Watch me tonight on Evening Magazine in Seattle

I taped this segment several months ago and was starting to wonder if it would ever make it air. If you're interested, Evening Magazine is on King5 TV at 7:00. I'll try to get a copy of it on here when I can.

"One of the most exciting art finds for a generation"

Reuters reports that two lost paintings by Italian Renaissance master Fra Angelico were recently discovered behind a bedroom door in a modest house in Oxford. They were unearthed by an auctioneer who was called into to manage the estate of the owner of the house, a librarian, who died in July.

The pieces are worth millions. According to the story, the deceased librarian found them in a box of "odds and ends" when she was working as a manuscript curator at a museum in "Huntington, California" back in the 1960s, and pursuaded her father to buy them for "a few hundred pounds." Since there isn't, as far as I know, a place called "Huntington" in California, and I'm not aware of any museums in Huntington Beach, I wonder if these things were actually found at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which has a pretty good art museum attached to it.

This find is particularly astonishing because these paintings are so old. While it's not uncommon to hear stories like this about 20th Century paintings, these things are from the 1430s. It really raises the question of how then ended up in a box of "odds and ends" at the Huntington Library in the 1960s. While they surely weren't as valuable then as they are now, they still would have been considered to be very important paintings, and I can't imagine them slipping through the cracks like this. It makes me wonder if the story behind them is true.

True or not, it's another example of valuable art being discovered in unlikely places. It happens.

Brainwash

Brainwash, a weekly online magazine with a libertarian slant, has published an article by Joanne McNeil that uses a discussion of FAKE to launch a rather interesting analysis of aesthetic subjectivity and the economics of scarcity in the art market, concluding that "the business of art collecting, swimming against the invisible economy, is rich and strange, but value of authenticity is as strong as any currency."

Indeed.

For some reason I'm fascinated by the fact that a libertarian website would choose a faux-Cyrillic font for its masthead. I know communism in Russia withered many years ago, but there's something about this font that, for me, still conjures images of socialist revolutionary propaganda. I wonder what Ayn Rand would have thought of this design choice.