A wine steward who plucked artwork off hotel and gallery walls in a bicoastal spree admitted Tuesday to stealing a $350,000 drawing in New York, resolving charges here after serving jail time in California.

Via Artdaily.org

Yep, you heard right. Art Series Hotel Group offered a challenge to Banksy lovers, offering them a chance to own a Banksy art work if they could successfully steal it from one of their hotels.

A huge thanks to our friend, Blaise Niosi, for the heads up on this one.

Scientists at Notre Dame have adapted a nuclear physics methodology to quickly determine whether a piece of art is a forgery using accelerated ion beams, without affecting or damaging the artwork.

Via Forbes.

The BBC wants to know how much you know about high-profile art thefts. Take the quiz.

Thieves carried out a well-organized, pre-dawn heist at Greece’s biggest state art museum on Monday, taking an oil painting by 20th century masters Pablo Picasso and one by Piet Mondrian.

Via the Wall Street Journal.

Art dealer Robert Lucky Jr. of New Orleans was sentenced Tuesday to 25 months in federal prison for selling forgeries of famed folk artist Clementine Hunter, whose paintings of early 20th century agrarian life in Natchitoches Parish hang in the Smithsonian.

Via The Town Talk.com

Michael G Bennett, Associate Professor of Law at Northeastern University, has a unique analysis on that relationship, in what he calls, The Most Explosive Copyright Case Never To Be Seen.

It is an uncontested fact of the trial that, sometime in 2006, Mehanna translated Muhammad bin Ahmad as-Salim’s book, 39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad, from the original Arabic to English. Though a shadowy figure, various sources strongly suggest that as-Salim is a Saudi citizen. If this is true, then Saudi copyright law and, by virtue of the Berne Conventional, U.S. copyright law could apply to Mehanna’s translation of as-Salim’s book.

Check it out.

And hopefully it won’t be melted down for scrap.

Via The Telegraph.

The Guardian has re-published the original news article concerning the theft and finding of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa back in the early 20th Century. The original news article was published in the Manchester Guardian on December 15, 1913.

Via the paper of record, recent hearings offer new details about the the two Pollock paintings that are at the center of a current federal investigation.