The 5 Best Immaterial Podcast Episodes
1) Stone: Making and Breaking Legacies
What happens when the unbreakable breaks? Throughout art museums around the world, you’ll find ancient stone statues of rulers and marble monuments immortalizing noblemen. These objects were made to ...Show More
2) Jade
Deep in the riverbeds of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, you’ll find a stone that’s as hard as steel and as green as the first breath of the earth. It’s called pounamu, or nephrite jade. It’s bee...Show More
3) Paper
Valentines, comic books, cigarette cards and more—all of these objects can be meaningful, but what does it mean to house them in a museum? Paper holds our memories, our stories, our fears, and our des...Show More
4) Metals, Part Two
In the second part of our alchemical journey, we meet what ancient philosophers called the “noble” metals: mercury, silver, and gold. How did a nineteenth-century set designer harness one of the most ...Show More
5) Metals, Part One
Philosophers and scientists have tried for millennia to crack the code of alchemy: the art of turning lead into gold. But alchemy goes much deeper than that—it gives us a framework for turning metal i...Show More
6) Time: Keeping Digital Art Alive
How do art conservators save video art from obsolescence? If a painting on canvas rips or a marble sculpture shatters to pieces, art conservators are trained to respond accordingly and repair them. Ar...Show More
7) Wood: The Most Musical Tree in the World
How did one tree become a world-famous tonewood for guitars? Deep in the forests of Belize, a wood importer from Florida discovered a rare tree that produced a sound unlike anything guitar virtuosos h...Show More
8) Trash: The Archaeology of Rubbish
An archaeologist and an artist walk into a dump… For most of us, we throw our garbage to the curb, and it disappears from our lives. But to some, that’s just the beginning of trash’s story. In this e...Show More
9) Chia: Beyond Superfoods and Infomercials
What can the tiny chia seed reveal about the history of oil painting? For centuries, one of the most prized mediums of art at museums like the Met has been oil painting, a European tradition embodied ...Show More
10) Blankets and Quilts: Threads of Identity
What happens when our most intimate possessions end up in art museums? Blankets comfort and keep us warm. They accompany us through our lives. They are keepers of some of our most intimate stories. We...Show More