Spanish woman’s attempted restoration of church artwork was widely mocked but became lucrative tourist attraction Cecilia Giménez, the woman who achieved unwanted international fame for her botched “Monkey Christ” restoration of a 19th-century mural in Borja, north-east Spain, has died aged 94. In 2012, Giménez, an amateur artist, decided to restore Ecce Homo, a mural by a local artist, Elías García Martínez, that hung in the Santuario de Misericordia church in Borja. However, her talent as an artist was not equal to her good intentions and she produced what was described as the worst restoration in history. Continue reading...

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While creativity is an established driver of profit for firms and success for individuals, not all situations are ideal for maximizing creativity. In this work, we establish a framework of ways that creators can deliberately reduce novelty in their works to make them more successful. The first way, permanent novelty reduction (PNR), is where creators decrease novelty in key aspects of their final product to make it more amenable to consumers or gatekeepers. The second way, temporary novelty reduction (TNR), involves strategically decreasing novelty in the short term to overcome environmental or functional resistance to novelty, often leading to a more creative product in the long term. Together, these two categories of novelty reduction support a new theoretical perspective: novelty reduction can play a critical role in the creative process. We develop this perspective by examining James Cameron and his team’s creative decisions during the making of one of the most successful films of all time, Avatar.

The president amplified conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and called for a member of Congress to be deported.