrons, to the Vermeer counterfeiter Han...
Revealing a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene in the Balkans On the Very Edge brings together fourteen empirical and comparative essays about the production, perception, and reception of modernity and modernism in the visual arts, architecture, and literature of interwar Serbia (1918–1941). The contributions highlight some idiosyncratic features of modernist processes in this complex period in Serbian arts and society, which emerged ‘on the very edge’ between territorial and cultural, new and old, modern and traditional identities. With an open methodological framework this book reveals a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene, which, albeit prematurely, announced interests in plu...
Describes the methods used to make artistic, literary, documentary, and political forgeries and the recent scientific advances in their detection. Includes over 600 objects from the British Museum and many other major collections, from ancient Babylonia to the present day.