Couple things catching my eye today:

• Albert Alcalay: Self Portraits, which airs tonight at 8 on KERA, gets mad props from TV critic Ed Bark.
• Recently, Heritage Auction Galleries brought us insight into the world of international art theft. Then the company made news with the auction – or non-auction – of a long-lost painting by Sebastiano Ricci. Now the Star-Telegram tells us a little bit more about Heritage.
• And finally, a quote guaranteed to make musicians stand taller and the rest of us wish we’d kept up those piano lessons. Conductor Daniel Barenboim, tells the New York Times:

“When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death. Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”