A cleaning woman who really gets into her job accidentally erased part of a work of art valued at $1.1 million during her nightly duties at Berlin's Ostwall museum, the AP reports. Martin Kippenberger's "When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling" is a multimedia sculpture that incorporates a "painted puddle beneath a rubber trough placed under a stacked tower of wooden slats." The cleaning woman thought the patina, meant to look like a patch of dried rain, was a stain, and went to work scrubbing away at it until it disappeared. The work was on loan by its owner, who instructed them to leave it where it is while insurers calculate its depreciated value.

Interestingly, The New Yorker profiled contemporary art conservator Christian Scheidemann in 2009, detailing his efforts to restore another damaged Kippinberger work titled "M.K.N.Y." — a self-portrait over which lies "a thick sheet of latex, molded into crude patterns." Scheidemann once had to "trim a new piece of elephant dung to fill a gap in a Chris Ofili painting," and works "like a surgeon," according to one gallerist. Doctor, we need a puddle. [Photo: Bernd Thissen/EPA]