A visitor to the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver defaced a painting worth $30-40 million. It’s not clear what her motives were, but she punched, scratched, leaned on, and attempted to urinate on (!?) 1957-J-No. 2 , seen at left. Okay, she was drunk. In the middle of the afternoon. In a museum?? Via…
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Professor of Classical to Contemporary African Art here at UCSB, has just released Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art, which explores the under-studied area of African-owned collections of African art. The image plates are stunning, plentiful, and of the highest quality. The volume is available in English and…
An engineering professor from the University of Southern California has lead a multinational group charged with saving Leonardo’s iconic fresco The Last Supper. One problem maintaining the fresco is the way it was painted: directly on a dry wall, which caused it to begin deteriorating almost immediately. Subsequent restorations haven’t helped the matter. However, the…
It seems the pepper-spraying incident at UC-Davis last Friday has brought out the creative side of some people. The Tumblr page PEPPER SPRAYING COP offers readers a place to upload images where “peace officer” Lt. John Pike has been spotted in works of art, film, and popular culture. Note that much of the accompanying text can…
A couple of years ago we posted a story about how Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Over the River,” a project where the artists would drape material over parts of the Arkansas River in Colorado, faced local and potentially national opposition. The New York Times reports that Christo (collaborator and wife Jeanne-Claude has since passed away) received…
Oops. Martin Kippenberger’s When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn’s anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), on loan from a private collector to Museum Ostwall in Dortmund, suffered an attack motivated by … a strong work ethic. Upon noticing what appeared to be grime in part of the sculpture, a cleaner apparently thought all…