The first American flag Peter Keim collected was a hand-sewn thirteen-star specimen that he found poking out of a paper bag at a farm sale. Happily for Keim, the flag turned out to be a hand-sewn beaut from 1862, worth $10,000. Keim now owns approximately four hundred American flags.

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Only a small number of people have the resources and wherewithal to collect Hepplewhite furniture or Paul Revere silver, but plenty collect baseball cards, including our guest this month: Randall, the voice behind the viral video The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger.

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There’s a tried and true method for curating art exhibitions: paint walls, hang pictures, write labels, and Bob's your uncle. But what happens when a neuroscientist gets involved? This month, CO examines how researchers at the Peabody Essex Museum are analyzing the ways people look at art.

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A suite of furniture made for the storied Beekman family of New York has one extremely over-the-top feature: the pieces are upholstered with export-quality French tapestries, i.e., material that wasn’t good enough for the French to hold on to. One man's trash . . .

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Philip Hewat-Jaboor is chairman of Masterpiece London and owner of a fine alabaster and rosso antico marble vase. The vase has a fascinating transnational backstory, but, maybe more importantly, it's beautiful, a factor Philip says is “coming back into the equation” with regard to works of art.

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If you find an Old Master artwork in your attic, how can you be sure it isn’t fake? This month Ben and Michael consider the case of "Judith and Holofernes," a painting attributed to Caravaggio and estimated at $100–$150 million that sold to a private buyer on June 25.

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Scholar and curator Glenn Adamson reminds us how important it is to pay attention to the objects in our immediate proximity in this episode keyed to Art Carpenter’s Wishbone chair

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This month we focus on a quartet of curious objects at Freeman’s auction house: a marble-top pier table long believed to have belonged to General Washington’s aide-de-camp Tench Tilghman, a quirky painting of Noah’s Ark by foppish Lancaster polymath John Landis, and two stoneware wine bottles in the shape of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

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In collector Noah Wunsch's private life one rule guides his hand: “no matter what you're buying make sure you like it.“ In this episode, Ben takes the measure of Noah’s treasure, which ranges from a 60 BC Visigothic belt buckle to the zany artwork of Genieve Figgis.

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Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize in economics and his personal dog-eared copy of The Wealth of Nations have come up for auction at Sotheby’s. Ben Miller calls on the expertise of Duke University professor Bruce Caldwell and Sotheby’s specialist Gabriel Heaton to put these and other items in historical context.

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