MIT Rips Off Comic Book

When MIT announced in March that it won a US$50 million grant to design high-tech gear for the US Army’s soldier of the future, the project was hailed as the stuff of science fiction and comic book heroes. The school has grudgingly acknowledged that it copied images from the sci-fi comic book Radix as part of its winning bid

Mother of art thief is jailed after shredding masterpieces

Mireille Breitwieser, the mother of an art thief, was imprisoned after admitting she shredded up to 60 masterpieces by leading artists, such as Bruegel and Watteau, stolen in broad daylight from museums in five countries. French police also dragged the Rhône-Rhine canal in eastern France looking for priceless objects, such as weapons, vases and musical instruments, dumped there last November

EU ‘Barcode’ Flag Parody

European functionaries recently commissioned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to create a new logo for the EU. To capture the diversity and unity of Europe in a single image, Koolhaas put all the colours of the national flags of the EU’s constituent states on a single flag of many vertical stripes. While perhaps laudable in theory, however, the resulting bar code design invites parody

Wombles’ liberation

A group of artists have created a field of Wombles to show their support for May Day protestors. The anonymous group have used hundreds of soft toys originally given out with McDonald’s Happy Meals. The piece called Auto-Destructive Art will be dismantled on 1 May and the toys given to anti-globalisation campaigners

Art, Weird

UK Town Rejects Mr Potato Head Statue

The giant Mr Potato Head statue given to the town of Belper in Derbyshire by its American sister city has been scratched and dismembered. He was sent to a fibreglass specialist for repairs and now stands outside the Safeway supermarket in the town

Former Sotheby’s chairman guilty

Alfred Taubman, the 76-year-old American shopping mall developer and former chairman of auction house Sotheby’s, brokered a deal with his counterpart Anthony Tennant at the auction house Christie’s to fix commission on the sales of artworks. He has been found guilty in New York of conspiring to fix art prices

Animal-headed humans appear in earliest art

Paintings of mythical animal-human hybrids are among the oldest surviving art ever produced. New research suggests that minotaurs, satyrs, the werewolves beloved of Hollywood and even Egypt’s animal-headed gods are latecomers to the art scene compared with the therianthropes carved by the earliest artists on bone and painted on stone

Atomic airbrush could save fire-damaged Monet

A fire-damaged painting by Claude Monet could be restored to its former glory, thanks to a technology designed to simulate the ravages of low-Earth orbit on spacecraft. Conservators at the institute are talking to space chemists at NASA’s Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland, Ohio, after hearing of their success in removing an overzealous art lover’s lipstick from an Andy Warhol painting. Their trick? They vaporise contaminants by blasting them with oxygen

LA Judge Rules Artist Can Parody Barbie in Artwork

US District Court Judge Ronald Lew ruled on Monday that the free speech rights of Utah artist Tom Forsythe — who was sued by Mattel two years ago after he parodied Barbie dolls in a series of photographs meant as a stinging social comment — outweigh the company’s trademarks and intellectual property rights as they relate to the 42-year-old doll

Tom Forsythe’s Barbie Art

San Francisco artist, Tom Forsythe, can continue using Barbie dolls in his photographic renderings, when Mattel’s preliminary injunction was recently denied. Forsythe uses Barbies to ‘to critique the materialistic and gender-oppressive values’ he believes the doll embody, Mattel wanted the court to order Forsythe to hand over all the negatives of his work so they could be destroyed.