NEW YORK (Reuters) - A museum conservator and horologist loses her colleague and married lover of 13 years, forcing her to use the intricate restoration of a 19th century automaton and the diaries of the man who commissioned it as the means to cope with her grief. Set in London in 2010, "The Chemistry of Tears" is the 12th novel by Australian-born Peter Carey, winner of two Booker Prizes for "Oscar and Lucinda" and "True History of the Kelly Gang". ...

The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia is getting ready to reopen after three years of renovations.

Seventeen young dancers stop horsing around on the Nederlander Theatre stage as Christopher Gattelli approaches.

No longer a major institution and now a shrunken, vagabond company, New York City Opera is ending its first season since departing Lincoln Center with a handsome staging of Georg Philipp Telemann's "Orpheus," a work premiered in 1726 that was long lost before it was rediscovered in 1978.

Go ahead. Poke your head in the clouds.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is big on bubbles.

Artist Tony Abeyta just can't help himself.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Argentine artist Tomas Saraceno combines art, architecture and science in a striking installation on the rooftop garden of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that gives visitors a different perspective of the sky, clouds and the city around them. "Cloud City," which opens on Tuesday and runs for six months, is a giant jumble of interconnecting modules, measuring 54 feet long and 28 feet high, that rises to varying levels and incorporates reflective materials, mirrors and glass with New York's skyline and Central Park as the backdrop. ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Turner prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor said on Friday that Britons would grow to love his spiraling red tower on London's Olympic Park, just as people had come to appreciate other structures initially loathed, including the Eiffel Tower. The 115-metre tall structure, higher than London's Big Ben and New York's Statue of Liberty has divided opinion, with some describing it as resembling a carnival slide or a water pipe. ...

Estonia will open the Baltic states' largest maritime museum in a hangar once used by Charles Lindbergh.

This time last year, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was about a month removed from a contentious musicians' strike that worsened its already strained finances. Now, the rebounding organization aims to raise the roof — and hopefully $1 million — with help from a hometown musician known more for rock, rap and country than classical.

BASEL, Switzerland (Reuters) - U.S. pop artist Jeff Koons is seeking to fire up your emotions at a retrospective show of his work in Switzerland. Although some critics regard his work as empty kitsch, Koons has put 30 years of sculpture - including his famous Balloon Dog - into his first museum show in Switzerland along with the admission that his art is in eye of the beholder. Visitors to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel are met by a giant globe-like sculpture made of thousands of flowers. ...

An unemployed Ohio man was browsing at his local thrift store for items he could restore and resell when he spotted a Picasso poster with the word "Exposition" written across the front, some French words, and the image of a warped round face. He handed over $14.14 for what he saw as a nice commercial print.

A young Vincent van Gogh was so struck by a dead willow leaning "lonely and melancholy" over a pond near The Hague that he knew at once he had to paint it.

Andy Warhol's "Double Elvis" sold for $37 million and works by Roy Lichtenstein and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei broke their own records at Sotheby's contemporary art sale on Wednesday.

Paintings by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon and a work featuring one ton of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei are among the artworks leading a Wednesday night contemporary art sale at Sotheby's.

With sunglasses and spike heels, makeup artists and wardrobe experts, the American soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" has landed in Italy.

An Andy Warhol portrait of Elvis Presley as a cowboy is being sold at a New York City auction.

(Reuters) - An 83-year-old artist known for his block letter "LOVE" design that became a symbol of the anti-war movement in the 1960s is being sued by a Monaco-based art dealer for renouncing the authenticity of sculptures once valued as high as $1 million. Beginning in 2008, art buyer Joao Tovar paid $481,625 for 10 sculptures of the word PREM, a Sanskrit term meaning "love," from a one-time business partner of renowned pop artist Robert Indiana, Tovar said in the lawsuit filed in superior court in Rockland, Maine. ...

Performance artist Marina Abramovic plans to build a $15 million center in upstate New York devoted to the research and production of duration-based works of art lasting from six hours to several days.

Absent from the Metropolitan Opera for 15 years, Benjamin Britten's great maritime tragedy "Billy Budd" has made a brief but welcome return in the season's closing days.

A Connecticut seventh-grader says workers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City didn't believe him when he pointed out an inaccuracy with a map that was on exhibit. The map purported to show the Byzantine Empire at its largest size in the 6th century, but he noticed that Spain and part of Africa were missing from the depiction.

KANSAS CITY, Kansas (Reuters) - American industrialist David Koch, a major supporter of conservative causes, said on Thursday his lifelong fascination with dinosaurs drove his $35 million donation to renovate the National Museum of Natural History's dinosaur hall. The gift was the largest single donation in the Washington-based museum and research institution's 112-year history, the Smithsonian Institution said. "I've had a love affair with dinosaurs since I was a boy," Koch, who turned 72 on Thursday, told Reuters in a telephone interview from New York, where he lives. ...