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Tetro, Christie's Auction, Art Forgeries, Matthew Crawford, Welcome to Thebes

Presented by Matthew Sweet. With Francis Coppola's new film, a look at how art forgeries are found, Matthew Crawford on the virtues of manual labour and the play Welcome to Thebes.

Matthew Sweet and film critic Ian Christie review Francis Ford Coppola's new film Tetro, examining the director's attempts to reinvent himself.

This evening Christie's are holding an auction of Impressionist and Modern art predicted to be the most valuable art auction ever held in London. Highlights include Picasso's 1903 masterpiece Portrait of Angel Fernandex de Soto (The Absinthe Drink). Godfrey Barker hot-foots it from the auction.

As the National Gallery mounts an exhibition of paintings exposed as fakes and mistakes, the gallery's head of scientific research, Dr Ashok Roy, joins art critic Sarah Kent to discuss the problems with authenticity in art and the latest techniques used to detect forgeries

Are we losing our better selves by spending our lives in offices? Matthew Crawford, philosopher, mechanic and author of The Case for Working with your Hands argues that consumer culture encourages detatchment from the objects on which our daily lives depend.

And Susannah Clapp reviews Welcome to Thebes by Moira Buffini at the National Theatre. In her latest play Buffini draws on Greek Mythology to tell a very modern story of an encounter between the world's richest and the world's poorest countries set in the aftermath of a brutal war.

Producer: Hannah Godfrey.

45 minutes

Broadcast

  • Wed 23 Jun 2010 21:15

Free Thinking

Free Thinking

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