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A critically acclaimed one-man play about institutional abuse of children that created waves in Ireland when it was first produced in 2003 will be coming to New York. ''James X,'' written and performed by Gerard Mannix Flynn, will begin performances on Dec. 6 and open on Dec. 9 at 45 Bleecker Theater. The play presents the story of a man waiting to present testimony to a tribunal investigating the sexual and physical abuse of children. It will be directed by Gabriel Byrne, the actor, and produced by Mr. Byrne, the actor Liam Neeson and Culture Project, a New York-based performance organization whose work focuses on human rights issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three overseers of the Rose Art Museum filed a lawsuit on Monday in state court in Massachusetts, seeking to halt Brandeis University's plans to close the museum and clear the way to sell some of its works, which include pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly. The university's trustees voted in January to close the museum and sell the works, collectively estimated to be worth a total in the area of $350 million, as a way to help the university contend with an endowment that has been seriously diminished during the financial crisis. Brandeis later backtracked, saying that no works would be sold in the immediate future and that the building would remain open as an art study center, though not as a public museum. In their suit the overseers -- Jonathan O. Lee, Lois Foster and Meryl Rose, a member of the family whose donations created the museum in 1961 -- contend that Brandeis's plans to close the museum ''contradict the charitable intentions'' of the museum's founders, ''abrogate Brandeis's promises that the Rose would be maintained in perpetuity'' as a modern and contemporary art museum, and violate its commitments to those who donated art to the museum. In a statement, attorneys for the university called the lawsuit frivolous and without merit, arguing that the Rose's endowment is part of the larger Brandeis endowment, and that the university is focused first and foremost on ''providing its students with a first class education and ensuring that Brandeis continues to provide financial assistance to needy students.'' This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a city of islands outlined by almost 600 miles of coastline, it should not be such a strange thing, the sight of two men portaging a canoe through the streets. But on Monday morning, when the English artist Simon Starling and a traveling companion, Dante Birch, paddled into the West 79th Street Boat Basin and hoisted their canoe -- a lovely 16-foot striped vessel Mr. Starling had made from African walnut -- on their heads and then began an upland trek to the American Museum of Natural History, Manhattanites stopped to stare as if they had spotted some kind of large, undomesticated animal on the loose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job. But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Art Randy Kennedy [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art said Thursday that it would lay off more than a quarter of its merchandising staff, eliminating 74 jobs in addition to 53 already cut over the last year. It also warned that the worsening economy would most likely force it to shrink its overall work force by 10 percent -- as many as 250 full- and part-time jobs in all -- before the summer, including some in curatorial and other pivotal departments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Five years is not a long time, in some things. But in dog years and especially in Web years, it can be a stretch. So when the Museum of Modern Art began working in late 2007 to renovate its Web site substantially for the first time since 2002, it knew that it wouldn't be just updating a few pieces -- it would be entering a whole new era. The era is one in which blogs, photo sharing, social networking, bookmarking and many other ways of creating art-loving online communities have become a much more important part of museum Web sites, led by places like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (walkerart.org), the Brooklyn Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is so user-friendly that its site (imamuseum.org) contains a dashboard-like display with up-to-date information, like the size of the museum's endowment, its daily energy use and the average time people spend looking at its Web pages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its advertising contractors routinely review the content of subway ads, keeping their eyes out for things that are too racy or rude. But they have never had an ad quite like one that came their way recently: an image of five naked women (probably prostitutes) vamping it up and staring down the viewer. The fact that the frontal nudity is fully Cubist and was painted by Picasso more than a century ago undoubtedly made the decision a lot easier. And so on Monday, a glossy reproduction of that artwork, ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,'' took its place underground in the Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street subway stations in Brooklyn, with copies of 57 other works from the Museum of Modern Art that will briefly transform the cavernous stations into a kunsthalle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a pre-emptive strike, the street artist Shepard Fairey filed a lawsuit on Monday against The Associated Press, asking a federal judge to declare that he is protected from copyright infringement claims in his use of a news photograph as the basis for a now ubiquitous campaign poster image of President Obama. The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan after The Associated Press said it had determined that it owned the image, which Mr. Fairey used for posters and stickers distributed grass-roots style last year during the election campaign. The photo, showing Mr. Obama at the National Press Club in April 2006, was taken for The A.P. by a freelance photographer, Mannie Garcia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Art Randy Kennedy [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Efforts are mounting to prevent Brandeis University from closing its Rose Art Museum and selling its collection of postwar works, a move that the university maintains is necessary for financial reasons. On Thursday dozens of faculty members signed a letter to Jehuda Reinharz, the university's president, asking him to consider suspending a final decision on the museum ''pending a full airing of possible alternatives by the Brandeis community.'' The letter added that ''the university's deserved reputation as a beacon for both social justice and intellectual integrity is at stake here.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Maybe because of the way its bourgeois tendencies keep clashing with its elitist ambitions, the novel is a literary form that writers have never been able to resist reinventing. There are epistolary novels and those in the form of diaries, wordless picture novels, graphic novels and novels written as dictionaries and encyclopedias. The Serbian writer Milorad Pavic may win the prize: he has attempted novels disguised as a crossword puzzle, a tarot book and even a clepsydra, an ancient water clock (at least conceptually; the pages are dry). That a work of fiction has now assumed the form of an auction catalog could be seen as a sign of the times -- deeply materialistic and, with a big recession on, increasingly for sale. But the artist and writer Leanne Shapton said that the idea for her novel, being published this week by Farrar Straus & Giroux under the unwieldy title ''Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry,'' came to her because she noticed how the lot descriptions in some estate catalogs added up to elliptical plots about the lives of the former possessors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If you've been half-awake in the subway sometime in the last year or so and thought you noticed two guys drowning in a glass of beer in a Michelob ad, or saw an ad for a television program about the Drug Enforcement Administration altered to say, ''Iran: Every Deal Can Turn Deadly,'' or that familiar subway door sign reworded to read, ''Do Not Lean on Poor,'' you have most likely seen the work of Poster Boy. While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two museums announced Monday that they had reached a settlement with heirs of the original owner of two Picasso paintings, including ''Boy Leading a Horse,'' who contended that they had been sold under duress in Nazi Germany. The terms of the agreement, reached as a trial was about to begin in federal court in Manhattan, were not disclosed. But the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum said in a statement that they would continue to own the works. The suit involved ''Le Moulin de la Galette,'' given to the Guggenheim in 1963 by the art dealer Justin K. Thannhauser, and ''Boy Leading a Horse,'' sold by Mr.Thannhauser to William S. Paley, who donated it to MoMA in 1964. In 2007 lawyers for Julius H. Schoeps, a great-nephew of the paintings' original owner, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, told the museums that they believed Mr. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a German Jewish banker who died in 1935, had sold the works to Mr. Thannhauser under duress, and demanded their return. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an interview with artist and actor Ryan Trecartin. Trecartin counts the Disney Channel and the film ''Dirty Dancing'' among his important artistic inspirations. Trecartin says that he thinks that people who have never known a world without the Web, are the ones who understand his work most intuitively. He says that he is looking forward to people born in the 1990s to begin making art.

The Massachusetts attorney general's office said on Tuesday that it planned to conduct a detailed review of Brandeis University's surprise decision to sell off the entire holdings of its Rose Art Museum, one of the most important collections of postwar art in New England. The decision to close the 48-year-old museum in Waltham, Mass., and disperse the collection as a way to shore up the university's struggling finances was denounced by the museum's board, its director and a wide range of art experts, who warned that the university was cannibalizing its cultural heritage to pay its bills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2005, the British artist Banksy -- then on the verge of becoming probably the world's most famous street artist -- walked into the Museum of Modern Art and three other New York museums done up in a beige raincoat and fake beard, looking more like a subway flasher than a ''quality vandal,'' as he called himself. Once inside he furtively mounted his own work among the masterpieces, relying on speed and two-sided tape rather than curatorial consent as his way into the collections, at least until guards noticed. ''These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires,'' he wrote later in an e-mail message to a reporter, explaining his dim view of museums and his desire to see his work inside one purely to poke fun at the whole idea. ''The public never has any real say in what art they see.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In its final days, the Bush administration has reached a long-anticipated agreement with China that will ban imports of a wide range of Chinese antiquities into the United States to help stanch the growing illicit traffic in such artifacts. The accord, signed on Wednesday, covers antiquities dating from the Paleolithic period, starting in 75,000 B.C., through the end of the Tang dynasty, in A.D. 907, and all monumental sculpture and wall art at least 250 years old. Yet it is not as broad as the ban China originally proposed in 2004, when it asked the United States to bar imports on a wide range of artifacts from the prehistoric period through the early 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR much of its history the camera has been regarded by most of its users as a reliable recorder of visual experience. But professional photographers, especially those who use the medium to make art, have always known better. ''A photograph is a secret about a secret,'' Diane Arbus said. ''The more it tells you, the less you know.'' When Allan Chasanoff, a New York art patron and photographer, began building a photography collection more than two decades ago, it was this idea, about the subtle deceitfulness at work in even the most straight-ahead snapshot, that guided him. It propelled him to look for imagery, by photographers both famous and decidedly less so, that he came to categorize as ''the optical'' -- not trick photographs, but more or less conventional ones that opened a ''a crack in the realism screen,'' as he wrote, pictures that you look at, then have to look at again (and again). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

EVEN before Marcel Proust died in 1922, ordering iced beer from the Ritz on his deathbed, his monumental novel about art and memory was being dissected for wisdom on a stunning variety of topics. It has been celebrated for its obsessions with everything from Norman architecture to optics, homosexuality, classical music, botany, tactical warfare, fin de siecle fashion and princely copper-pot French cuisine. (In one passage the narrator describes Francoise, the enduring housekeeper, combing Les Halles for the choicest cuts of meat, like Michelangelo in Carrara, ''selecting the most perfect blocks of marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II.'') [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A federal judge in Ohio granted a request late Tuesday from Senator Barack Obama's campaign to extend the voting hours in 21 precincts in Cleveland by an extra 90 minutes because of a lack of paper ballots. But because the order arrived after the polls had already closed, election officials were only able to reopen 10 polling stations, according to the Ohio secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner. That resulted in five additional votes being cast, Ms. Brunner said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]