| December 8, 2007 | - Scientists discovered a mysterious black fungus growing on the cave paintings of Lascaux. Some thought it might be the effect of global warming, noting that soil temperatures around the caves have risen two degrees centigrade since 1982.
| Source:
NYT
|
| June 1, 2007 | -
Damien Hirst unveiled a diamond-encrusted human skull valued at $100,000,000.
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 9, 2007 | - At Sotheby's in New York, a late Cezanne watercolor of a green melon sold for $25 million.
| Source:
BBC
|
| November 19, 2006 | - A Danish
artist named Kristian von Hornsleth was giving animals to Ugandan villagers who agreed to take his name. “Africans adopting European names for gifts—that's nothing new,” said George Sabadu Hornsleth, who received a pig. “We've been doing that since colonial times. Why do you think I'm called George?”
| Source:
Yahoo! News
|
| November 17, 2006 | -
Deep-fried American flags were removed from an art exhibit in Tennessee.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| October 19, 2006 | -
Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn elbowed a hole through Picasso's “Le Reve,” a painting he had just sold for a record $139 million.
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 31, 2006 | - A Japanese
acoustics expert recreated the voice of the Mona Lisa. “My true identity,” said the virtual Mona Lisa, “is shrouded in mystery.”
| Source:
Yahoo! News
|
| May 4, 2006 | - An Australian
painter named Tim Patch unveiled a portrait of Prime Minister John Howard that he had painted with his penis.
| Source:
News.com.au
|
| January 6, 2006 | - A 76-year-old performance artist was in trouble for chipping Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain,” a urinal valued at $3.6 million, with a hammer. In 1993 the same performance artist was arrested for urinating into the artwork.
| Source:
AP
|
| January 4, 2006 | - An artist in California went to an abandoned mine shaft in a desert and bound his feet together with a long chain and a lock in order to sketch a self-portrait. He lost the key, however, and was forced to hop for 12 hours to get help.
| Source:
Boston.com
|
| December 18, 2005 | - North of London, thieves used a crane to steal a two-ton Henry Moore sculpture, “Reclining Figure,” that was valued at more than $5 million; authorities fear the thieves may melt it down for scrap metal.
| Source:
AP
|
| April 11, 2005 | - The New York Public Library planned to auction off rare artworks to raise money.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 28, 2005 | - A Russian court found a museum director and an artist guilty of creating blasphemous
art and fined them $3,600 each. The piece in question depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola advertisement with the words “this is my blood.”
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| December 1, 2004 | - A British artist publicly ate a fox to protest all the attention being paid to a ban on fox hunting. "Everyone gets really worked up about a furry animal," the performance artist said after his meal, "but no one cares about each other."
| Source:
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
|
| November 30, 2004 | - A twenty-four-year-old man was killed in his trailer home by an exploding lava lamp.
| Source:
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
|
| November 10, 2004 | - The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art paid more than $45 million for Duccio di Buoninsegna's 8"x11" “Madonna and Child.”
| Source:
Charlotte Observer
|
| August 29, 2004 | - It was reported that a janitor at Tate Modern in London threw out a work of art because he thought it was just a bag of garbage; the artwork, entitled "Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art," was in fact a bag of garbage.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 22, 2004 | - Edvard Munch's
The Scream
was stolen by armed robbers from a crowded museum in Oslo, Norway.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 17, 2004 | - The Israeli ambassador to Sweden attacked and damaged an artwork at the Historical Museum in Stockholm; the work, by an Israeli artist and his Swedish wife, consists of a portrait of Hanadi Jaradat, a Palestinian suicide bomber who killed 19 people at a cafe in Haifa, on a boat floating in a pool of red liquid. The ambassador ripped electrical wires out of the piece and threw a light into the pool.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 31, 2003 | - A woman died at the Burning Man festival in Nevada when she tried to get off an "art car" and was run over.
| Source:
CNN
|
| August 18, 2003 | - British police raided an artist's home after a burglar mistook a mask made out of bacon for a human head.
| Source:
BBC
|
| November 20, 2001 | - A man stole 21 ceramic penises from an art exhibit in Boulder, Colorado, and left an American flag in their place.
| |
| September 25, 2001 | - After four concerts of his music were cancelled, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German avant-garde composer, apologized for describing the attack on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art one can imagine . . . the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos.”
| |
| July 31, 2001 | - One of the world's largest paintings, by French fauvist Raoul Dufy, was found to be coated in cancer-causing asbestos; the Paris Museum of Modern Art will spend a million dollars scraping it off.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | -
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced his new decency panel, which will police the city's museums for smutty art; the panel includes Leonard Garment, the lawyer for pardoned fugitive Marc Rich, and John Howard Sanden, an artist who makes portraits of corporate chief executives.
| |
| April 3, 2001 | -
Catholics in Santa Fe, New Mexico, were upset about a photographic collage depicting the Blessed Virgin in a two-piece swimsuit made out of roses.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | - Three Greek shepherds found nine 2,300-year-old marble statues while building a fence.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was upset about a picture in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and was threatening to set up a decency panel to police the city's museums.
| |
PDF
IMAGES
