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."