Free Republic

DETROIT -- The Detroit Institute of Arts is stuck with having to repair a painting worth $1.5 million. It has to remove a stain left by a wad of gum stuck on the painting by a 12-year-old visitor. It happened Friday. Museum officials said the boy was with a group from Holly Academy in Oakland County, Mich., when he took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on Helen Frankenthaler's 1963 abstract painting "The Bay." The gum didn't stick to the fiber of the canvas, but left a stain the size of a quarter. Museum experts are researching...

MEXICO CITY - Hundreds of tourists, art lovers and mere voyeurs flocked over the weekend to the opening of "The Death of God," the latest exhibit by controversial British artist Damien Hirst. The show, the result of Hirst's three-month stay in Mexico, includes human skeletons, animals preserved in formaldehyde and skinned lambs, propped up as if praying or splayed upon crucifixes. One work shows a lamb kneeling inside a crystal container, looking as if it is carrying a white-covered Bible and red rosary between its legs. As a bright oasis in the midst of these brutal pieces, Hirst slipped in...

We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of...