Artnose in the News

Antiques Trade Gazette
The Guardian
De Morgen

Antiques Trade Gazette

The Month in Question

Antiques Trade Gazette
Issue 1569, Week ending 21st & 28th December 2002

SOMETIMES our fellow Europeans can take cultural life a little too seriously. On November 18 the highly respected Belgian national newspaper, De Morgen, reported that international museum community was in a state of shock following the discovery that the Elgin marbles were zijn van Engelse makelij (made by an Englishman). 

Renowned Oxford archaeologist Dr. Rex Tooms, so the story ran, had discovered irrefutable evidence that the sculptor of the Parthenon was an itinerant Iron Age donkey-breeder from Dorset called Phil Davies who, according to an inscription on a terracotta cup Tooms excavated in a villa near Athens, had changed his name to Pheidias.

As a result of this epoch-making discovery, Dr Tooms is pressing for the handing over of the entire Parthenon to Britain, where plans are apparently already underway for the ancient temple to be re-sited in the West Midlands and developed into a multiplex cinema and shopping centre.

Unbeknown to De Morgen, this amazing story was in reality an embarrassingly literal translation of the latest spoof scoop on the satirical art website, artnose.com. It was a stupid mistake," commented a red-faced spokesman for De Morgen. "It all happened on a Sunday when we had a skeletal staff."

The unfortunate Belgian Sunday journalist can be forgiven for falling hoojk, lijn and zinker for artnose.com's Parthenon revelations. One of the website's more recent stories reveals that provincial auctioneers are responding to the so-called 'Ikea Challenge' by giving new names to old furniture to encourage younger buyers back into the salerooms.

"On arrival at the auction house, George III bureaux are disassembled by saleroom porters, shrink-wrapped and packed into carboard boxes with an Allen key enclosed before being sold under the name of Fnek. Pie-crust tea-tables are in future to be known as Smeg, Victorian credenzas will be called Möben and the Regency mahogany linen press is henceforth to be referred to as Klbb."

Ridiculous idea? Now that David Dickinson has appeared nude in the Radio Times, anything is possible.

Put our mini-ad
on your website

home l archive l artists l critics l small ads l dating l links l letters l about