Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art

A tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century?s most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries?many of them still hanging in prominent museums and private collections today

Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices.

Rick Steves' Paris 2009

I've traveled to Europe several times over the past 8 years and purchased various guide books for the planning of each trip and as a guide during the trip. By far the best and most reliable is the Rick Steves series. Factual information. I like it because he has a back door philosphy. I feel like I'm getting the background information from someone that has lived there for years. I also love how I'm able to use it as a guide once I'm there too. He has walking tours of museums - of course I typically purchase the musuem audio tours but in the random time that I don't pay for it, it's nice to have one in the guidebook.

I do not (yet) own this book, but I spent half an hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop recently in an absolute trance paging through it. The sole review here trashing this beautiful book struck me as so unfair that I feel compelled to write a rebuttal.

The reviewer is concerned that this collection of photographs does not represent the daily lives and cultural practices of the people it represents. That in fact the attention these people are getting from tourists and photographers is encouraging them to show off and thus changing their cultural practices from what they were in isolation.

Dreaming in Hindi

Having miraculously survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor, Rich spontaneously accepted a free-lance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language. Before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi.

In Moscow, New Homes Planned for Contemporary Art

 MOSCOW—A recession may not be best time to ask the Russian government for financial investments in culture, but at the very least it can offer moral support. Last Friday Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev green-lighted a $100 million proposal to build a museum of contemporary art in Russia’s capital. The project’s instigators, Mikhail Mindlin and Leonid Bazhanov, serve as heads (executive director and artistic director, respectively) of the National Centre for Contemporary Art, an institution founded in 1992 and headquartered in Moscow. The center currently has branches across Russia and a collection of about 2,500 works of art and hosts exhibitions, lectures, and special programs for artists and scholars.

Romeo and Juliet (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Each edition includes: