German artwork doesn't impress cleaning lady

The results can be interesting when common sense collides with modern art.

A museum in Dortmund, Germany, recently had on display a work by the late artist Martin Kippenberger.

Called "When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling," the piece looks, as best we can tell, a bit like a wooden ladder, with a large plastic bowl at its base.

The artist painted the bowl so as to make it appear to have become discolored by dripping water.

Art is a many-splendored thing, of course, and tastes vary widely. So we'll leave it to the art world and individual art enthusiasts to decide whether Kippenberger's artwork is to their liking.

But at least one individual apparently missed whatever artistry the piece in the German museum was supposed to demonstrate.

A cleaning lady spotted the discolored bowl at the bottom of the artwork by Kippenberger and assumed that it had become inadvertently soiled.

So she scrubbed it clean.

An evidently horrified spokeswoman at the museum told London's Telegraph newspaper, "It is now impossible to return it to its original state."

That is a big deal because the artwork in question is valued at more than $1 million!

We do not know the errant cleaning lady's fate. But we suspect that she would not have made a similar mistake if the art in question had been, say, the Mona Lisa.

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