Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers for many famous books.

With the aid of YouTube, you can watch an episode of Robert Hughes’ documentary series The Shock of the New each week, just as it first aired on the BBC and PBS in 1980. But I defy you to watch “The Mechanical Paradise,” the first of its eight installments, and not plow through the rest in a day.

From April 4 through September 9, the Tate Modern will stage the first serious UK exhibition of major works by Damien Hirst, one of Britain’s most influential, controversial and wealthy artists. Many of his famous sculptures — including, of course, the famous/infamous shark suspended in formaldehyde – will be on display.

A couple weeks back, we mentioned that you can download a finely-read audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that version doesn’t include — and couldn’t include — are etchings by Henri Matisse.

This weekend, Mike Wallace died at the age of 93. As The New York Times observes in its obit, Wallace was “a pioneer of American broadcasting who confronted leaders and liars for 60 Minutes over four decades.

During his short lifetime, Jean-Michel Basquiat made a big impression on the art world.

In 1993, CBS 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer ruffled a few feathers in the art world with a piece called “Yes…But is it Art?” The program featured works made up of things like vacuum cleaners, empty canvases–even a can of human feces, which the artist had labeled “Merda d’artista.

Last February, Google launched Art Project, which lets users take a virtual tour of 1,000 works of art from 17 great museums — from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, to the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Say what you will about mid-eighties American culture, but how many historical moments could bring together a world-famous visual artist and rock star over a genuinely innovative consumer product? Maybe Apple could orchestrate something similar today; after all, we endure no drought of celebrity enthusiasm for iPods, iPads, iMacs, and iPhones.

In a world of accelerating obsolescence, of plastic products and digital information, a few old-school craftsman are still hanging on. But they’re getting harder and harder to find. In this pair of short films we meet a few craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic who are stubbornly persisting while the world changes around them.