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Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• Attribution is more complicated than we thought. An art dealer in Korea confessed to selling forgeries of Lee Ufan’s paintings, but the artist refuses to say they’re forgeries.
• Meanwhile, in Canada, painter Peter Doig is being sued for saying that a painting is not his.
• And in the UK, a new TV show seeks to slow down museum-goers by planting fake paintings and rewarding the visitors who correctly identify them.
• That concept wouldn’t quite work in L.A.’s new Museum of Broken Relationships, whose exhibits include a spare key never given to its intended recipient, a mirror that didn’t go with an ex’s decorating scheme, and a pair of silicone breast implants a woman got at her boyfriend’s urging.

Benvenuto Cellini; Saliera (salt cellar), 1540-1543; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

Sculptor Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for two things: his bombastic autobiography, the Vita, in which he confesses to multiple murders and a spectacular jailbreak, and for his salt cellar. Yes, that’s right—a dish for salt.

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• Hey red! This is your big chance: Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X, is offering €5,000 and a trip to Vancouver to the person who most closely resembles Van Gogh.
• Jorge Luis Borges’s sister was a pioneering modernist painter. Must have been a very interesting household.
• The travel films of the artist couple known as “Park Avenue Cubists” are suitably kooky.
• And on the topic of films, Cubists, and kooky, here’s an animation of a bar brawl between Matisse and Picasso.
• Does dishware collecting sound like a tame hobby? Try radioactive uranium glass.
• And finally, a question that has long bugged us (really!): why did ancient dolphins look so creepy?

We are introducing a new resource featuring more than 75 images on the topic of biomimicry. Find it in the Artstor Digital Library’s Teaching Resources area: Teaching Resources > Case Studies > STEM to STEAM > Stem to Steam: The Anatomy of Design

After Leonardo da Vinci; original design: c. 1488; Museo nazionale della scienza e della tecnica “Leonardo da Vinci”. Image and original data provided by (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com; scalarchives.com

Throughout history we have looked to nature to define and devise systems of design. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man embodies the dominance of the concept of anthropomorphic balance during the Renaissance. The perfect proportions of man are contained within the ideal geometric shapes of the square and the circle, as if the artist had given graphic proof to the metaphysical declaration of the Greek philosopher Protagoras: man is the measure of all things. Consider our units of measurement, such as the foot and the cubit (from the Latin for forearm) established by the ancients, the braccio (Italian for arm), the pouce (French for thumb, meaning inch), whereby mathematical ratios in architecture were based on the proportions of the human figure.

Love LibGuides? We do too. We’re thrilled to announce our new LibGuides aimed at helping students, faculty, and even librarians get started–or become experts–using the Artstor Digital Library. View them on our home page at artstor.libguides.com, and please feel free to reuse them as you see fit; you have our permission!

Our faculty guide covers everything faculty need to know about presenting and teaching with Artstor Digital Library–from giving presentations using the tools within the database to sources for information about using primary source materials in the classroom. Also included are tips for faculty looking to support their students’ research habits, including links to the Library of Congress’ page on citing images, and in-resource tools like the citation generator and image download features.

Takashima Kazuyuki; Detailed map of the developed port of Yokohama; 1859. Image and original data courtesy of University of British Columbia Library, Rare Books and Special Collections

Artstor and the University of British Columbia are now making available approximately 350 Japanese maps and prints from the UBC Library’s Tokugawa collection.

The University of British Columbia Library (UBC Library) is one of the largest academic libraries in Canada and consistently ranks among the top university research libraries in North America. UBC Library has 14 branches and divisions, two campuses (Vancouver and Kelowna), one off-site hospital library, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre – a multi-purpose teaching and learning facility.

Paleontology staff posing with Fossil Shark Jaws. Image and original data provided by Library, American Museum of Natural History, Anthropology Department, American Museum of Natural History

These photographs of six members of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Paleontology staff sitting inside the massive jaws of a Carcharocles megalodon are the stuff of nightmares—and, of course, just the thing for Shark Week.

Yet, as Brian Switek writes on ScienceBlogs, they’re the result of a miscalculation. “[T]he famous jaws were reconstructed by assuming that the teeth of the extinct shark would have had the same proportions to the jaw as in the living great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), yielding a maw that would have fit a shark 100 feet long or more.”

Missed our #ColorMyArtstor postcards at the ALA conference? Not to worry, you can print your own! Visit the Promoting Artstor section on our Support site and download the full set of five! There you will also find downloadable posters, bookmarks, brochures, and logos to let everyone know that your institution subscribes to Artstor.

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• A new artist residency offers a month in a deserted island accessible only by boat or seaplane. Only joint applications from artist couples or two artists “willing to tolerate each other for the duration” will be accepted.
• In previous Friday Links we told you about the world’s ugliest color and the world’s darkest black. This week we bring you the world’s newest blue.
• Social media is shaping the way art is produced and shown, “perhaps even motivating artists and art institutions to feature work that looks attractive on digital platforms, even if it feels flimsy in real life.”
• What does the Sleeping Hermaphrodite motif in Greco-Roman art tell us about art, sex, and good taste?

Dal Lake, vegetable merchants on boats Image and original data provided by Barbara Anello; Photographs © Barbara J. Anello

Lower East Side: Dancing Ninja, Near 105 & 104; Graffiti Lower East Side Manhattan 1991. Photograph © Barbara J. Anello

Artstor is sharing two new collections of photographs by Barbara J. Anello: graffiti in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s, and Tibetan Buddhist art and architecture in Ladakh, India.

The photographs from Ladakh were exhibited at the Overseas Press Club in New York City and Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 1982.