A classified ad you won't see at the New York Times

"Wanted: Fact checker."

Roberta Smith's review of the Pixar MOMA show (free registration required) includes this howler:

Farther along, you can see the many looks and personalities that were bruited about for Eve, the ultimately severe German-accented action-suit designer in "The Incredibles." Said to be inspired by the designer Edith Head, she also looks a lot like Linda Hunt, who provided her voice.

Two easily verifiable errors in one paragrah! I propose that we start calling Brad Bird "Linda" around work. Re-dubbing every copy of The Incredibles to change Edna's name to Eve may prove cost-prohibitive, however.

Then there's this:

Informed comments abounded. "See that carpet?" a man said knowingly to the woman standing next to him. "That's Andy's room." He was referring to the image of a blue and gray hooked rug covering the revolving stage, which is also found in the "Toy Story" films, on the floor of the bedroom of Woody's and Buzz's owner. Little did he know that the weave of this version had been mathematically calibrated so that it would remain legible when the zoetrope was moving at its 25 m.p.h. pace.

Now, I got to see the zoetrope before it was packed up, and I will testify in any court that it was going exactly 0 mph. It's very heavy, and has no wheels under it. Oh, yes, the turntable spins but, as anybody who made it through Grade School knows, you don't measure rotation in mph. (It turns at 60 rpm, with 18 facets providing an 18 fps, frames per second, animation.)

She also claims that there's a second zoetrope at the Ghibli Museum in Japan. This will come as news both to the folks at Ghibli, and to my friends who built this one-off for the MOMA exhibit.

I knew the review was going south when she peppered it twice with the word "corporate" used as an epithet. Am I grousing about her opinion? Well, a little, since I can't take seriously an art review written by someone who thinks that real art is art nobody is willing to pay for. Hey, she's entitled to her opinion. Not everybody loves Pixar films, and I have no problem with that.

What I'm really grousing about is the high-school-newspaper level of editing. If she ever wants to get a job with a real newspaper, she may want to learn to fact check.

Or take out an ad for someone to do it for her.