The opening reception of a most unusual exhibit for a major arts institution will take place 5-7 p.m. Thursday evening. It’s FAUX REAL: A Forger’s Story, at the gallery of University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.    

One of the biggest events of the year — in years, actually — for American historians, sociologists, genealogists and researchers of all types is the release, 70-plus years after the fact, of   

Peter Haberkorn, a Cincinnati artist who imaginatively salvages and repurposes older materials, has a background in architectural study. Fittingly, the first thing you notice upon entering Northside’s Prairie to see his new show, Airstream, is just how beautifully his work fits in as gallery-complementing design.    

William Messer, the curator of Iris BookCafe and Gallery's photography shows, follows up his excellent display of work by Czech photographer Hana Jakrl with a new one devoted to Danielle Voirin, w  

Paul Goodman, who died in 1972, isn't as well remembered today as he should be, but he helped shape America's post-World War II alternative (progressive) culture as much as the Beats, the Merry Pran  

Artists have to come from somewhere, I suppose. Still, it’s remarkable how many of the giants of Pop Art came from and/or matriculated in our stretch of the Midwest — Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Robert Indiana in the Hoosier state, Roy Lichtenstein studied at Ohio State and Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann both were born in Cincinnati.
  

Music and art are supposed to be more than time-passers — at their best, they're supposed to offer enlightenment. A new, innovative five-week series that begins today at area museums and religi  

Sometimes you have to leave Ohio — and Cincinnati — to discover how many interesting and unusual connections there are between the Buckeye State and the larger world of modern/contemporary arts and design.   

Now that Sunday night’s Oscars are over, the Internet is full of catty stories and tweets parsing every last second of televised coverage, from Angelina Jolie’s exposed leg to Adam Sandler’s participation in a taped segment in which actors discussed why they love movies. (If he really loved movies, he’d stop making them, some have said.) It’s both understandable and sad that the Oscars — and movie-award season in general — ends like this, with far more interest in the telecast’s trivia than in the movies that win awards. Arguably, the news value of this year’s show peaked before it even officially started, when Sacha Baron Cohen, in costume as “The Dictator” for an upcoming movie, spilled an urn of faux human ashes (ostensibly Kim Jong-il’s) on interviewer Ryan Seacrest. It’s getting worse, too, now that the Internet and 200+-channel cable television have educated us ad nauseam to the nature and inner workings of the Oscar campaign season. We carefully learn how a film builds momentum by moving through all the secondary award ceremonies from critics groups and the Hollywood professional guilds and associations. As a result, the Academy Awards themselves have become anticlimactic, which partially explains the media devotion to dissecting the telecast. And the attempts by the Motion Picture Academy to build false enthusiasm by allowing up to ten Best Picture nominees have been a disaster, since we all now know how to “read” the   nominations to distinguish the real ones (they also have Best Director nods) from the padding. Not all that long ago, few outside Hollywood insiders even knew there was a well-orchestrated “campaign season,” much less how to follow and handicap it.
Convention wisdom, and you hear a lot of it these days, would be to revive the Oscar telecast by de-emphasizing the importance of the awards, themselves. Reduce the number given out on TV, especially the more esoteric or niche ones, in favor of increasing the glitz, spectacle, star power and big production numbers. Do like the Grammys have done, where classical, jazz, folk, blues, opera, international and more are rarely ever presented on the show.
But I think the Academy should go the other way and try to increase public awareness of the importance of Oscar nominations. But maybe not for the Big Four categories – Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress, which probably do suffer from overexposure by the time the telecast comes around (although The Artist, this year’s big winner, could use the help since many people have been scared off by the fact it’s a black-and-white silent film).Click the jump for more on ways the Academy could draw more attention to deserving films such as A Separation, In Darkness, Footnote and Bullhead.    

Whereas many galleries and art centers often serve food at the opening receptions of their shows, Covington's Carnegie Galleries has had quite a bit of success going one step further—actually st