Wednesday's Art Notes

_Indian potter Hansaben keeps a furnace running to bake earthenware clay pots at Gyaspur village, some 20 kms from Ahmedabad. Earthenware clay pots prepared in the winter season are ideal to store cool water during hot summers. Photo by Sam Panthaky/ AFP/ Getty Images_ * A main cast member says she's leaving the Broadway musical _Spider-Man_, which is still in previews, via "The New York Times":http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/theater/29spider.html. * Vivid ancient Australian cave paintings have kept their fresh color because living pigment-colored bacterial and fungal organisms have completely replaced the original paint, via "UPI":http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/12/28/Living-pigment-in-rock-art-discovered/UPI-13151293575728/. * In Sweden, three men have been convicted of a stealing an Edvard Munch painting and two others that no one had noticed was missing until the police found them while investigating an unrelated crime, via the "Associated Press":http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=12498403. * Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt predicts the extinction of the 'geek' and an immediate future where special intellectual niches no longer exist and all existing pop culture gets constantly and randomly hybridized, via "Wired":http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_angrynerd_geekculture/all/1. * Denis Dutton, the philosopher, author and founder of high-minded humanities Internet content aggregator "Arts & Letters Daily":http://www.aldaily.com/, has died after having cancer at age 66 in New Zealand, via the "Los Angeles Times":http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/12/denis-dutton-has-died.html. **Here is Dutton delivering a lecture on beauty and evolution for TED Talks in February:**