Lino Tagliapietra: The Making of a Maestro

Nine artists—dancers, musicians, and visual artists—in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction are transformed by creativity in their search for identity and freedom. Their stories reveal how art has been a ballast while confronting old addictive habits and finding a portal into the aliveness and spiritual connection of art-making from a unique San Francisco perspective.

The documentary film "Mr. Dial Has Something to Say" investigates the problem of classism and racism in the elite American art world. By following the dramatic, disturbing story of Thornton Dial, a 79-year-old American-African artist from Alabama's Black Belt.

The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. In these postmodern days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid. Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.

From Brooklyn to the Bronx, Soho to Greenwich, Union Square to Wall Street... Join us and the friends, collaborators and gallery owners who supported Jean-Michel Basquiat throughout his life. The first ever recognized graffiti artist, who saw international success as a neo-expressionist painter in the 80s, Basquiat is a true contemporary hero who died at the peak of his career.

Up until the end of her life, Beatrice Wood continued to influence younger artists with her definitive, free-wheeling ways. She was central to the American Dada movement and was the last surviving member of this group. In this program she recalls her friends Man Ray, Picabia and others, and her ex-husband Marcel Duchamp. She died in 1999 at 105 years of age.

Florida, 1994. Artist Mike Diana is convicted on an obscenity charge in the wake of an undercover police officer purchasing his limited edition zine Boiled Angel. Here is the very unusual story of what led to this First Amendment debacle happening for the first time in the United States.

Adlon recounts the making of the sculpture, "Kugelkaryatide" the sphere that stood in the center of Tobin Plaza between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film follows the sculpture from its creation as the largest bronze sculpture of recent times to the aftermath, where it now stands, heavily scarred, in Battery Park.

Follows the behind-the-scenes work of Studio Ghibli, focusing on the notable figures Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki.

In 2009, while sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s ratings beat records in the art market, an affair erupted in Germany revealing the existence of more than a thousand Giacometti counterfeits, hidden in a warehouse in Mainz. For 10 years, two German merchants and a Dutch forger managed to sell hundreds of fake sculptures, some of which were even exhibited in museums. A German investigator, a private detective in Dutch art, a French sculpture expert and the forger himself, take turns telling us this incredible story as we discover the fascinating and tortured life of Alberto Giacometti.