An original Michaelangelo drawing, estimated at between $10 and $12 million dollars, was recently discovered in an old box of illustrations of lighting fixtures at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
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Picasso Found In Break Room
Just weeks before MOMA’s move to Queens, an original Picasso painting was discovered by a newly hired night watchman. It had been hanging up in the employee’s break room for twenty years, right next to a Drake’s Cakes display. “I spotted it right off the bat, no sweat,” said Louis Rodriquez, “The guitar-headed girl, the typically cubist fracturing of space and time, the autobiographical minotaur figure, and the vagina dentatis references — they all pointed to it’s being the real thing.” The following morning Rodriquez brought it to the attention of the museum’s head curator, William Grigg. “At first I dismissed it — after all this was a night watchman,” said Grigg, “but then I noticed the big Picasso signature…” The painting is expected to fetch at least $20 million at Christie’s later this month.
Stegosaurus Remains in Neanderthal Diorama
An amateur Welsh paleontologist on holiday got the shock of his life recently when he paid a visit to New York’s Museum of Natural History. Toward the back of an eighty-year-old diorama of Neanderthals killing a wooly mammoth he noticed a vast pile of gigantic bones. “It was a bloody Stegosaurus!” he told reporters recently, “mixed in with the bloody Neanderthals! They lived eighty bloody million years apart!” The disassembled Stegosaurus skeleton, complete but for a single rib — later found in the hand of one of the slavering Neanderthal mannikins — will eventually be reassembled and displayed in the main hall. “It was right there under our noses all along!” said one museum official, who declined to take responsibility.
Dropcloth Actually a Jackson Pollock!
Larry Blittman, a curator at The Whitney Museum, recently gave several old dropcloths to a Queens housepainter named Argyris Smiktofrides, who was doing some work at the museum. “They’d been in a basement room for years,” Blittman said. But when Smiktofrides looked at the dropcloths, he immediately felt there was something “special” about one of them in particular. “It wasn’t folded as you’d expect,” he said, “but rather was mounted on a large wooden frame, and signed. It also had the classic cigarette ash marks and looping spatter-drips of a real Pollock.” The Whitney is currently in litigation with Smiktofrides, who plans to return to Greece and build several villas with the proceeds from the pending sale of the painting.
Shield of Achilles Turns Up
A redfaced curator at the British Museum in London yesterday told reporters that he had positively identified the fabled Homeric “Shield of Achilles” in a basement room of abandoned Mycenean-era armor. “This was part of the huge booty Lord Elgin had brought here in the early 19th century, and we’d been keeping it below stairs, intending to catalog it someday…” he said. “But we’d always been too busy. Then one day I was down there sneaking a fag and I looked at one of the bronze shields and noticed that the figures on it were magically alive! There was every manner of miniature activity, all entirely consistent with Homer’s description of it in Book Six of The Iliad. That’s when I thought we might take a closer look. Just imagine, the Shield of Achilles, right under our noses!”
Gogol’s “The Nose” in Sotheby’s Recycling Bin
Without giving it a moment’s thought, an expert in 19th-century manuscripts at Sotheby’s recently threw an old sheaf of papers into a recyling bin before leaving for the day. “It was all in Cyrillic,” she said, “which is basically Greek to me, so I chucked it.” Fortunately a few hours later a Russian cleaning lady happened to be going through the same bin looking for a New York Post. She spotted Nikolai Gogol’s famous Absurdist short story masterpiece instantly. “It is his pre-Surrealist The Nose, no?” she said, shrugging. Indeed it was. The manuscript expert has taken a leave of absence from the auction house, and the cleaning lady has been hired by Christie’s at a substantial salary increase.
Sword of Damocles in Hermitage Dumpster
Officials at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg yesterday announced that a Gypsy man with a barebones knowledge of Modern Greek had discovered the actual Sword of Damocles, long thought to be fictional, in a dumpster behind the main building. The ornate bejeweled box in which it was found bore an inscription in Fifth Century Greek that said, “Tou Damokleon” — which basically translates to “Property of Damocles”. The man and his lawyer will appear on Larry King Live later this week.
Microscope Technician Locates Ted Williams’ Son’s Brain
An unidentified Bellevue Hospital technician, during a routine cleaning of some old microscope equipment located what he was sure was the brain of Ted Williams’ controversial son John. “It was too big to be a dust particle,” the giddy technician told reporters, “so I figured I’d hit paydirt.” The hospital plans to freeze it, and then, eventually, to use it to clone ferrets.
Michael Jackson’s Nose Among Lighting Fixtures
A demolition worker from Howard Beach, Queens yesterday claimed to have discovered the original nose of pop crooner Michael Jackson, and was immediately hawking it on ebay to the highest bidder. The demo-man, Lou Bonano, had been watching Jackson denouncing Tommy Motola in a televised news conference when he suddenly remembered a nose in a box in his basement. The box contained lighting fixtures and other hardware from a plastic surgeon’s office that had been refurbished years ago. “I ran down there and rummaged around and found the nose right away,” he said, “and the more I looked at it the more I realized he looked nothing like it anymore — not even close — and that’s when I knew it was his. It was right under my nose all along!”
A vigorous online bidding war between the Estate of Sir John Merrick, popularly known as the Elephant Man, whose bones Jackson purchased two decades ago, and Sir Paul McCartney, whose songs Jackson purchased around that time, is said to be under way.
