Monster Mash: Breaking news and headlines

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

-- Multimillionaire artist Damien Hirst (right) takes on a 16-year-old graffiti artist over the youth’s stencil collages.

-- Tony winner Karen Ziemba will star in the upcoming production of ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ at San Diego’s Old Globe.

-- Baltimore Opera Company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

-- Rachel Weisz returns to the London stage next summer in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ at the Donmar Warehouse.

-- The Getty’s top photography curator, Weston Naef, to retire.

-- Pete Wentz, lead singer of Fall Out Boy and husband of Ashlee Simpson, adds ‘artist’ to his resume.

-- ‘White Christmas,’ which played in Los Angeles in 2005, is bringing in the green on Broadway.

-- Bangladesh gets its own version of the Taj Mahal.

-- Sales were down, attendance was down -- what was left at Art Basel Miami ? The art.

-- Back injury forces David Tennant to sit out Royal Shakespeare Company’s acclaimed ‘Hamlet’ in London.

-- Conductor Steven Reineke, left, who is set to be begin his tenure as principal pops conductor for the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, is named music director of the New York Pops.

-- Time magazine picks its top museum exhibitions and plays and musicals of 2008.

-- As expected, Marc Mayer is named to head the National Gallery of Canada.

-- The Russian government reviews the legality of the Soviet Union’s sale of artworks in the 1920s.

-- Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne discusses the museum architecture of Daniel Liebeskind on NPR.

-- Are free tickets really the best way to bring in younger, long-term theater audiences?

-- A sneak peek at plans for Frank Gehry’s new offices in El Segundo.

-- Christie’s to auction 35.56-carat colored diamond once owned by King Philip IV of Spain.

-- Lisa Fung

Top photo: Patrick McMullan