Paper Monitor
11:44 UK time, Thursday, 15 October 2009
A service highlighting the Ritchies of the daily press.
Oh goody, the Guardian has been along to the Frieze art fair in London and done us a G2 special edition to mark the event.
There's a Bansky of the Mona Lisa mooning, clear polythene bags filled with urine, a sculpture of a pregnant man... and that's before we get to the work of a Hong Kong artist who taped his eyes shut on a sightseeing tour of Malaysia and is now displaying his snapshots from the holiday.
Nobody tell .
In fact, even the Guardian's art critic, Adrian Searle, - slipping into the role of innocent bystander as random acts of modern art occur around him.
"After a while, my critical faculties turn to mush," he confesses. Hmm, something of an admission for an art critic critiquing an art show.
"...I end up staring intently at a thin bit of wire that slowly emerges, just below eye level, from a wall. This motorised wire obtrudes, dangling under its own weight, while the other end disappears into a second hole in the wall nearby."
Of course, there is a point to all this. For your paid-up Guardianista, this is thoroughly nutritious stuff - an opportunity to feel enfranchised in the otherwise elitist world of modern world.
And while Paper Monitor's on the subject of all not being quite as it seems, the Guardian's front page tells of a for dubious reporting.
The producers of Starsuckers, which premieres at the London Film Festival next week, sought to prove their point by planting a number of untrue stories about celebrities with tabloid hacks and seeing what happens. (Given that the Times is the main sponsor of the festival, why is the Guardian first with this?)
What happened was that said pieces of gossip were faithfully reproduced - and often embellished - without so much as a fact checking call to the celebrity is question.
The bogus stories include one about Amy Winehouse's hair catching fire, and Guy Ritchie getting a black eye from juggling cutlery.
Although, after Ritchie's surely soon-to-be infamous "marmalade" interview of last week, such retrospective score-keeping seems almost churlish.
The 
