Around the web: professional cheese sculptor edition

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

Art

• The strange story behind the CIA calendar the CIA gift shop refuses to sell.
• What it’s like to be a professional cheese sculptor.
• Related: a brief history of food as art.
• Were JG Ballard’s billboards actually coded Salvador Dalí paintings?
• We totally identify with this woman who accidentally got locked inside a museum in Germany.

• What is flood control missing? The eye of an artist, according to the city of Austin, Texas.
• Turns out it wasn’t so easy after all: a Brooklyn artist was arrested after allegedly wanting to show how easy it is to carry around a bomb.
• Here’s a nice Valentine’s Day project for art historians in love: make your own “love token.”
• The Uffizi will show more female artists—with a little help from the Guerrilla Girls.

Art & science

• A neuroscientist’s lessons on why abstract art makes our brains hurt so good.
• Since we didn’t have any Van Gogh-themed articles this month, here’s our inevitable Mona Lisa click-bait: Have researchers unlocked the mystery of Mona Lisa’s famously enigmatic smile?
• The 50-year rescue of Vasari’s flood-damaged masterpiece.
• What doctors can learn from looking at art.
• Psychologists believe they can identify progressive changes in work of artists who went on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
• A pioneering female artist, botanist, naturalist, and entomologist re‑emerges after 300 years.
• Jackson Pollock’s paintings mirror nature’s fractals like branching trees, snowflakes, waves—and the structure of the human eye.

Art & money

• “My niece has my $1-million Kandinsky painting in her dorm room!”
• How a half-billion-dollar statue is dividing India.