ARTINFO - Here’s a story, sad but true, about a man who took a coy-looking female to a hotel, then got drunk and lost her. Unfortunately for this man, an art courier named James Carl Haggarty, his lady friend was highly two-dimensional. In fact, she was contained within a painting — none other than Portrait of a Girl, a 19th-century work by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot with an estimated value of $1.4 million, which Haggarty was taking to show to a potential buyer. In a lawsuit filed against Haggarty by Kristyn Trudgeon, the majority owner of the portrait, she states that Haggarty woke up to find that he did not have the painting and could not recall its whereabouts, citing that he had too much to drink the previous evening. Whoops.

ARTINFO - Mexico City’s burgeoning art scene will welcome a new private museum in November, when billionaire collector Carlos Slim inaugurates a new branch of his Soumaya museum. The $750-million project — that’s 50 percent more than SFMOMA plans to spend on its recently announced expansion, for those keeping track at home — has been designed by Slim’s son-in-law Fernando Romero and is already under construction in western Mexico City, according to Reuters.

ARTINFO - The Coordination de la Défense de Versailles (CDV) doesn’t pull any punches when expressing its opposition to the upcoming exhibition of Japanese Pop artist Takashi Murakami at the Château of Versailles. Having been formed to press (unsuccessfully) for the cancellation of a Jeff Koons show in the palace in 2008, the organization now condemns what it calls the veritable ‘murder’ of our heritage, our artistic identity, and our most sacred culture.

ARTINFO - With U.S President Barack Obama set to announce the end of his nation's combat operations in Iraq in a televised address this evening, the Middle Eastern country's long history of turmoil and its recent, slow progress toward peace will once again receive major media attention. However, if American-born, Italy-based curator Mary Angela Schroth gets her way, it will be on the international stage again in the near future for a much more positive reason. Along with a team of patrons, artists, and curators, she is working to create a national pavilion for the nation at the 54th Venice Biennale, which opens next June. It has not participated in the biannual event since 1976.

ARTINFO - It is a dangerous world out there. Just days after a van Gogh was stolen from a Cairo museum, a work by Renaissance master Titian that is housed in the Santa Maria della Salute basilica in Venice was almost accidentally destroyed. The culprit this time? Italian firefighters attempting to quell a blaze in a nearby seminary.

ARTINFO - Funding for the arts has been cut in many cities in recent years as a result of the troubled economy, but some Detroit Symphony Orchestra members say that they believe something else is at least partially responsible for the drastic pay cuts that have been proposed by the orchestra's administrators:  a history of mismanagement. Through their union, they have voted to authorize a strike.

ARTINFO - Though entrepreneur Rick Norsigian continues to argue that photographic negatives he purchased at a California garage sale are the work of famed American photographer Ansel Adams, the evidence supporting that stance is quickly unraveling. One of the experts that had authenticated the works, former Museum of Fine Arts, Boston curator Robert C. Moeller III, has recanted his previous assessment, telling the New York Times that at least some of the photographs were taken by another man, Earl Brooks. Norsigian has been working with a team of lawyers to sell prints of the negatives, which he says are worth $200 million.

ARTINFO - With Glass, Under Glass, Without Glass, at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 185, Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montreal, Canada, through October 3, macm.org

ARTINFO - Though U.K.-based Architect Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad, she has never before received a commission to work there — or anywhere in Iraq, for that matter. But that is no longer the case. Authorities at Baghdad's Central Bank have confirmed that the award-winning architect has been picked to design a new headquarters for the institution. Hadid’s new design will replace the bank’s previous home, a marble-clad concrete structure that was attacked by suicide bombers and gunmen on June 13, killing 14 people and injuring well over 50.

ARTINFO - Street art, teetering as it has been for the last decade between crime and high-end gallery cash crop, has taken another step toward establishing itself as a legal, rarefied art form. This past weekend saw the launch of the Urban Art Foundation, which styles itself as an ACLU for graffiti-related criminal charges, offering financial backing and legal representation for those arrested for tagging city streets. It also hopes to procure landmark status for some of New York’s finest covertly-made works and promote the art form in public schools.

Art directors throughout central Virginia spent Friday morning networking in Charlottesville.