Word: shangs
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This show will take things much further, for specialists, no doubt, but especially for the ordinary viewer. There could be no more vivid introduction to the upper reaches of Chinese art, and this takes hold right at the beginning. No matter how many ritual vessels from the late Shang dynasty (13th to 11th centuries B.C.) you may have seen, the memory of them will pale beside the massive ting, or tripod pot, in the first room, with its swollen bronze belly and deeply incised decoration. And when, in a nearby case, you see a late neolithic pi, or jade disk...
...bewildering to watch the behavior of certain fruit flies at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There, in the laboratories of biologists Ward Odenwald and Shang-Ding Zhang, strange things are happening inside the gallon-size culture jars. In some experiments, the female flies are cowering in groups at the top and bottom of the jars. The males, meanwhile, are having a party -- no, an orgy -- among themselves. With a frenzy usually reserved for chasing females, the males link up end-to-end in big circles or in long, winding rows that look like winged conga lines...
They seem to be everywhere. The 3 Mustaphas 3, a cutting-edge band from England, incorporates styles from the Balkans, Africa and Latin America -- sometimes in a single song. And Shang Shang Typhoon, a Japanese septet with two albums on the Epic/Sony Japan label, blends Okinawan and traditional Japanese music with salsa, reggae, funk and rock. "There is no pure, unadulterated music anymore," says Hart. "Nor should there be. If music doesn't change, it dies. And when the music dies, the community dies." By that measure, the world's future sounds pretty lively...
...fake when the context of desire is switched. There are Egyptian statues from the 7th century B.C. that deliberately copy the archaic style of Old Kingdom figures done nearly two millenniums before. Chinese craftsmen in the Sung dynasty made ritual bronze vessels almost indistinguishable from those of the Shang period, 2,100 years earlier. Roman sculptors in the 2nd century A.D. made versions of 5th century B.C. Greek prototypes, and from then on, there would be an immense industry in the copying, overrestoration and outright forgery of everything antique -- marbles, bronzes, pots, cameo gems, goldwork...
Apart from a Shang bronze and a little Rembrandt self-portrait etching, nothing in the haul could be resold on the open market, or even in its shadow line. With the Vermeer, resale is all but inconceivable, although famous stolen paintings do sometimes get sold: the very picture that named the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet's Impression: Rising Sun, was stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris by armed robbers in 1985 and is believed to be in Japan...