After admitting that around one third of its Coptic art collection was fake, the Brooklyn Museum of Art hasannounced plans to display them in an unusual exhibition next year, in which Coptic works still considered to be genuine will be deliberately placed alongside those which have now been deemed counterfeit. The Independent reports that the exhibition will serve to alert other museums of possible fakes in their collections, [...]

In the wake of extensive debate earlier this year, the pressure is on for Jay-Z at Glastonbury this weekend: detractors questioned the rapper's suitability to headline the Pyramid Stage this Saturday, which Jay-Z and others responded to by pointing out the thinly-veiled racism behind many of the comments. But he isn't the only artist hitting back at whinging festival-goers: the New York Times reports that Kanye [...]

Giving your first novel a title as earnest as "All The Sad Young Literary Men" was probably always going to invite the playground bullies of cultural commentary, and New York writer Keith Gessen has been at the receiving end of increasingly critical attacks by influential New York gossip website Gawker in the last few weeks, in which Gessen is accused of elitism and pretentiousness. The author meanwhile retorted [...]

Three graduates at the Royal Academy School became the envy of art students across the county when Charles Saatchi bought their entire graduate collections hours before the degree show even opened to the public. Carla Busutill, Angus Sanders-Dunnachie, and Jill Mason can now reasonably expect to join the ranks of celebrated artists from Hirst and Emin to Stella Vine, whose careers were launched after Saatchi discovered their work. According [...]

Two very different great artists– musician Bo Diddley and fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent – died this week, and tributes to both poured in, including an homage to Diddley by Atlanta band the Black Lips, whose cover of his classic song Mona was distributed for free online. Although both deaths were widely reported in the news, some commentators complained complained that Diddley’s death in particular didn’t [...]

Sebastian Faulks's new James Bond book received mostly positive reviews this week, with the New York Times noting "Devil May Care obeys the Bond series's most fundamental command: keep the action coming fast and furious."

And the action online also came fast and furious in response to the book's launch, with Neil Smith speed-reading Devil May Care and live-blogging his chapter-by-chapter review on the day of its [...]

When Lucien Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold last week for £17.2m arts columns nationwide began murmuring about capitalism, commodity culture and – crucially – the role of the artist’s muse. Indeed, as the writer Joanna Moorhead points out, the silent, subservient, selfless (and almost without exception female) muse is an uncomfortable concept for today’s society. It was, therefore, reassuring to hear Freud’s model Sue Tilley [...]

Face off?

Polly Stenham's That Face premiered at the Duke of York’s theatre this week, after debuting at the the Royal Court last year. The 21 year old’s portrayal of a middle class family’s meltdown attracted rave reviews, with the Independent’s Paul Taylor remarking that it was a "dazzling debut" and a "richly deserved success". Our own Andrew Billen was more restrained in his praise, however, commenting [...]

Missed opportunities

The UK-US divide between the exposure given to black artists has surfaced in the blogosphere this week. Bonnie Greer noted on Comment is Free that the days when "black people acted, directed and wrote plays" were "gone with the wind". After coming to the UK twenty-two years ago to join a "thriving" and representative theatre scene, she concludes that this has all but disappeared.

David Harewood, [...]

An existential crisis over what it means to be human looms, with the publication of David Levy's book Love and Sex with Robots. Despite the tabloid title, Levy's is a scholarly work, which argues that robotic machines will gradually replace our fellow human beings as companions, both for love and sex. In this week's NS Michael Bywater, finds the robot revolution plausible; "Love is not something to do [...]