x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Curious Objects

The Magazine Antiques

Through interviews with leading figures in the world of fine and decorative arts, Curious Objects—a podcast from The Magazine Antiques—explores the hidden histories, the little-known facts, the intricacies, and the idiosyncrasies that breathe life and energy into historical works of craft and art.

arts

All Episodes

45:40

Rescued by the Romanovs, a Fabergé Treasure Comes to...

Curious Objects ·

2024/05/01

The Romanov dynasty was wiped out in 1918 . . . but what happened to all their stuff? Well, some of it ended up at Heritage Auctions, whose Imperial Fabergé and Russian Works of Art auction on May 17 hopes to move a treasure trove of ikons, furniture pieces, diaries, and gold-encrusted baubles. To discuss the sale—and in particular a Fabergé bonbonnière given to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna—Ben Miller welcomes guest Nicholas Nicholson, specialist in Russian works of art at Heritage.Learn

en

58:55

Advice Ep: How to Buy an Antique/Vintage Rug

Curious Objects ·

2024/04/24

In the newest installment of our advice series, Ben Miller speaks with Jordan Heres, co-founder with his wife, Ingrid, of the Charlottesville, Virginia, rug purveyor Weft and Wool. The focus object is a rug from Karaja, Iran, made in about 1900, but Ben’s and Jordan also tackle such subjects as how often a rug should be washed, why you should never use a beater bar when vacuuming a rug, and where the best rugs can be found (spoiler: it’s Istanbul, but the runner-up might surprise listeners). Learn

en

38:39

THROWBACK: This Chair Is Made of America

Curious Objects ·

2024/04/17

In this special throwback episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Ellery Foutch, assistant professor of American studies at Middlebury College, about a “relic Windsor chair” assembled by Henry Sheldon (founder of the Middlebury museum named in his honor) in 1884. This unique piece of furniture was built with fragments of wood salvaged from structures with local or national significance—such as the warship Old Ironsides, the William Penn House in Philadelphia, and a colonial whipping post

en

14:56

CO Bites: A Pitch-Perfect Vermont Songbook

Curious Objects ·

2024/04/10

In this Curious Objects Bites episode, Benjamin Miller examines an 1830s manuscript tune book from rural Vermont. Bound crudely in leather, this book of sacred music was made by a farmer named Bernard Ward as a gift for his grandson, and many years later passed into the major collection of musical instruments, books, scores, and ephemera assembled by Frederick R. Selch. Filling Ben in on the details of this unusual item is Brenton Grom, executive director of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum in

en

35:39

The Book of Dragons (and the Con Artist Who Made It),...

Curious Objects ·

2024/03/27

Rebecca Romney, co-founder of rare book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a frequent guest on Pawn Stars, returns to our podcast Curious Objects this week. She has with her a mid-nineteenth-century abecebestiary, or calligraphic treatment of the alphabet with animal motifs, made by Englishman Charles Eduard Stuart . . . except that wasn't really his name. Charles Manning Allen and his brother John, known as the Sobieski Stuarts, were eccentric book publishers who claimed to be descendants of Stuart

en

6:15

Remembering Greg Cerio

Curious Objects ·

2024/03/20

Greg Cerio, editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES, died Saturday. In this special episode, Ben pays tribute to the man who gave Curious Objects the green light, and who foresaw a rich future for objects from the past.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

en

13:44

CO Bites: Yoshiko Takaezo's "Closed Form," with Glenn...

Curious Objects ·

2024/03/13

This week Glenn Adamson returns to the pod to discuss an exhibition he co-curated at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu focuses on the work of the Okinawan-American ceramicist, which bridges the gulf between art and craft. In this inaugural installment of Curious Objects Bites—bingeable conversations about fascinating things for the busy listener—Adamson details a “closed form”: a Takaezu pot that confines a bead that rattles around inside.Learn more

en

42:00

Taylor Thistlethwaite Gets Excited About "Brown...

Curious Objects ·

2024/03/06

Taylor Thistlethwaite, proprietor of Thistlethwaite Americana in Middleburg, Virginia, returns to the pod to defend the merits of “brown furniture.” Whether it’s earthy, richly figured black walnut or the sometimes-overlooked black cherry, it’s important not to “think of wood as just something brown,” Taylor says. “There’s so much life in it. And it matures like fine wine.” Case in point: Taylor’s three-hundred-year-old chest-of-drawers with chunky hardware and unusual feet that is as beautiful as

en

27:53

THROWBACK: Once Upon a Bowl

Curious Objects ·

2024/02/28

If you ever start to feel like history is abstract, spend a little time with an object or two that were actually there. For instance, a silver bowl and a pair of candlesticks that once belonged to New York grandees Pieter and Elizabeth Delancey, which suddenly reappeared recently after being lost for three hundred years. In this special rerun of one of Curious Objects’ most popular episodes, host Benjamin Miller revisits the obscure journey made by these three storied objects, with the help of Debra

en

43:55

Ben visits the Art Slice podcast

Curious Objects ·

2024/02/21

Last month Benjamin Miller made a guest appearance on Art Slice, hosted by the podcasting power couple—and artists and art historians—Stephanie Dueñas and Russell Shoemaker, and now available here. The trio’s conversation focuses on a dazzling group of mixed-metal wares made by Tiffany and Company in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including such standouts as an 1879 chocolate pot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a coffee pot shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Of special

en

47:30

Advice Ep: How to Buy a Vintage Engagement Ring

Curious Objects ·

2024/02/14

How much should you spend? What kind of stone should you get? Is antique better than modern? These are just a few of the many questions that any courter must consider when ring-hunting. Here to share his ring lore on this special Valentine’s Day episode is a true jewelry expert, Matthew Imberman of Kentshire Galleries. First things first: don’t worry about cursed jewelry. In Imberman’s experience, it’s usually not.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

en

37:01

The Woman Who Saved Wedgwood

Curious Objects ·

2024/02/07

In 1909, Daisy Makeig-Jones was hired by the Wedgwood firm in Staffordshire, England, to decorate pottery. She would go on to develop the “Fairyland” luster pattern, which combined dazzling iridescent glazes with motifs from fairy tales and would serve to revitalize the Wedgwood brand. Bailey Tichenor, one half of the duo behind Artistoric gallery, comes on the pod to discuss a mid-1920s example of Makeig-Jones’s work called Poplar Trees, which boasts depictions of cypresses and other trees, a

en

72:55

“Enriching Your Life Through Collecting” at the...

Curious Objects ·

2024/01/31

In what has become an annual tradition, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller capped off January with a panel discussion at the Winter Show. This year’s edition was named “Catching the Bug: Enriching Your Life Through Collecting,” and featured three distinguished collectors and the objects they live by and through. The Hawkes bowl belonging to conservator Lloyd Zuckerberg, interior designer Marcy Masterson’s Italian side chair, and the Etruscan hand mirror of artist and educator Thomas Lollar provide

en

33:20

The Beatles as Painters

Curious Objects ·

2024/01/24

In the summer of 1966 the Beatles were in Japan, whirling through the first leg of what would be their final world tour. Hoping to forestall the dangerous excesses of Beatlemania, Japanese authorities confined the Fab Four to their hotel suite at Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel for almost the duration of their one-hundred-hour stay. Casting about for things to do, the Beatles fell to painting: each took upon himself to design one quadrant of an acrylic-and-watercolor artwork known as Images of a Woman,

en

50:40

The Marginalia That Made Christie's Value This Book...

Curious Objects ·

2024/01/17

In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published a seven-part book that would become the foundational text of modern anatomy: On the Fabric of the Human Body. With it, the Flemish anatomist overturned more than a millennium’s worth of medical dogma, many of his breakthroughs coming while dissecting human corpses—a method of study unavailable to physicians of classical antiquity. Part education and part art, Vesalius’s illustrated anatomy is as respected today for its woodcut specimen drawings—flayed “muscle men”

en

50:17

Advice Ep: Making Your Home a Source of Inspiration,...

Curious Objects ·

2024/01/10

In this week’s episode, interior designer Tara McCauley gives listeners an inside look at her practice, which she likens, curiously, to a travel agency. She says: “I like to think of myself like I’ve gone into the market and I’ve done the research and I’ve talked to the experts and the locals and I’m bringing you the best kind of experience you’re looking for.” She's also brought along a small splatter-painted box by artist Thomas Engelhart, a veteran of the houses of Mugler and Hermès. For his

en

72:39

Ask Ben Anything

Curious Objects ·

2024/01/03

Over the past couple weeks we’ve been fielding and compiling questions that listeners have put to host Benjamin Miller. A taste: “Has any object ever truly baffled you?” “What’s the best town for antiquing?” and “Will Curious Objects ever do an adults-only episode?” This week’s episode represents a taste of his own medicine for Ben, usually the interviewer, and offered a chance for us at The Magazine ANTIQUES to learn a little more about what the Curious Objects community puzzles over. Learn more

en

46:30

END OF YEAR THROWBACK: A Conversation with Luthier...

Curious Objects ·

2023/12/27

A top-tier orchestra might well have tens of millions of dollars–worth of instruments on stage. Many of them are antiques. And there are few people who know these instruments more intimately than Paul Becker. He’s the fifth-generation owner and director of Carl Becker and Son, a 150-year-old luthier business in Chicago. He and his family have restored the most famous instruments in the world, and they’ve put violins, violas, and cellos in the hands of many of the world’s finest musicians. In a

en

39:33

Lewis Littlepage and the Amazing Silk-embroidered...

Curious Objects ·

2023/12/20

“Conservative” by the standards of its day, the three-piece suit worn by American statesman and bon vivant Lewis Littlepage (1762–1802) at the court of Catherine the Great is sewn of silk and embroidered with sprays of blue, white, and grey flowers. Neal Hurst, curator of textiles and historic dress at Colonial Williamsburg, comes on our Curious Objects podcast to discuss this colorful garment in connection with Littlepage’s similarly colorful life—from contretemps with American Founding Father John

en

37:06

What makes Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire” Cycle as...

Curious Objects ·

2023/12/13

This week Benjamin Miller is joined by filmmaker Rachel Gould, better known on YouTube as the Art Tourist, to discuss Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire cycle of about 1834–1836. A watershed in the genre of landscape painting, Cole’s canvases use an allegory of empire—germination, prosperity, decline—to preach a cautionary tale about environmental and spiritual overreach. It was message delivered with earnest intent to the citizens of the young and ravenous American republic, and is hardly less relevant

en

124 results

Similar Podcasts

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a

Diaries: From the Housing Projects to Power

Mia Z. Edwards

九霄电台

九霄电台

The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio| Daily Mystery Dramas

Adam Graham|Old Time Radio Detective Host

The Magnus Archives

Rusty Quill