Maya Lin, "What Is Missing?" Listening Cone, 2009, installed at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. (Photo: Bruce Damonte Photography, Inc. © Maya Lin Studio, Inc., courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.)

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Architect, designer, and environmental artist Maya Lin carved a permanent, powerful place in the American heart with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

She was 21 when she drew that black granite line in history, and she went on to a wide-ranging life in design.

Ten years ago, Maya Lin announced she was out of the memorial business entirely. But now, she’s done one more: to all the species vanished or vanishing from the Earth. A king-sized listening cone, filled with the sounds of birds and frogs and primates slipping away.

This hour, On Point: Maya Lin and “What Is Missing?”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Maya Lin joins us from New York. An award-winning architect, designer and environmental artist, she’s best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.  Her  latest work, which she calls her final memorial, is “What Is Missing?” It focuses on extinct and vanishing species, and incorporates sculpture, video, sound, hand-held electronics, printed material and an interactive website.

More links:

Maya Lin’s official website offers a rich visual experience. Covering the full scope of her work, it includes a wealth of beautiful images and provides detailed background information on the art and the artist.

“The Missing Piece” — Susan Morgan reported on Maya Lin’s “What Is Missing?” in a multimedia feature for The New York Times Style Magazine that includes a photo gallery.

You can also browse a slideshow of her work below, or view the slideshow at full size. Click on the images to view descriptions.

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In the world of pricey art galleries and top museums, the paper trail behind a painting is almost as important as the work itself. This documented history, a painting’s “provenance,” proves the work’s authenticity and can raise its value to staggering levels.

A new book tells the riveting true story of a con-man and a talented, struggling artist who teamed up to pull off what Scotland Yard called the “biggest art fraud of the 20th century.”

How did they do it? Why? And what did it mean for the world of art?

This hour, On Point: “Provenance.” A painter, a con-man, and a fraud for the ages.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Joining us from Albany, New York, is Laney Salisbury, co-author with Aly Sujo of the new book, “Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art.” 

You can read an excerpt from the book.  And on her website, Laney Salisbury offers photos of forged artworks painted by John Myatt.

And from Stoke, England, we’re joined by John Myatt. Profiled in “Provenance,” he painted over 200 forgeries that sold as the work of master artists. He served four months in prison for his role in the fraud, and now makes a living selling “legitimate fakes.”

A visitor to the new Acropolis museum stands behind the Caryatids in Athens on Sunday, June 21, 2009. The empty space in front of the visitor denotes the absence of a Caryatid now on display at the British Museum in London. (AP)

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Giant questions of antiquity, propriety and cultural heritage — beginning with the Acropolis, where else?

In the early 19th century, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, under Ottoman eyes, removed sculptures from the Parthenon — half of the frieze on the Parthenon itself, and a lot of sculptures. Many see the “Elgin Marbles” — ensconced in the British Museum — as a great cultural heist, 200 years old. Now Athens has a stunning new Acropolis Museum, and very much wants the Elgin Marbles back.

This hour, On Point: The Elgin Marbles — London or Athens?

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Athens, Greece, is John Psaropoulos, editor and columnist for Athens News, Greece’s oldest English-language newspaper, and Athens correspondent for National Public Radio.

Also joining us from Athens is John Brady Kiesling, a former American diplomat and trained classical archeologist. He studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and who has worked on archeological digs in Greece, Turkey, Armenia, and Spain. He lives in the Plaka neighborhood just at the foot of the Acropolis and joins us from his home there.

Joining us from the British Museum in London is Konstantinos Politis. A classical archeologist, he is in charge of the dig and the museum at the site of Lot’s Cave in Ghor Safi.

And from Cambridge, England, we’re joined by Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University’s Newnham College and author of “Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found.”

More links:

The website of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens offers photos and information about the Acropolis monuments and the musuem’s galleries.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, critic Christoper Hitchens argued for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece.  In yetserday’s Times, Michael Kimmelman explored how the opening of the museum has renewed the debate.

The BBC World Service offers a collection of photos of the new museum in Athens:

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Everybody’s talking evolution these days. Way beyond biology and into evolutionary psychology — how human behavior has grown out of prehistoric imperatives.

Philosopher Denis Dutton is taking another step. He’s reaching out to link evolution and art.

Dutton makes the case that art has been elemental to the ascent of humankind — linking cave drawings, natural selection, and Picasso. Mating habits, sexual selection and Pavarotti. Art, he argues, is not just sublime. It’s instinct, from cave to concert hall.

This hour, On Point: Philosopher Denis Dutton on evolution and the art instinct.

You can join the conversation. Does it ring true to you? Art as essential to human evolution? As elemental as our opposable thumb? Would we have been humans without it?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and founding editor of the Journal of Philosophy and Literature. He is also the founder and editor of the website Arts & Letters Daily. His new book is “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.”

Filmmaker Wayne Wang looks on during an interview in Hong Kong in March 2008. (AP)

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Hong Kong-born director Wayne Wang was named after his father’s favorite actor, John Wayne.

He knows his way around Hollywood and mainstream Hollywood films. He directed Jennifer Lopez in “Maid in Manhattan” and Queen Latifah in “The Last Holiday.”

But Wayne Wang made his name spanning cultures in “Chan Is Missing” and “The Joy Luck Club.” Now he’s back, in indie-director mode, with new takes on the Chinese and Chinese-American experience.

This hour, On Point: Wayne Wang on his latest films, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and “The Princess of Nebraska.”

You can join the conversation. Have you followed the work of Wayne Wang? Do you go for his big studio productions? Or his indie instincts? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Wayne Wang joins us from San Francisco. He’s directed eighteen films, from “Chan is Missing” and “The Joy Luck Club,” from Amy Tan’s novel, to “Smoke” by Paul Auster and the J-Lo hit “Maid in Manhattan.” His latest pair of films, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska,” are out this fall — “Prayers” to the art house circuit and “The Princess of Nebraska” to a YouTube debut.

And from Oakland, California, we’re joined by author Yiyun Li. “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska” were adapted from her 2006 short story collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She’s a professor of creative writing at Mills College.

You can watch “The Princess of Nebraska” here courtesy of the YouTube Screening Room:

And you can watch the trailer for “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” here:

America is in the middle of a tattoo craze. Forty percent of Americans aged 26 to 40 have been tattooed. More than a third of Americans 18 to 25 have already been inked somewhere — sometimes in ways shocking to their elders.

But the U.S. tattoo culture is nothing compared to some of the world’s body art traditions.

New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people sustain an ancient tattoo tradition that puts bold spirals and family history on their faces.

It was banned. It’s come back.

This hour, On Point: the old original tattoo tradition of the Maori, and America’s tattoo culture today.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Karen Kramer Russell, curator of the Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibition, “Body Politics: Maori Tattoo Today.”

Whare Heke, Maori artist and bone carver, he works out of his Moana Nui Designs studio in Watertown, Mass.

Mary Kosut, professor of sociology at Purchase College, State University of New York, and director of the college’s Media, Society and Arts program, she has spent more than a decade researching American tattoo culture.

More than any other artist, Picasso left his mark on the 20th century. In his long life — 92 years of it — he enjoyed gargantuan fame, glittering friends, and a lavish lifestyle. And he created an immense output of art, which he described as his “diary.”

Now Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, is out with the third and penultimate volume of his acclaimed life of Picasso. It picks up where the artist leaves Cubism behind and marries a Russian ballet dancer, only to acquire the 17-year-old mistress who would change his paintings forever.

This hour, On Point: the complex life, and mastery, of Picasso.

-Jacki Lyden

Guest:

John Richardson, author of “A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932,” the third installment of his biography of Picasso.

Ever read a passage in a book, or hear a bit of music, and think, “how did they do that? How did the author or composer get inside my head?”

Well, science writer Jonah Lehrer says that artists have a pretty good track record understanding the subtleties of our minds — often well ahead of scientists.

Whitman, Proust, Stravinsky, Cezanne — each of them, Lehrer writes, anticipated major breakthroughs in what today we call neuroscience.

Proust didn’t invent Prozac, but he connected the body to the mind in a way Lehrer said no one had before.

This hour On Point: artists and intimations of neuroscience.

-Jacki Lyden

Guest:

Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large for Seed Magazine, a magazine about science in our culture. His new book is “Proust was a Neuroscientist.”