Museum Bids to Turn eBay to Art

MoCA warms to Eli Broad amid reports that director has resigned

(NEWSER) - LA's troubled Museum of Contemporary Art is moving toward a bailout deal with Eli Broad, reports the Los Angeles Times. The billionaire real estate investor and art collector offered MoCA a $30 million donation contingent on improved performance, which board members favored over a merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The move toward Broad comes amid unconfirmed reports that the museum's director has resigned. More»

Mafia threats spark plea for museum and staff

(NEWSER) - The director of a Naples museum is urging Germany to grant asylum to the museum and its staff seeking to flee the mob. Antonio Manfredi says the contemporary art museum has been plagued by vandalism and threats from the local Mafia. The museum has put on exhibitions dealing with social issues, including the prevalence of organized crime, Der Spiegel reports. More»

Pablo Picasso's 'The Actor' is hardly the first expensive accident

(NEWSER) - The art student who tripped and tore a hole in a Picasso painting is probably fairly embarrassed—but will, perhaps, feel better knowing others can sympathize. The Independent lists nine other art catastrophes, some accidental and some not:

• Cy Twombly: A woman kissed one of his paintings, leaving it smeared with lipstick—she said she was “just trying to warm up” the white canvas.
• Qing vase: A Cambridge museum visitor slipped down the stairs, possibly thanks to an untied shoelace, and smashed a set of 300-year-old vases.

(NEWSER) - Herb and Dorothy Vogel had just modest incomes—he was a postal clerk, she a librarian—but over four decades they acquired more than 3,600 drawings, paintings, and collages from America's leading artists. They collected so much that they had to stuff works under their bed. But now the Vogels' one-bedroom apartment has been cleaned out, and their works have been scattered: 50 each to 50 museums across the country plus another 1,100 to the National Gallery in Washington. More»

Mass. retrospective traces artist's work in Minimalism and Conceptualism

(NEWSER) - Sol LeWitt died last year, but his artwork is still being created—executed by handlers according to written instructions. This weekend marked the opening of a massive exhibition of LeWitt’s wall drawings at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, an exhibition Sebastian Smee, in the Boston Globe, calls “as wonderful as anything I've seen in years.” More»