Collections

Figuring out the value of a collectible car these days can be more like an episode of "CSI" than "Antiques Roadshow." Sure, a vehicle's condition and relative rarity are keys to its price on the auction block, but potential buyers have to be as concerned with authenticity. Does it have only factory-installed parts? Has the engine been replaced? Do all of the identifying numbers match? Are the documents genuine?

Jorgen Evil Ekvoll and Can Sayinli's hand-woven silk rug -- a design called War, depicting a baby surrounded by bleeding bodies, hand grenades and guns -- sold for $60,000 at the Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition in December. Dan Golden's wry cartoons of cigarette-smoking canines, psycho-babbling infants and the Red Cross symbol with the tag line "Morphine Is the Best Medicine" on hand-tufted wool sell for $6,750 each at Eccola Imports in L.A.

Draw your own conclusion about political cartoons. Neighbors Bob Scheibel and Daryl Cagle certainly have. Scheibel contends that editorial cartoonists no longer have the free hand -- or the public clout -- that they enjoyed for more than 200 free-wheeling years. Cagle counters that today's political cartoonists are doing the most significant work in the history of their barbed pen-and-ink profession.

Her fingers ran over the smooth red buttons with flecks of gold and the wavy sea-green buttons and the black buttons with ridges that made them look like miniature fans. Yoshini Kondo admired them all -- buttons sewn in lots of 12 on yellowing cards, buttons in every color and size, buttons in Bakelite, casein, ceramic, shell, wood, even silk thread. But did she need old buttons in her life?

Kara Knack has stars in her eyes. And moons and suns and planets. There are thousands and thousands, to paraphrase the late Carl Sagan, the great popularizer of astronomy whose enthusiasm has guided Knack's decades-long support of the Griffith Observatory. Celestially themed objects dangle from the ceiling of her residence in Malibu. They hang on the walls and adorn the mantelpiece, couches and chairs. They are embedded in the soil of her garden and stacked in the cupboards of her kitchen.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, best known for its contested antiquities, Impressionist irises and gorgeous grounds, has been diversifying in gruesome black and white. Since 2003, the museum has bought up several photographic prints that count among the 20th century's most iconic journalistic images of death by violence: Malcolm Browne's picture of the 1963 self-immolation of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk; a print from the Zapruder film of the 1963 shooting of John F.

Some people who visit the acclaimed restaurant Deux Cheminees come for more than chef Fritz Blank's cuisine -- they come for his books. The Philadelphia mainstay that offers some of the city's finest dining also houses an impressive culinary collection that includes about 15,000 volumes: cookbooks, periodicals, menus and memorabilia.

One dress is not enough for Oscar producer Laura Ziskin. Even 30 of the most iconic dresses ever worn on Oscar's red carpet are not enough. Ziskin wants more. Not to wear, but to share. Ziskin is transforming the annual Oscar fashion show, which typically forecasts what styles might grace the red carpet on the big night, into a retrospective of memorable outfits from the last five decades of Academy Award galas.

A secret six-year imbroglio that threatened to dismantle the Hammer Museum -- established by oil baron Armand Hammer and endowed with art by his foundation -- has ended with the museum and the Armand Hammer Foundation agreeing to part company and divide a $305-million collection amassed by Hammer.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS know that cleaning up a toxic spill can take a very long time. Now, art museum watchers know it too. Nineteen years and one day ago, the late chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., Armand Hammer, created the cultural equivalent of an oil spill. He turned his back on nearly two decades of pledges to bequeath his mostly modest art collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, announcing a plan to open his own art museum instead.