The dispute has highlighted a fundamental predicament: The art world is crawling with counterfeits—estimates of the proportion of art on the secondary market that isn’t what it claims to be range from 40 to 70 percent—and it can be maddeningly difficult to distinguish a forgery from the real thing. Attributions can flip repeatedly during the life of an artwork, a phenomenon that has become even more common as experts reassess collections with help from new scientific techniques. The result is that the question of authenticity, which seems like it should be cut-and-dried, has come to seem quite fluid. That can create confusion, but also opportunities.
Why do Americans need Bigfoot?
This question propels John O’Connor’s “Secret History of Bigfoot,” a farrago of participatory journalism, anthropological speculation, pop-culture parentheticals and broadsides against Donald Trump that often seems stuck together by sap and tar. And is none the worse for it.
After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and some of my classmates would shudder whenever the number 23 appeared in any context. Other people became fascinated by this form of numerology because as soon as you pay more attention to a certain thing—including a number—you get the feeling that you see it too often to be purely coincidence.
For a long time, people assumed that the late mathematician John McKay might have fallen victim to this same phenomenon, known as the “frequency illusion,” or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. In McKay’s case, the number that captured his imagination was 196,884.
Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine?
She had lived in Singapore for 37 years, grown up and discovered her queerness and found the courage to leave her mother’s homophobic home there. She’d worked as a teacher, writer, artist and curator there. She’d fallen in love and had her heart broken there. Despite her appreciation for the island — and especially the community that helped to keep her afloat — the relief of being away from an overbearing and overreaching government was palpable.
In the title essay of her new collection, “Dinner on Monster Island,” De Rozario grapples with the complexity of this feeling, wondering whether leaving her fellow artists and activists behind makes her a monster. Much like the rest of the book, this piece refuses simple answers.
Dunia Ahmed disappeared over a year ago. But before she vanished, weird things were happening, including multiple attempts on her life. So, obviously, two self-proclaimed journalists start a podcast to monetize her tragedy.
In her third novel, “Almost Surely Dead,” Amina Akhtar departs from trends and fashion to sink deep into a missing-person mystery with humorous cynicism and an increasingly creepy edge.
If you crave romances about beekeepers in the Algarve, or sagas of whimsical poisoning in Kensal Green, Nicolas Lunabba’s memoir probably isn’t for you. The clue is very much in the title. Will You Care If I Die? is a raw, intimate story of desperate trust and betrayal, of people perpetually balanced above a terminal abyss. Elegantly translated by Henning Koch, the prose juggles twisted humour, poetry, love and polemic in an aching, challenging journey. Lunabba anatomises what happens when a guarded heart surrenders and when someone always told they were worthless is redefined as precious by even one person.