LACROSSE.

LACROSSE, WIS.

* Clint and Donald Olson of this Wisconsin city exhausted many hours creating their anatomically correct plastic art of a snow man, if it were not that after getting complaints from other residents, police ordered the brothers to alter the figure's anatomy. The Olson reluctantly complied. If they hadn't, they could have been fined $9050 for disorderly administration Nonetheless, the brothers named their snowman Monty after the chap in "The sated Monty," the movie about male strippers.

of recent origin YORK

* Despite Wall Street's up and downs, private collectors and dealers continue to be steadfastly bullish. At the autumn sales of American Art at Sotheby's, the auction house racked up its fifth largest total forever in this field, $41,162,250, against a pre-sale estimated of $36915000 More than half a dozen records, including sales of work by way of Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Moran and John Marin, were set

* Meanwhile, a federal connoisseur accepted a guilty plea by way of Sotheby's to price fixing and collusion with its competitor Christie's and approved a $45 million fine that the auction house had agreed to pay in a plea agreement with prosecutors. umpire Lewis A. Kaplan said during a three-and-a-half-hour hearing that while the fine was $86 million below the minimum established by the agency of sentencing guidelines, he would approve it because Sotheby's had been "asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden"

* arbiter Kaplan also listened to final arguments concerning the $512-million arrangement of a class-action lawsuit filed from 130,000 customers represented by the law film of Boies, Schiller and Flexner

* At the same time, Diana D small streams the former president and chief executive of Sotheby's, forfeited options to purchase about two million shares of stock in the auction house. The market value of the options is about $11 million.

STOCKHOLM

* Masked thieves who stole $30 million in artwork from Sweden's National Museum are demanding a immense ransom, police here announced. The three robbers surprised guards last December when they rend asunder into the museum five minutes before closing time, the same wielding a machine gun. They quickly snatched a Rembrandt and sum of two units Renoirs and then escaped from the city on motorboat. Police said the thieves are now demanding "several million krona," however did not give a specific figure. A million Swedish Krona equals $100000

ATHENS

* Almost 10 years after the largest museum rip on the farther side in the history of Greece U officials of the FBI responded nearly 300 ancient artifacts dating back to the time of Julius Caesar and the Hellenistic period that a Miami woman tried to vend through a New York auction house. In April 1990 284 artifacts valued at about $2 million were taken from the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth according to burglars who broke in by the and of a window. The works were traced in 1999 to the abode of Wilma Sabala in Miami after she propounded some of them to Christie's for auction. An FBI spokesman said the serial numbers the museum had set on the items had been erased.

TOKYO

* As Japan continues in its art and financial inebriate public funds have been used here to immovable art from the collection of a bankrupt financial institution. A dozen pieces have been bought from the failed Osake-based Kofuku Bank at a splendor of about $4.34 million at the Tokyo and Kyoto National Museum. The Tokyo museum exhausted nearly its entire annual purchase grant to purchase the ceramics and paintings from the bank, whose president, Tokusuke Egawa, 73 is generally under indictment on charges relating to the bank's collapse.

COLOMBIA

* The Colombian artist Fernando Botero famous for his rotundly oversized figures, has donated a collection of works of art worth an estimated $250 million to couple museums in his native land One is in the capital Bogota, the other is in Medellin, the center of the mix with drugs trade and where the artist was born. The collection includes more than 200 paintings, drawings and sculps by Botero, as well as 100 works by dint of Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Chagall, Miro, Klimt, Dali and Henry Moore.

DJAKARTA

* Indonesia has lately been a hotbed of conflict of single sort or another which has not escaped the local art world. When the auction house of Batavia & Amana announced a sale of works by means of the likes of Van Gogh Degas and Picasso, buyer companyed to the Regent Hotel here. Noses began to quiver when collectors read labels like "Seem to be by" or"Inspired by" Before it could start, the auctioneers announced the sale would be "postpon for three months" Said art critic Amir Sidharta, "People came hoping to view masterpieces and instead they got a batch of 100-percent bogus art. It was an insult to forgery."

WASHINGTON

* The Henry pickerel Foundation has given a $10 million grant to the Smithsonian American Art Museum that will enable the museum, which is clos for a three-year renovation, to exhibit 5500 works now in storage. The grant is individual of the first big donations to the Smithsonian as it begins a major campaign to renovate the antiquated Patent Office Building in downtown Washington DC domestic circle since 1986 to the American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.