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Curious Objects

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.
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Top 10 Curious Objects Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Curious Objects episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Curious Objects for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Curious Objects episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

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 series of handmade objets d’art in the shapes of pyramids, platters, obelisks, and disks, Engelhart has taken inspiration from porphyry, a material prized by the ancient Romans and employed in the construction of monuments and tombs—just one more instance of the fertile cross-pollination between the arts of the past and the present.

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Curious Objects - Advice Ep: How to Buy a Vintage Engagement Ring
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02/14/24 • 47 min

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.

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In this special throwback episode of Curious Objects, Ben Miller takes listeners on a virtual tour of the suite of beaux-arts abodes built for the Vanderbilts, Oelrichs, Astors, and Berwinds by the likes of Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White. These houses—referred to as “cottages” by their nouveau riche owners—have been lovingly maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County. The organization’s CEO and executive director Trudy Coxe, curator of exhibitions Ashley Householder, and curator of historic landscapes and horticulture Jim Donahue give Ben the lowdown on the almost three hundred years of architectural history preserved here . . . and, of course, the strife and scandal that stalked the lives of the houses’ owners (spoiler: murder and rosarian shenanigans abound).

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Friend of presidents and billionaires, nemesis of Hitlerism, and helicopter skiing enthusiast, Kenneth Rendell is an antiquer who needs no introduction. But listeners hankering for more had best apply to Safeguarding History: Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History, Rendell’s recently published memoir and the occasion for his conversation with Curious Objects’ host Benjamin Miller. On the docket in this episode is the role Rendell played in cracking the case of the forged Hitler Diaries, how he amassed twenty-five thousand rare books and manuscripts in just eleven months for Bill Gates’s personal library, and tips for determining the value and authenticity of precious objects, for collectors new and old.

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Art historian Isabelle Kent regales Ben with the tale of five stained-glass roundels gracing the windows of her childhood home in London's Bedford Park, and he tells her all about his pair of telescoping Sheffield plate candelabra. Bonus tidbit: tips on how to distinguish between a bogus antique and the genuine item.

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Curious Objects - Textiles Don't Get No Respect
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07/13/23 • 62 min

The cope, a long, loose-fitting ceremonial cloak worn by a priests or bishops, is a curious object. “Imagine a circle cut in half—a cope is the shape of that half,” explains Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Henry VII commissioned thirty of these richly embroidered vestments for the English clergy, helping to lay the foundation for that special blend of religion, power, and material prestige that would mark the reign of his son, the notorious Henry VIII. One of these copes is our focus piece this week. But twenty-nine of its brothers and sisters shared the fate of so many Renaissance textiles: oblivion.

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Curious Objects - A Journey Back In Time At the Peabody Essex Museum
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09/05/23 • 35 min

Benjamin Miller continues his odyssey through the PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, which embraces a sizeable portion of the museum’s nearly 2 million objects sourced from around the globe. Christian Louboutins and a $2.1 million copy of the Declaration of Independence are on the menu, as Ben speaks with Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.

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Curious Objects - Around the World at the Peabody Essex Museum
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08/27/23 • 39 min

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is the United States’ oldest continuously operating museum. Today it embraces nearly 1 million objects from around the globe. However, as with most museums, space and programming constraints mean that only a fraction of these can be on view at any one time. Enter PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, a massive new facility that gives curators, visiting scholars—and Ben Miller, host of Curious Objects—access to Jingdazhen punch bowls, documents from the Salem Witch Trials, showy Persian shoes, and much, much more. Feat. Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.

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Curious Objects - Why You Should Spend $10,000 on a Shaving Bowl
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10/18/23 • 45 min

Like host Benjamin Miller, Oliver Newton specializes in silver—specifically, that from England, and especially silver from the nineteenth century and before. He has in hand a 1713 Anthony Nelme shaving bowl, one of those otherwise workaday objects made exceptional by fine craftsmanship, distinguished provenance, and, of course, the luster and value of its material. From the bowl’s history to the ins and outs of slinging hollowware, Oliver and Ben cover the antiquing gamut in the collegial manner what befits two young swells of the trade.

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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” and skeletons who pose like figures from medieval paintings—as for its no-nonsense organization . . . and it might have been even better. In this week’s episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Rhiannon Knol, specialist at Christie’s, which is currently offering Vesalius’s own annotated copy of his book’s second edition. Its margins dark with suggestions—in Latin—for transposition, rephrasing, and new contextual information, this fascinating document of medical history hints at what a third edition would have offered, if not for Vesalius’s untimely death in 1564.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Curious Objects have?

Curious Objects currently has 118 episodes available.

What topics does Curious Objects cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on Curious Objects?

The episode title 'Should Antiquities Return to Where They Came From?' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Curious Objects?

The average episode length on Curious Objects is 43 minutes.

How often are episodes of Curious Objects released?

Episodes of Curious Objects are typically released every 14 days, 5 hours.

When was the first episode of Curious Objects?

The first episode of Curious Objects was released on Nov 3, 2017.

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