Lead Stories
In November Ontario College of Art student Jubal Brown told the Associated Press that he was the person who vomited publicly on two masterpieces this year. At the Art Gallery of Ontario in May he regurgitated red food coloring on a Raoul Dufy work, and at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in November he threw up in blue on a Piet Mondrian painting. Brown claimed that his goal was “to liberate individuals and living creatures from banal, oppressive representation.” He said his third work will be in yellow.
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Roberto Alomar-ism in the news: In September East Pittsburgh school custodian Anthony DePaulo spit on the car of a city councilman he didn’t like; in October Robert Cossia in Belleville, Illinois, spit on the truck of Gregory Brown (and allegedly on Brown himself) after a dispute over a bounced check; in November British doctors reported in the Lancet that meningitis was passed to a man when another man spit in his face; and also in November, according to U.S. News & World Report, the National Spit Tobacco Education Program reported that televised tobacco chewing and spitting during the 1996 World Series was down 80 percent from the average over the last ten years.
In June a federal magistrate ordered Dr. Susan J. Powers to pay the government $292,000 for breaking her contract to provide medical care to underserved rural areas in exchange for the government’s having funded her medical education. Powers tried to get out of the contract by claiming that if she left her “support network” of friends in the San Francisco Bay area she would become despondent and possibly suicidal.
China’s Xinhua news agency reported in September that Lui Yuxue, 16, had successfully undergone tongue-reduction surgery. The operation snipped off several inches of Lui’s tongue that extended outside her mouth.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Illustration by Shawn Belschwender.
