Wanted: Museum Director to Marry Art, Commerce

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.

He transformed role of curator while at the Met

(NEWSER) - Thomas Hoving, who helped transform the role of museum curator in his decade at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, died today. He was 78 and suffered from cancer. "I'm a goner,” he had told author Michael Gross , who broke the news on his blog this morning. “But I have no regrets. I’ve had a terrific life." More»

(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»

New exhibition includes 16th-century porn alongside masterpieces

(NEWSER) - Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, a new exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, comes with a warning to spectators: parental discretion advised. Mixed in with decorous portraits of noblemen are 16th-century pornographic images, dirty books, and other obscene artifacts. For Wall Street Journal critic James Gardner, the mixing of high and low images "forces us to look at some very familiar pieces in a fresh way." More»