Wednesday's Art Notes

_Indian schoolchildren dressed as tigers wait to perform during a Republic Day parade in Bangalore on January 26, 2011. Photo by Dibyangshu Sarkar/ AFP/ Getty Images_ * A lifelong collector of butterflies and amateur lepidopterist, novelist Vladimir Nabokov had developed his own theory on the evolution of a particular blue butterfly, which now, scientists say, turns out to be totally valid, via "The New York Times":http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html. * A pile of fabricated "sunflower seeds":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/10/mondays-art-notes-41.html created by "Ai Weiwei":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/01/wednesdays-art-notes-55.html for an exhibit at the Tate Modern will be auctioned off in February, via "The Wall Street Journal":http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2011/01/26/the-saga-continues-with-sunflower-seeds/. The artist "talked to":http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704624504576097932998562592.html WSJ on Tuesday about how little his time is spent on art, and how much is spent on politics and human rights issues. * In Paris, fans queued up in the middle of the night for up to five hours to get a final glimpse of a Monet exhibition, which is estimated to have lured about a million visitors over the course of four months, via "The Independent":http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/paris-artlovers-queue-through-the-night-to-marvel-at-monet-2193321.html. Meanwhile, ARTINFO "reports":http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36788/parisians-demand-more-flexible-museum-hours-and-the-city-listens/ on new changes coming for the way Paris museums are managed by the government. * ARTINFO "looks at":http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36808/the-art-that-robert-mugabe-doesnt-want-you-to-see/ the censored art of Zimbabwean painter Owen Maseko, who was jailed for several months over an exhibition of works that depicted atrocities from the 1980s. * The New York Times "reconsiders":http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/garden/27art.html the role of parent as art patron, and tests out the idea by "interviewing":http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/garden/27artside.html an established artist who got no encouragement as a child. * Among the victims of the Moscow airport bombing was Ukrainian playwright Anna Mashutina, via "The New York Times":http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/world/europe/26ukraine.html. * Country music pioneer Charlie Louvin, one half of the popular Louvin Brothers, whose songs where later recorded by Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris, has died at age 83, via "The Washington Post":http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postmortem/2011/01/charlie-louvin-dies-country-si.html.