Spoiler

Most often when art makes it to the screen it’s only to serve as background, but occasionally it does get to play a leading role as happened in a recent episode of Bones titled ’The Skull in the Sculpture’. The show opens with the news that artist Geoffrey Thorne has been crushed in one of his own works - a cross between a John Chamberlain (vividly painted) and a César (crushed into a square). Thorne’s gallery is ‘curated’ by Helen Bridenbecker who sports full Kabuki make-up (yes it’s a clue). There’s lots of art jargon, PoMo makes an appearance and it feels as though an art consultant with a sense of humour was on set, or at least in the script meetings.

Eventually, to help solve the crime, a cool 3D hologram mimicking the crushing is created and at one stage one of the lab rats, in a Sylvie Fleury moment, manipulates it to do a reverse crush so the original shape of the car with body is revealed. (Fleury had once described how she’d like to untangle a crushed car and restore it back to its original form as a comment on the macho art of John Chamberlain and César).

Anyway, as anyone who knows anything about art will have guessed, the dealer did it.