Chew on This One

Boys gum is plucked from valuable art

"It's not often you see a 53-year-old professional play with his gum, but on Friday morning at the Detroit Institute of Arts, paintings conservator Alfred Ackerman picked up a wad of chewed Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice and stretched it like taffy, flipping it around his finger to create a second disgusting strand.

"I chewed it to get a sense of what this was like in terms of stickiness and tackiness and the amount of moisture we would be dealing with when we lifted it off," said Ackerman.

The saga of the $1.5-million abstract painting defaced two weeks ago by a 12-year-old boy who stuck gum on it during a school outing is heading for a happy ending. After intensive research, experimentation and surgical work with high-performance tweezers, hand-rolled Q-tips and a fast-evaporating solvent -- plus some purposeful fooling around with gum -- the quarter-sized residue on Helen Frankenthaler's "The Bay" is gone."

Am I reading this right? The guy picked up CHEWED gum, played with it a bit and then chewed it himself? Yeah, that seems like completely normal behavior from an adult. Suddenly the kid who planted the gum on the painting in the first place is looking mature by comparison.

I don't envy the guy though, he's got a difficult task in front of him. I have no idea how he's gonna get that huge piece of blue gum off that artwork, but if he does I think the painting will look great.