Saliera, by Benvenuto Cellini. Gold, enamel and ebony, 1540-1543.

Speaking of gold, and art theft, today's featured work of art is the world's most famous salt shaker: the piece above, known as the Saliera. Okay, so it's obviously not a shaker. The salt goes in that round bowl in the back, and the little arched temple in the front is there to hold the pepper. (I'm not making this up, I swear.) Technically, this thing is called a salt cellar. So the next time your fabulously wealthy friends invite you over for dinner, and they're too posh to have normal old salt shakers, you can say, "Pass the salt cellar please, my good man," and not look too stupid.

This salt cellar is the work of Benvenuto Cellini, a mannerist sculptor with a bit of an eccentric personality. He murdered a few people, was often in prison - and he actually brags about all of this in his autobiography. He did do one thing worth bragging about: when he was imprisoned in Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo (a.k.a. Hadrian's tomb), he broke out by climbing down a rope made out of bedsheets he had tied together. (And you thought that only happened in the movies.) Cellini also claimed to be a great lover, an opium-eater, and a necromancer. Your typical Renaissance fare, I suppose. (Ha, excuse the pun, it was unintentional.)

Cellini's wild life aside, he was quite the artist, and did a lot of work for royalty. He briefly studied under Michelangelo, and went on to work for the famous Cosimo d'Medici, King Francis I of France, and Popes Clement VII and Paul III.

Cellini made Saliera for King Francis I. He brags in his autobiography that when he first showed it to the king, Francis couldn't take his eyes off of it. He explains, "In order to show how the sea is connected with the Earth, I made two figures, a good palms width in height, which sat across from each other with legs crossed, just as one sees the arms of the sea flowing into the land. The sea, depicted as a man, holds a richly decorated ship, which can hold salt enough; beneath it I mounted four seahorses and put a trident in the figures right hand. The Earth I depicted as a woman, of such lovely form and as graceful as I knew how to create. Next to her I placed on the ground a richly decorated temple, which was intended to hold pepper.... At her side were the loveliest creatures the Earth produces."

You might be surprised by just how famous Saliera is. The House of Faberge made some amazingly opulent stuff for Russian royalty, but no single Faberge work carries this much fame. This made it all the more appalling when it was stolen from Austria's Art History Museum back in May 2003. Thieves broke into the museum around 4 AM, smashed the case Saliera was in, and took off with it. The alarms went off, but the unfortunate security guard on duty assumed the alarm had been false - nobody realized what had happened until about 9 that morning.

Luckily, Saliera is a famous enough work of art that not even buyers on the black market would risk buying it. It would be too risky to display it, even in a private home. When it was stolen, various groups tried to estimate just how much it was worth - most estimates came in around $55 million, but auction house Sotheby's argued that that price was much too low, and the real value was probably in the hundreds of millions.

In January 2006 the Austrian police finally found Saliera when one of the thieves tried to put it up for ransom - police followed him into the forest and found the spot where he had buried it. Personally, I would have gone for a Swiss bank, but I guess burying the thing works, too. It suffered no damage, and is now back on display. If you have any interest in stolen art, I suggest you check out Interpol's webpage on stolen art, or the website of the FBI's recently created Art Crime Team.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I, by Gustav Klimt. Oil, silver and gold on canvas, 1907.

If you have any interest in the work of Gustav Klimt, now is the time to head down to LA. I know what you're thinking - the last thing I want to do is be surrounded by smog, traffic, and Hollywood yuppies. Well, sorry, but if you have any desire to see the painting to the left, you'd better head to LACMA soon. Say, before June 30th. Heck, even I'm seriously considering taking the 8 hour drive from my home to get there.

Five Gustav Klimt paintings, including Adele Bloch-Bauer I, were recently returned to their rightful owner in LA. Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer (their original owner), won a legal battle with the Austrian government, which had taken possession of the paintings after the Jewish Bloch-Bauer family fled the country during World War II. Thanks to some serious sucking up, LACMA gets to exhibit these paintings for the next 3 months. After that, who knows where they will end up, but I shed tears to think that Altmann might have them hanging in her living room or something. Come on lady, buy yourself a poster to hang in the house, and put the paintings on public display like they should be.

It will especially be tragic if Adele Bloch-Bauer I ends up in a private collection. It's probably the greatest painting Klimt has done that makes use of silver and gold. Klimt's father was a gold and silver engraver, so when Klimt uses them he really knows what he's doing. Paintings like this really hearken back to the good old days of Byzantine icons and mosaics. Also, gold is pretty.

Ironically, Adele Bloch-Bauer I has been known for a long time as the "Mona Lisa of Austria." Looks like now she'll be "Mona Lisa of LA," or "Mona Lisa of Maria Altmann's House." We'll have to wait and see. Be sure to check out the LACMA website for more info on the exhibition.

The Bay, by Helen Frankenthaler. Acrylic on canvas, 1963.

Keeping with the theme of art in the news, I thought today I'd showcase the Helen Frankenthaler painting The Bay that gained some notoriety back in February. Allow me to tell you the story.

Once upon a time, in the magical, far-off kingdom of Michigan, a school class took a field trip to The Detroit Institute of Arts. It is there that The Bay hangs, in all of its abstract, colorful glory. Well, one twelve-year-old boy from the school apparently didn't appreciate the poetic way in which Frankenthaler uses her paints to capture the forms of nature, and decided her work would be vastly improved by the addition of a chewed wad of Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice gum. (I'm so glad the news media goes out of its way to get us details like this.) The gum was noticed by a security guard, and quickly removed, although it did leave a stain about the size of a quarter.

News reports say that the boy didn't really have a clear idea of why placing chewed gum on museum art is a bad thing. I don't recall being too bright at twelve, but I visited a few museums at that age, and never did the idea of placing gum on a painting seem like a great idea. But the boy quickly realized the enormity of what he had done when he was lynched by an angry mob of museum docents and art conservators. Okay, that's not exactly what happened, but that's what would have occurred had the law not gotten involved.

Now I'm going to allow you to go ahead and insert your own Helen Frankenthaler joke here. Come on, you know you've got one, just get it out of your system. "Too bad, the gum was probably an improvement!" Or "Was this before or after someone spilled a jar of blue paint on it?" Or "Finally, a Helen Frankenthaler piece is getting the treatment it deserves." Or, for the less clever among you, "Haha, who cares about the gum, since, you know, that painting is, uh, pretty dang ugly. And stupid. It's not even a painting of anything. Excuse me while I go enjoy my Thomas Kincaid."

Now I'll tell you that The Bay has an estimated value of $1.5 million. I will also tell you to burn your Kincaid and give real art a chance.

The quarter-sized gum stain is now gone, thanks to thorough work with high-performance tweezers, hand-rolled Q-tips, some solvent and some experimentation with Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice (the art vandal's gum of choice). The painting is back on display again, the 12-year-old boy was suspended, and all's well that ends well. Now I think I'll go do a little research and find out what it is that makes tweezers "high-performance."

L'atelier, by Pablo Picasso. Crayon on paper, 1958.

Now that I've proven to all of you that I am, in fact, a genius, let me show you a real Picasso. This is a drawing that is too good to have been made by a five-year-old.

This is L'atelier, the real thing. Back when Atelier de Cannes was on sale, I was angry that Costco didn't have a better picture of it available on their website, so I searched the internet for a better image, and found this. Had I been smarter, I would have said, "Aha! So the other is a fake!" But I just assumed they were two different versions of the same composition, one good and one not-so-good.

What I really find amusing about all of this is that the fake version, Atelier de Cannes, is so absolutely awful compared to this. I mean, if you were forging a work of art, wouldn't you try to be pretty dang precise? But it honestly looks like whoever forged Atelier de Cannes had the skills of a five-year-old. The forger screwed up the composition, messed up on the thickness of the lines and the vibrancy of the color... I could list much more, but just look at them both. Obviously, a blind man could have made a better forgery.

And now for the moral of our story: Well, our first moral is that, even if you are blind, you too can become a successful creator of fake art. Actually, I should call that the immoral of our story. In my mind, the real moral is this: don't accept crappy art just because it has a big name attached to it. Big names like Picasso or Monet or Van Gogh usually scare us into believing that everything they've ever made is good. But it isn't! Great Moses's ghost, you say, could that really be true? Yes! Everyone accepted the fake Costco Picasso, not because it was good, but because everyone thought it was a Picasso. So, my children, don't let the names of dead guys convince you that something is either good or bad. Unless that dead guy's name is Hitler or something. I mean, pretty much everything associated with him is bad. I suppose Jesus would be an exception to the rule, too. But really, other than those two, it could go either way.

(By the way, L'atelier is French for The Studio, and Atelier de Cannes is French for Studio in Cannes.)

Atelier de Cannes, by Pablo Picasso? Crayon on paper, 1958.

Looks like I finally came through for you pessimists! What can I say? I get busy, I get lazy... and I was actually kind of overwhelmed about everything that could be said about the Acropolis. I mean, it's the freaking Acropolis. I will get to it... eventually... but first, a little something in honor of April Fool's Day.

Back in mid-2005, the above drawing was put up for sale on Costco.com, for the low low price of $129,999.99. (Because people out there shopping for a Picasso sure wouldn't want to pay the full $130,000.) At the time I actually went to the Costco website and checked it out, and was surprised to see that they had some other quality art pieces for sale as well, including a Chagall and a few Modiglianis.

So naturally everybody and their mother started talking about this Picasso drawing, and being the art historian I am, everyone came to me complaining that their 5-year-old could draw something better than this. I hear this about a lot of good art, and usually it pisses me off, but in this case I actually agreed. Little did I know that this was actually a sign that I am, in fact, a genius.

So Costco sold this drawing, as well as a second Picasso, and was about to put a third up for sale when someone with authority finally spoke up and said, hey, this doesn't just look like crap, it is crap. And Picasso didn't make crap. Picasso's daughter Maya, the world's Picasso authority, came out a week or two ago and stated that all of the drawings, and their authentication papers, were fakes.

I so called it.

Well, I didn't call it a forgery, but I did call it a piece of crap, and I was right.

Go me.