News: A charitable extra, reclaiming Nathan Katz's art, boring visual-art stories

The father of a ten-year-old boy has paid $47,100 in an eBay auction for his son to play an extra in Will Ferrell's next movie, "Step Brothers." The money will be donated to Cancer for College, a charity that gives scholarships to cancer patients, started by Craig Pollard, a cancer survivor and friend of Mr Ferrell's. The winning bidder noted he has personal reasons for the donation, as his mother died of ovarian cancer.

Heirs of Nathan Katz, a Jewish art dealer who lived in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, have filed a claim for 227 works of art that are now hanging in Dutch museums--the largest ever for the Dutch government. Katz's four children say the family was forced to trade many pieces of art for visas to flee the Netherlands. Katz was reportedly forced to trade Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man" for the release of his mother from a concentration camp in 1941. Dutch art was often coveted by Germans since it was not seen as "degenerate".

Jonathan Jones of the Guardian argues that news stories about visual art have become banal. He rattles off six inevitable categories: restorations, "ground-breaking" discoveries, plagiarism, recovered works, graffiti and expensive pieces. Newspapers consistently overhype such stories, he complains: "Bad reporting along these generic lines distorts understanding and can destroy our pleasure in great art."