The Italian police's list of hot art contains a staggering 300,000 items, 10 times as many as the Interpol site.
Some commemorative sculptures survived in homes until the 1960s, when African poverty and a hot art market conspired to take them to Europe for sale.
"And immediately they make contact with them, even before they graduate from school, saying, 'I will buy everything from you.' " (A similar phenomenon has been observed in recent years at hot art schools in New York and Los Angeles).
Ms. Mutu, who was born in Kenya, has been a hot art world commodity in recent years, celebrated for surrealistic collages in which disembodied eyes, lips and body parts cut from magazines are layered with glitter, animal fur and paint to create distorted beings that suggest both animals and women.
On his Web site, and in his 1993 autobiography, Hot Art, Cold Cash, published by Little, Brown, Van Rijn openly acknowledges some of the scams he has pulled, including the notorious Avar treasure that he commissioned from a famous faker in Athens and sold through Sotheby's in the 1980s.
While the sales of many luxury goods are on the decline, these relics of the land before time are the newest hot art objects.
Apparently, at least six other comedians feel the same way: They've come together to perform an already-sold-out show made up of rape jokes on January 21 at Vancouver's Hot Art Wet City.
I didn't see my queer reality in The L Word's funhouse-mirror fantasy of lesbian life, but I could imagine that one day I might marry a hot art curator and raise an adorable child like Angelica.
I first got the pleasure of meeting Samantha when she was a participant in the largest bi-annual teen art exhibition in the state of Minnesota called "Hot Art Injection (May Cause Side Effects)" in 1999, in conjunction with the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council.
