What a view | Fake art, the greatest painters, the National Gallery Singapore – take your pick of art shows and documentaries on TV
- A New Yorker posing as an art dealer hired one of Ai Weiwei’s classmates to fake paintings, which were passed to a Manhattan art gallery for sale
- The story is told in a Netflix documentary, and Netflix is also where you’ll find a primer on great artists. BBC Earth admires the National Gallery Singapore
Art – like everything else – can’t exist in a vacuum. So it’s hardly surprising to find it filtering into other disciplines, particularly architecture.
From the curly Corinthian column to the capering, cavorting cartouche, fancy designs have found their way into and onto buildings. Some edifices, however, can be said to have inspired works of art themselves – while housing works of art.
Its centrepiece – which presenter Rob Bell calls the epitome of “clever engineering […] that looks beautiful” – doesn’t hang on a wall but props up the building’s extensive glass roof. It is a sculpted, load-bearing steel tree that seems to grow to the top of the gallery’s atrium, branching out wildly as it ascends. Standing sentinel over “one of the most important art spaces in Asia”, it is literally “art for art’s sake” – as 10cc sang.
