Frescogate: Cecilia Giménez goes a bit Damien Hirst

More intrigue from the Santuaria de Misericordia in Borja, as that nice old lady who turned the image of Jesus into a sad-eyed monkeybeastling has announced that she wants a slice of the tourist revenue. If we are going to have such a socio-aesthetic construct as outsider art, creativity that benefits from its amateur, outlying, renegade status, does it cease to be worthwhile the moment the artist tries to cash in on it?

Francesca Eastwood’s handbag: all bound for Mu Mu land

Francesca Eastwood, spawn of Clint, has prompted a minor brouhaha thanks to her involvement in an art stunt that involved a $100,000 Hermès bag being chainsawed and set on fire. It’s essentially a reality-show re-run of the KLF’s notorious Burn A Million Quid event, albeit on a smaller budget, and some of the aghast responses are pretty similar – Ms Eastwood should, we are informed, have put the money towards some more worthy cause. But is it really so much more heinous to destroy a bag worth $100,000 than to spend $100,000 on a bag in the first place? Or to sell it for that much? (Unless of course that’s what Eastwood and her conspirator/boyfriend were actually intending to say, in which case I’ve suddenly decided that it’s lame, studenty gesture politics of the most obvious kind.)

One more thought: how much direct involvement did the Hermès marketing department have in all this?