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Last Saturday, an elderly man set up a stall near Central Park and sold eight spray-painted canvases for less than one five-hundredth of their true value. The art works were worth more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, but the man walked away with just four hundred and twenty dollars. Each canvas was an original by the enigmatic British artist Banksy, who was approaching the midpoint of a monthlong residency in New York City. Banksy had asked the man to sell the works on his behalf. For several hours, hundreds of oblivious locals and tourists ignored the quiet salesman, along with the treasure he was hiding in plain sight. The day ended with thirty paintings left unsold. One Banksy aficionado, certain she could distinguish a fake from the real thing, quietly scolded the man for knocking off the artist’s work.

What makes Banksy’s subversive stunt so compelling is that it forces us to acknowledge how incoherently humans derive value. How can a person be willing to pay five hundred times more than another for the same art work born in the same artist’s studio?

Some concepts are easy to evaluate without a reference standard. You don’t need a yardstick, for example, when deciding whether you’re well-rested or exhausted, or hot or cold, because those states are “inherently evaluable”—they’re easy to measure in absolute terms because we have sensitive biological mechanisms that respond when our bodies demand rest, or when the temperature rises far above or falls far below seventy-two degrees. Everyone agrees that three days is too long a period without sleep, but art works satisfy far too abstract a need to attract a universal valuation. When you learn that your favorite abstract art work was actually painted by a child, its value declines precipitously (unless the child happens to be your prodigious four-year-old).

The movie grew out of a conversation Mr. Jenison had with Penn Jillette in which he casually remarked that he thought he had figured out how the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was able to produce canvases so lifelike that they still mystify painters and art historians alike.

The secret, suggested Mr. Jenison, whose role in inventing the “video toaster” means he is sometimes called “the father of desktop video,” was the canny use of mirror-based optical devices. So he set out to test his hypothesis by painting his own stroke-by-stroke version of Vermeer’s “Music Lesson” in a Texas warehouse, with Teller, the quieter half of the duo, documenting every advance and reverse as Mr. Jenison experimented with the optical equipment he thinks Vermeer used.

When he was seventeen years old, the artist and illustrator Chris Foss read a glowing newspaper review of “Whaam!,” the diptych painting by the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which was heavily inspired by a panel from a 1962 comic book. “I remember being completely outraged,” Foss said. “The world was going mad over this blown-up comic-book panel, and all I could think about was the original artist, the person who arranged the dots and who was being completely overlooked. Who knew that, thirty years later, the same thing would happen to me?” In October, “Ornamental Despair,” a 1994 painting by the British artist Glenn Brown, sold at auction in London for $5.7 million. The painting is almost an exact replica of a science-fiction illustration that Foss created for a men’s magazine in the nineteen-seventies, for which he was paid about three hundred and fifty pounds.

How quickly an element decayed and how it did so — meaning which of its component parts it shed — became the focus of researchers in radioactivity. Apart from purely scientific insights, there was a hope that radiation could lead to something marvelous. X-rays, a kind of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and produced by accelerated electrons, had already been hailed as a major medical breakthrough and, in addition to showing doctors their patients’ insides, were being investigated as a treatment for skin lesions from tuberculosis and lupus. In her 1904 book “Investigations on Radioactive Substances,” Marie Curie wrote that radium had promise, too — diseased skin exposed to it later regrew in a healthy state. Radium’s curious ability to destroy tissue was being turned against cancer, with doctors sewing capsules of radium into the surgical wounds of cancer patients (including Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are used today in research). This enthusiasm for radioactivity was not confined to the doctor’s office. The element was in face creams, tonics, even candy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Curie and her daughter wrote on radium in 1926, preliminary experiments suggested that radium could even improve the quality of soil.

Which shows how clueless I was, even then. Forgery is important because it exposes the ideological character of aesthetic experience. We’re actually not, or not only, or never entirely, responding to an art object via its physical attributes. What we’re seeing is not just what we see. We bring with us a lot of non-sensory values—one of which is authenticity.

responding to the widespread social upheaval spreading throughout his country, yemeni artist and activist murad sobay initiated the ’12th hour’ campaign — a series of street art murals, paintings, and graffiti that discuss 12 cultural concerns the country is currently engaged in. the artworks are emblazoned across the walls of the yemeni capital of sana’a, and unfold as an hour-by-hour series, all in pursuit of cultivating awareness of the problems in a peaceful and participatory way. the project is sustained by a massive public response — initiated through a call-to-action on facebook. citizens demonstrate their interest in the creative campaign by taking to the streets with sobay and painting the walls with powerful messages about government and policy. the walls transform into expository stories, which shed light on the consequences of anti-government demonstrations and alternatively encourage a non-violent discourse.