BAGHDAD, Iraq - A dark canvas etched with fine knife cuts hangs on the wall of the Hewar gallery. In the corner stands a skeletal-faced bronze in a soldier's overcoat, turning his back on three figures with severed heads. Completed before the war, the pieces bear stark testimony to the despair of the artists under Saddam Hussein's crushing rule.
With Saddam gone, the gallery's owner wants to put on a new show.

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Don Olson's wish for today is that at twilight, all of us face southeast and observe the rising of the full moon. At that moment, Olson hopes we will collectively turn our thoughts to Vincent van Gogh.


Olson, a Texas astronomer, would transport all of humanity to a field in the south of France to do today's moon-watching there. Olson is convinced that on this very day, 114 years ago, that is exactly what van Gogh, the great Dutch post-impressionist, did and exactly where he did it. READ MORE...

A white marble statue of Poseidon had been chopped up, its torso and upper legs thrown to the floor and its head gone. A life-size stone statue from Hatra, brought to the museum three weeks before for safekeeping, had lost its head and its left arm to the looters’ saw. The Warka Vase, a 5,000-year-old cup in carved alabaster that was too fragile to move to storage, had disappeared.
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WHAT do the people behind Estée Lauder, The Gap clothing firm, London diamond jeweller Lawrence Graff and a member of the Qatar royal family have in common? Apart from being seriously rich? They are among the ten most active art collectors in the world, likely to blow up to £18 million a year of their fortunes on it. Their collections - featuring everything from Sixties American artist Andy Warhol to Renaissance painters like Leonardo da Vinci, to Impressionists like Van Gogh - are unlikely to hold many Damien Hirsts but, in terms of sheer buying power, they all rival Charles Saatchi.
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AN FRANCISCO -- Barbie sprawls naked in a blender. A familiar green-and-white logo bears not the Starbucks name, but the appellation ''Consumer Whore.'' The familiar image of Bert, from ''Sesame Street,'' hangs from a noose. All are images from ''Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age,'' a new exhibit at the Artists Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art here that criticizes the increasingly strict intellectual-property laws that artists say hurt their ability to borrow cultural imagery to reflect the impact of business on American society.
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