Brushwork

The dead German artist Martin Kippenberger, whose blasphemous frog caused the Vatican some discomfort three years ago, has now suffered retribution at the humble hands of an enthusiastic cleaning lady. Although cleaning staff were supposed to keep a distance of at least twenty centimetres, and although the work in question is helpfully titled "When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling", the cleaner scrubbed away a painting of a dried rain puddle from beneath a Kippenberger installation in a Dortmund museum. As with much modern art, it is not entirely clear whether the object is any the worse for having been revised in this aleatoric fashion; but insurance adjusters are hard at work calculating how much of its $1.1 million market value has been wiped away.