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I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called “sanctified culture,” and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but really ought to be called “everyday culture” — the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music I listen to, the movies you see, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so thrilling, so moving — I’ve always believed that these divisions are false.

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed

As far as I could tell, there were no protesters in the vicinity of Lincoln Center on Nov. 15 before a Saturday matinee, the final performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Metropolitan Opera. This was a big change from the opening night of the Met’s season in September and the premiere of the “Klinghoffer” production last month, when hundreds of angry demonstrators gathered to denounce this opera by the composer John Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman as an anti-Semitic work that dared to humanize terrorists. Of course, Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath. But the only sign I saw being held outside the Met at the sold-out matinee said, “I need a ticket!” in big red letters.This was also to have been the day of a live HD simulcast of “Klinghoffer.” But Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, canceled the broadcast, bowing to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leaders were concerned about the work’s gaining international exposure at a time of a rise in anti-Semitic actions.

This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?

Richard Serra’s new sculpture, “East-West/West-East,” is a set of four standing steel plates rolled in Germany, shipped via Antwerp, and offloaded, trucked, and craned into place in the middle of the western Qatari desert. It’s his second public commission in Qatar—the first, a towering sculpture titled “7,” is his tallest ever—and it is being unveiled, together with a new work, at the Al Riwaq exhibition space, in Doha. “East-West/West-East,” which spans the greatest area of any of Serra’s creations, is yet another grand piece of public art purchased by the Gulf nation. The Qatar Museums Authority is estimated to spend about a billion dollars per year on art. At its head is the young Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a sister of the Emir of Qatar and a Duke University graduate, who was recently named the most powerful person in the art world by ArtReview.

A 19th-century French impressionist artist who perished almost a century ago is the world’s leading aesthetic terrorist; you just don’t know it.Fortunately, the Renoir Sucks at Painting (RSAP) movement is here to change that.

t the core of RSAP’s serious political critiques are Eurocentric aesthetics and beauty standards and the domination of art museums by white men. “If the problems with Eurocentricity were personified in a man, Renoir would be the disgusting” embodiment, Geller insisted.Geller did not mince words: “Renoir is the most pulsating, puss-ridden boil which is the most blatant essence of the problem,” he added.“The fact that this utter charlatan can get by the watchmen defending the high altar of art is the proof positive that the system is broken, and that, for far too long, these decisions have been made by people who have access to fancy art educations and pursue them with an eye toward dictating taste,” Geller explained.

After a law went into effect last summer banning obscenities in public performances, the playwright and director Ivan Vyrypaev excised the curse words from one of his plays, “The Drunks,” for its Russian debut at the prestigious Moscow Art Theater. Some actors played the new version straight, he said, while others winked to make clear what was cut.

Mathematics and art are generally viewed as very different disciplines – one devoted to abstract thought, the other to feeling. But sometimes the parallels between the two are uncanny. From Islamic tiling to the chaotic patterns of Jackson Pollock, we can see remarkable similarities between art and the mathematical research that follows it. The two modes of thinking are not exactly the same, but, in interesting ways, often one seems to foreshadow the other. Does art sometimes spur mathematical discovery? There’s no simple answer to this question, but in some instances it seems very likely.

In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).

But while non-experts are led by being told what is authentic and what is not, clever forgers do a more elaborate version of the same thing to snare specialists. Rather than telling them “this is authentic,” which would summon a defensive reaction on the part of the expert (“Oh yeah, I’m the expert here, I’ll tell you what’s authentic and what isn’t”), they lay a trail of traps by scattering subtle clues that lead the expert into following a carefully plotted trail, but to come to their own conclusion about the authenticity of the work in question.