A Pennsylvania State Police recruit has made a constitutional issue of a tattoo. Ronald Scavone says the police refused to hire him, after he successfully completed interviews and a background check, because he refused to “physically alter (his) body” by removing a tattoo, which he says could be easily covered up with clothing.

(Oil and wax on canvas. 64.5 x 78.4 in., 1969)

Brice Marden’s 1969 painting, Au Centre, was headed to Sotheby’s in NYC for auction. En route, it came loose inside its crate when a forklift operator smashed into it at Frankfurt airport in Germany. Gagosian Gallery’s insurance carrier, AXA Art Insurance Corp., filed suit against Lufthansa Airlines last Friday.

A Nebraska man who stole a painting of the Virgin Mary to finance an abortion for a teen he was accused of raping has been convicted of first-degree sexual assault and felony theft.

Pasquale Iannetti, 69, was indicted Thursday by a grand jury in San Francisco on charges of wire and mail fraud for shipping prints purportedly authorized by Miro, the renowned Spanish Catalan painter and sculptor who died in 1983.

He was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud for allegedly shipping fake Miro prints to customers across the country from 2001 to 2008. He was also indicted on seven counts of wire fraud for credit-card transactions at his gallery or wire transfers in amounts ranging from $3,600 to $17,902, the indictment said.

Yesterday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down a 2002 California law giving owners and heirs to artworks looted by the Nazis extra time — until the end of 2010 — to sue for their return. The 9th Circuit found the California law unconstitutional.

Echoing the lower court’s ruling, the 9th Circuit found that “California officials overstepped their authority when they passed the state’s Holocaust art-restitution law, because they intruded on what is strictly a federal government prerogative to shape policies on war and foreign affairs.”

However, according to the LA Times, the 9th Circuit ruling did not settle the specific legal issue at hand, whether or not the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena really owns “one of the most prized works hanging in its galleries, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, moments before the Fall — or should the paintings on two wood panels be handed over to the daughter-in-law of a Jewish art dealer who left the panels in Holland when he fled the invading Germans in 1940?”

The LA Times has the full story here.

Thomas Hawke’s Digital Connection raises a very interesting and disturbing issue, and one that we have highlighted before here. It seems that Flickr, the online image-archiving company, is censoring images and content that it deems negatively critical of Obama. Most recently Flickr has removed, without prior notice to the owner, the image of Obama as the Joker.

Thomas Hawke:

[I]t’s unfortunate that Flickr would embark upon yet another act of censorship when an image was so clearly parody and fair use. What bothers me even more is that this is still another example of Flickr censoring users who are critical of President Obama and his policies. In June Flickr deleted the entire account and photostream of Flickr user Shepherd Johnson after he posted comments critical of the President on the Official White House Photostream. Now I’m actually a Democrat who voted for President Obama and am super happy to see the President using Flickr. But while Flickr’s staff is obviously proud of the fact that they have President Obama’s official photostream on Flickr, I don’t think that this fact ought to be the impetuous for them to censor and delete users who are critical of the President.

I’m also troubled by this censorship in light of the clear pro-Obama bias that Flickr’s staff has shown. If you do a search for the word “Obama” on the flickr blog you get 74 different results, many of them very positive. By contrast a search for “Bush” on the Flickr blog only pulls up 5 results (even though Flickr has existed much longer under President Bush’s presidency than President Obama’s).

It should be apparent that this is one way in which law, specifically copyright law, can be used as a censoring mechanism. What is not immediately apparent is whether or not the Obama administration has its hand in this.

According to the Art Newspaper, a “cache of Frida Kahlo oil paintings, diaries and archival material that is the subject of a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press on November 1st has been denounced by scholars as a cache of fakes.”

“In my view the publishers have been the victims of a gigantic hoax,” says New York-based Latin American art dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who has bought and sold numerous works by Kahlo.