The judges’ choice of Utzon’s bold and imaginative design was not without controversy. “From the first, it stirred the people of Sydney to breathless wonder and scalding abuse,” said Philpott. “It was called the Sydney Harbour monster, a piece of Danish pastry, a disintegrating circus tent.” Premier Cahill, worried that the project might be derailed … Read more
The building of the Sydney Opera House began on 2 March 1959. But when BBC Tonight visited the construction site in 1965, it was plagued by technical problems, soaring costs, vacillating public opinion and political infighting. In 1965, BBC reporter Trevor Philpott sat overlooking Sydney Harbour as he tried to find the right metaphor to … Read more
To be a successful art forger requires more than technical proficiency and a misplaced ethical compass. It isn’t enough to approximate the dibby-dabby dots of a Georges Seurat, say, or the thick expressive swirls of Vincent van Gogh. You need to know your history as well as your chemistry. Anachronistic pigments will give you away … Read more
The recent discovery of an art forger’s workshop reminds us of the long history of fraudulent artworks – here are the simple rules to work them out. It’s everywhere: fake news, deep fakes, identity fraud. So ensnared are we in a culture of digitised deceptions, a phenomenon increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence, it would be easy … Read more
Sam was lying in bed one morning when her tenant in a house she owned in Margate sent her a photo of a piece of graffiti that had appeared on the wall outside. Astonishingly, it looked like a Banksy. It would turn out to be perhaps the graffiti artist’s most interesting new artwork of recent … Read more
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