Replica

In three weeks, the 32-nation World Cup soccer tournament begins in South Africa and the ultimate prize for every team is to win the celebrated, 18-karat gold and malachite trophy. The World Cup trophy is on the final leg of a carefully orchestrated and lucratively sponsored global tour. Nelson Mandela held the trophy recently and, according to news accounts, machine-gun-toting policemen, clad in bulletproof vests, will protect the Cup during its 30-day tour of South Africa. Its final public appearance will be at the 90,000-seat Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg for the June 11 opening match.

True "Star Trek" fanatics who visit "Star Trek: The Exhibition" at San Jose's Tech Museum may find some flaws in the life-size replica of the starship Enterprise's bridge. Sure, Capt. James T. Kirk's chair sits in the middle of the bridge, encircled by panels, instrument consoles and blinking colored lights. But the seats for Kirk's multiethnic crew are missing, and the funnel-like device that Science Officer Spock used to analyze space anomalies is on the wrong side of the bridge.

The art could have been history. Two 1930s New Deal mosaics adorning a courtyard at Newport Harbor High School were in jeopardy after inspectors determined the school's old building wouldn't withstand a major earthquake. The original structures of the Gothic Spanish-inspired Newport Beach campus and the artistic flourishes built into its walls and floors, inspectors said, would have to be demolished. An outcry by students, parents and alumni ensued. They hated the idea of their beloved bright white campus, with its 99-foot-tall spired bell tower and treasured art, being destroyed.

At age 9, Adrien Morot started making casts of his own face using plaster bandages he had stolen from the school nurse's office. By age 12, he had set his house on fire using flammable rubber and had been called into the principal's office for coming to school with fake bloody stumps in place of his fingers. Three decades later, the Montreal-born artist traveled the world to make life casts of Hank Azaria, Amy Adams and many of the actors in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian."

Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford and Elizabeth Taylor are hanging around a Newbury Park warehouse today, waiting for the hammer to drop on their careers as a Hollywood attraction. They are among more than 200 hand-sculpted figures that will be auctioned off tonight by the Hollywood Wax Museum as part of a celebrity look-alike shake-up. Some of the life-size replicas made of oil-painted wax are being permanently removed from the Hollywood Boulevard tourist attraction.

Now playing at the Frank Lloyd Gallery: an Oscar-worthy performance by an inert substance in a sculpture role. In Richard Shaw's fabulous show, clay takes on a panoply of guises -- cigar box, paintbrush, animal skull, dollar bill -- and plays them all brilliantly. Under Shaw's direction, clay is the consummate actor, channeling identities with such conviction that we forget, momentarily, what's real and what's a different kind of real. The Bay Area artist has been creating illusionistic still-life sculpture for decades, porcelain renderings of things at once precious and pedestrian.

The Rio suburb known as Vila Kennedy would seem to have little in common with New York. The rough district, far from the city's glitzy beachfront, boasts no cinemas, no museums, no Central Park -- in fact, no park at all. But Vila Kennedy does have a Statue of Liberty. Right there, on a stone pedestal overlooking the main highway, amid trash, traffic and sundry shops, stands a 9-foot-high replica of the iconic monument at the entrance to New York Harbor.