Culture Canvas

A weekly roundup of arts and culture headlines (back from hiatus).

Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images.

“Orange, Red, Yellow,” above, an oil painting by Mark Rothko, sold for $86.9 million at a Christie’s auction in New York, setting a record for the Abstract Expressionist painter. The price “was the most spectacular of 14 world records established on Tuesday,” via the New York Times.

Watch the auction here.

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The blockbuster movie “The Avengers” had the biggest domestic opening weekend debut in box-office history, hauling in $200.3 million, via the Wall Street Journal.

However, “the damage inflicted on Manhattan by an army of marauding extra-terrestrials and the superpowered defenders of Earth…would cost $160 [billion] to repair, according to U.S. ‘disaster experts,'” via the Guardian.

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Performance artist Marina Abramovic unveiled the design for the Marina Abramovic Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, a $15 million center in upstate New York devoted to the research and production of duration-based works of art, via the Huffington Post.

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The best-selling erotic novels by E.L. James, a trilogy titled “Fifty Shades of Grey,” might not be coming to your local library. Libraries in a few states are choosing not to stock the books or pulling them from shelves, with many citing what they say is inappropriate content, via the Christian Science Monitor.

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David H. Koch, the executive vice president of Koch Industries and a supporter of conservative causes, donated $35 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The gift, the largest single donation to the museum and the fifth largest in Smithsonian history, will go to a new dinosaur hall, via The Washington Post.

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In a ruling with “significant” implications for the music industry, the Village People’s original lead singer, Victor Willis (the cop), can reclaim his copyright interests in the 1970s disco act’s hits, including “YMCA,” “In the Navy” and “Go West,” via Bloomberg.

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Keith Haring, the late artist who is the subject of an ongoing exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and was recently celebrated with a Google doodle, invented the museum gift shop, via the Christian Science Monitor.

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Lyricist Hal David and composer Burt Bacharach were awarded the 2012 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song by President Obama. The ceremony will be aired on PBS later this month.

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The Economist reports: “The project has eaten up all his Nobel prize money and he says he could have written half a novel in the time it has taken to finish it. But Turkey’s laureate, Orhan Pamuk, finally has his Museum of Innocence, the wellspring of his bestselling 2008 tale of the same name, about the doomed Istanbul lovers, Fusun and Kemal.”

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During a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 13-year-old boy from West Hartford, Conn., noticed an error in one of its maps of the Byzantine Empire. He notified staff and in January received a letter from the museum notifying him that the map would be corrected, via the Hartford Courant.

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An unemployed Ohio man paid $14.14 for a Picasso poster at a Columbus local thrift. The poster, actually a linocut, It turned out to be signed by Picasso himself. The man sold it for $7,000 to a private buyer, via the Associated Press.

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The secret history of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” via the Art Newspaper. The painting, which recently sold for a record $119.9 million at auction, had been “resting in the vaults of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for 17 years, with few people even knowing that it was there.”

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In Slate, Michael Agresta asks: “What Will Become of the Paper Book? How their design will evolve in the age of the Kindle.”

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Ai Weiwei, “China’s most famous artist” talks to the Economist about his work and how it “confounded” his jailers.

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Adam “MCA” Yauch, a member of the rap group the Beastie Boys, died Friday at the age of 47 after a three-year battle with cancer. [New York Times]

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Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator of children’s literature who was best known for his book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” died early Tuesday in Danbury, Conn., at age 83. He had suffered a stroke.

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Thomas Kinkade, the popular painter who died in April at age 54, was killed by an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium, according to the medical examiner, via the Los Angeles Times.

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George Lindsey, the actor and comedian best known for playing gas station attendant Goober Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show,” died Sunday at age 83. [The New York Times]