New England Journal of Aesthetic Research news headlines

Herald reports: “Boston Police Detective William Kelley said the average person thinks graffiti vandals are ‘just a bunch of mindless kids,’ but they are part of a ‘well-organized subculture’ tuned in to the Internet.” Also, Chicago Iraq vet who is part of this ‘well-organized subculture’ is sentenced to six months in jail for tagging nine T trains.

The art department of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain sanctioned a “well-organized subculture” by “unleashing graffiti and mural artists from around the area to create murals on the walls of the upper level of the Welte Parking Garage” during its fourth “Mural Slam.”

Onion: “Art World Relieved As Thieves Steal Pretty Terrible Late Period Renoir Work.”

After 15 years, Marshfield artist George Greenamyer’s public sculpture for Roslindale Square in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood is moving ahead. Greenamyer: “From my way of thinking, it’s a long process.”

Art restorer Craig Kay in Alford, Massachusetts: “Paintings will last about 80 years. Then they get banged up. I’m surprised they are in as good a shape as they are, most of the time. But sooner or later, things begin to happen to them.”

Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine, is given a portrait attributed to Gilbert Stuart of Bishop Jean-Louis Anne Magdelaine Lefebvre de Cheverus, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Boston. The painting will be on loan to the Portland Museum of Art.

Canada says: Stockbridge, Massachusetts, feels it doesn’t get the respect it deserves. “Eventually, people started thinking of the entire area as Lenox,” laments Barbara Allen, the curator at Stockbridge’s public library. “To my irritation, you can look at an article in The New York Times archives and it will say something like ‘The annual art exhibit took place in Lenox this weekend,’ when in fact it was right here on Main Street in Stockbridge.”

The Alliance of Artists Communities, a nonprofit group that represents arts-residency organizations such as Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Sundance Institute, holds its 20th annual conference titled “Advancing Today’s Artists: Boldness + Abundance in a New Economy” in Providence from Oct. 20 to 23 in Providence.

“The political art form of the decade“? Talking Points Memo rounds up the best/worst of “the racist and/or nutso anti-Obama” billboards.

Founder of Blu Homes, which manufactures pre-fab Modernist homes, uses his product to expand his house in Wayland, Massachusetts.

Members of the Western Maine Woodturners Association fashion a 7-inch tall wood-turned scale replica of the historic Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Narrow Gauge Railroad Engine No. 24 and tender, which will soon be displayed at Richard’s Florist and Narrow Gauge Cinemas in Farmington.

UniversalHub: Federal appeals court in Boston rules that heir of a Jewish art collector in Vienna has no right to the painting “Two Nudes (Lovers)” by Oskar Kokoschka, which the owner sold under duress after Nazis marched into Vienna and now is in the collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, “because she waited too long under Massachusetts law to file a claim.”

Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood to get new public art: Laura Baring-Gould’s “Dorchester Voices/Dorchester History” in Edward Everett Square and Joseph Wheelwright’s “Sleeping Moon” in Peabody Square.

150th anniversary of James Wallace Black floating 1,200 feet up over Boston in a balloon to take the first successful aerial photograph in the US.

Providence artist Brower Hatcher picked for $187,000 California public art project.

“Survey says Museums are vital to Maine’s economic health“?

Globe: “When Hyman Bloom died last year, not a single work by this painter, whom many regard as the most important and original artist to have emerged from Boston in the last 70 years, was hanging in any of this region’s major public museums.”