Monster Mash: Celebrity art collectors; repaired Picasso returns to the Met; a $9.5-million carpet

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--Star power: Jennifer Aniston, Christina Aguilera, Tobey Maguire, Beyonce and Jay-Z are among a growing number of celebrities who’ve become avid art collectors. (ARTINFO)

--Glory days: James Brown’s cape, Ella Fitzgerald’s yellow dress and Miles Davis’ fluegelhorn will be among a trove of mementos on display in a Washington exhibit celebrating Harlem’s storied Apollo Theater. (Associated Press)

--Restored: Picasso’s ‘The Actor’ has been rehung -- under plexiglass -- at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after conservators repaired a 6-inch tear caused by a woman who accidentally fell into the canvas. (New York Times)

--Record rug sale: A mid-17th century southeast Persian Kirman ‘vase carpet’-- which had an estimated value of about $300,000 -- has sold for a record $9.53 million. (Daily Telegraph)

--Casualties of war: Berlin’s Free University is putting online a database of more than 21,000 artworks condemned as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and seized from German museums in 1937. (Bloomberg)

--Softer side: An unpublished sketch that shows the often curmudgeonly Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens) as family man and loving father will be among 200 of the author’s manuscripts, letters and photographs that will go up for auction in New York. (Associated Press)

--While you wait: Travelers from Iceland stuck in New York because of volcanic ash can show their passports and get two free tickets to the comic thriller ‘The 39 Steps’ at New World Stages off-Broadway. (Playbill)

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks at Brasilia at 50; music critic Mark Swed reviews the JACK Quartet’s in-the-dark performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’ ‘In iij. Noct’ in Pasadena; TV and film actor Kevin Tighe stars in ‘Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo’ at the Mark Taper Forum, and Michael Jackson’s estate and Cirque du Soleil will collaborate on several ventures including a reality TV program tied to a concert-style touring production and a permanent show in Las Vegas.

-- Karen Wada

Upper photo: Tobey Maguire. Credit: Associated Press

Lower photo: Jennifer Aniston. Credit: Carlos Alvarez / Getty Images