What a wonderful program this was. Through the smoke, an art object would appear, and the panelists would have to determine what it was, whether it was genuine or fake, and from what time and place it came. Viewers learned a little something of art history, but perhaps more important they might learn the importance of detailed and critical analyses of artifacts, which is to say the importance of informed and reasoned inquiry in general. Lamentably, today's so-called "educational" programming attempts nothing so process oriented, operating instead on the simplistic notion that knowledge is merely information. Like the longer lived but local (Baltimore) program produced by Johns Hopkins and hosted by Lynn Poole,"What in the World?" belongs to an era long gone and wistfully remembered.
2 Reviews
fascinating even to a child
shermanjones10 June 2007
I remember finding this show fascinating. It consisted of museum experts examining an object and trying to identify its origins. Each expert had so many reasons for identifying an object as what he thought it was but they were often wrong. It had talking heads and very little else but I watched it religiously. I learned about art, archaeology, anthropology, peoples and cultures all over the world and I was only nine! One has to wonder who came up with this idea for a TV program and imagine how it would be laughed at today. I also wonder how many of my generation became archaeologists and anthropologists partly inspired by watching this show (I didn't).
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