Huge LeWitt Exhibition Is Beautiful Lunacy

Kippenberger work damaged beyond repair: museum

(NEWSER) - She thought she was just doing her job; instead, she was forever altering a $1.1 million artwork. A cleaner in a German museum spotted what she thought was an unintended stain on a sculpture and decided to wash it off. The piece by the late Martin Kippenberger, “When It Starts Dripping from the Ceilings,” is a wooden structure with a bowl underneath. 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»

Reactions mixed on gallery exhibit

(NEWSER) - An exhibit at Scotland’s Gallery of Modern Art intended to “reclaim the Bible as a sacred text” did not go entirely as planned, the Telegraph reports. Visitors were invited to “write your way back into” the Bible on display, and the resulting additions ranged from the angry—“This is all sexist pish”—to the silly—“The Gospel According to Luke Skywalker.” More»