Word: lacquerer
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...that no civilization, East or West, attained a greater refinement in the decorative arts than Edo Japan. Ceramics, lacquer and textiles were brought to an extraordinary pitch of aesthetic concentration by a large body of artisans whose collective skills have never been surpassed, in Japan or anywhere else. And skill was key. Edo artists and patrons loved virtuosity within a given medium, but they didn't have a hierarchy of art and craft. To them, the work of the lacquerer or the papermaker was no less worthy than that of the screen painter, and in any case so many media...
...received a good deal of publicity is that of Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a San Antonio, Texas, pediatrician with interests in microbiology and archaeology. In 1983, while examining a Mayan jade artifact that art experts claimed was a recent forgery, Garza-Valdes discovered that it was covered by a lacquer-like coating produced by bacteria. Since it also had traces of ancient blood on it that should have been datable by the radiocarbon method, he took it to the University of Arizona dating lab, where scientists scraped off a sample of this natural "varnish" as well as the blood underneath...
...Harada, with his back against the temporary wall of a cafeteria, after his failure to win gold in the normal hill jump, a copy of the results sheet in a glove that said JAPAN; or Cammi Granato, the captain of the U.S. women's hockey team, after a black-lacquer disk with gold dust was hung around her neck, simply holding her face in her hands, overwhelmed...
...task, on the face of it, is impossible: to epitomize this vast field of visual culture, across four millenniums, with a mere 475 objects--ink paintings and calligraphy, porcelain and jade, lacquer and bronze. And yet it works, for three reasons. The first is the often sublime beauty of the objects. The second is the coherence of its frame: everything comes from the Chinese imperial collections as they developed over the centuries; thus what we see is the slowly changing profile of the highest court taste. And the third is that the museum's 650-page tome of a catalog...
...draw, however, as Naples is a major pick-up spot for high school and college students. This designation is facilitated by lax ID checking by some Naples employees. And even if you get bored here, you can always entertain yourself by carving your name or initial into the black lacquer tables and walls. (Don't worry, everyone does...