Tunisia declared a curfew in the capital and seven other regions following violent protests over an art exhibition.

The government has blamed ultra-conservative Salafi Islamists, who were angered by an art exhibition they say insults Muslims. Protesters clashed with police in Tunis on Tuesday, raising religious tensions in the home of the Arab Spring and piling pressure on the moderate Islamist government.

In some of the worst confrontations since last year's revolt ousted President Zine Abidine Ben Ali and launched uprisings across the Arab world, protesters hurled petrol bombs at officers, blocked streets and set tires alight in the working class Ettadamen and Sidi Hussein districts of the capital overnight.

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Salafis, who follow a puritanical interpretation of Islam, denied being involved in the clashes, BBC reported.

The curfew will be in place in the suburbs of Ben Arouss, Ariana and Manouba as well as the cities of Sousse, Monastir, Jendouba and Ben Guerdane.

By morning, protests had spread to a number of residential districts. Stone-throwing youths stopped trams from passing through the capital's Intilaqa district, where demonstrators entered mosques and used the loudspeakers to call on Tunisians to defend Islam.

An Interior Ministry official on Tunisian state TV said 97 people had been detained during the unrest, including dozens of Salafis and some described as "criminals."

According to the BBC, Justice Minister Nourredine Bhiri said that those behind the violence would "pay a heavy price."

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"These are terrorist groups which have lost control, they are isolated in society," he told a Tunisian radio station, per the BBC.

Tuesday's clashes came a day after a group of Salafis forced their way into an art exhibition in the upscale La Marsa suburb and defaced works they deemed offensive.

The work that appears to have caused the most fury and polarized Tunisians spelled out the name of God using insects.

"These artists are attacking Islam, and this is not new. Islam is targeted," said a youth, who gave his name as Ali and had removed his shirt and was preparing to confront police in Ettadamen.

In a statement released before the protests, Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that now leads the government, condemned what it described as provocations and insults against religion but urged its own supporters to respond peacefully.

The violence puts Ennahda in a difficult position.

While Islamists did not play a major role in the revolution, the struggle over Islam's place in government and society has emerged as the most divisive issue in Tunisian politics, and several clashes have erupted in recent months.

Salafis want a broader role for religion in the new Tunisia, alarming secular elites who fear they will seek to impose their views and ultimately undermine the nascent democracy.

Some said the unrest started just two days after al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Tunisians to demand the imposition of Muslim religious law, AFP reported.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Two men who vandalized a controversial painting of South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed were due to appear in court Wednesday.

Television footage Tuesday showed a white middle-aged man in a suit walking up to the portrait, called The Spear, at a Johannesburg gallery and painting a red cross on the president's face and private parts, Reuters reported. A younger black man then  smeared black paint over the picture while the first man was being taken into custody by security guards.

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"I'm doing this because the painting is disrespectful to President Zuma," one of the men told BBC News.

A BBC correspondent said he saw one of the vandals being head-butted as he was detained at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.

The picture of Zuma is a facsimile of a famous poster of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. In the red, black and yellow painting, the president is shown striking Lenin's heroic stance, but with his penis hanging out of his trousers.

Racist?
Zuma's African National Congress party had already launched a legal bid to try to force the gallery to remove the picture, which it described as crude and racist.

Minutes before the vandals attacked, ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe told Reuters people had a right to criticize the government, but there were limits.

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When you had an artist depicting the president's genitals, he added, "you are not raising a discussion, you are insulting people."

The artist, Brett Murray, is well-known in South Africa for his work criticizing the white-minority apartheid government that ended in 1994.

The painting was taken down from display after the attack, prompting the Zimbabwe Mail newspaper to file a report headlined “Presidency penis goes into hiding.”

'Paucity of morals'
The Goodman Gallery said Murray’s exhibition, called Hail to the Thief II, “continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness.”

“Murray’s bronzes, etchings, paintings and silk-screens form part of a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance and are his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite,” the gallery said on its website, which was still showing an unvandalized image of the painting.

Zuma has been married six times and fathered 21 children.

Anton Harber, chairman of South Africa's Freedom of Expression Institute last week called the ANC's criticism of the picture "silly" and defended artists' right to pose difficult, uncomfortable questions with their work.

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The arrested men, Barend la Grange, and Lowie Mabokela were due to appear in court Wednesday, The City Press newspaper reported, along with a third man arrested outside the gallery after allegedly spraying paint on a wall.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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SYDNEY -- Smelling excrement may not be everyone's idea of fun, but for those who like to push the boundaries, Australia's most controversial new museum may be just what they are looking for.

Dubbed "the subversive adult Disneyland", the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is located in Tasmania and features around 400 works of art from Egyptian mummies to Young British Artists including Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville.

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But the most talked-about piece is the Cloaca Professional, labeled the "poo-machine." It was built by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye to mimic the actions of the human digestive system.

A series of glass receptacles hang in a row with the machine being "fed" twice a day on one end. The food is ground up "naturally," the way it is in the human body, and the device produces feces on the clock at 2 p.m. at the other end.

The smell is so powerful that not many visitors can take it.

"It put me off because of the overwhelming assault on the senses," said Diane Malnic, a Sydney-based accountant.

'Vomit room'
Yet this was her second visit in five months, following a family holiday in Tasmania earlier in the year. This time, she flew without her husband and children just to have another look at the collection, interested in Delvoye's other pieces.

She took great care to avoid the "smelly" parts and still talked vividly about the "vomit room" which was part of an earlier exhibit no longer on display.

"I wouldn't go back to see them," she said, laughing.

The Cloaca is part of a series of at least five similar machines built by the artist, another of which will soon be exhibited at the Louvre. It is the most hated piece in the museum but also the most visited.

The museum, which opened in January 2011, is owned by eccentric and philanthropist David Walsh, who made his fortune as a professional gambler, and features one of the largest private art collections in the world with an estimated value of around $100 million.

Its motto is to shock, offend, inform and entertain.

"It definitely challenges your interpretation of what art is," said Malnic.

Elephant dung
Pieces include Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, which features elephant dung and porn-magazine cutouts of genitals. It caused controversy in 1996, with then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani reportedly describing Ofili's work as "sick".

Another much-talked-about piece is the Matrix by Jenny Saville, a full-frontal large painting of a naked transgender man with his modified genitals exposed.

"It's confronting," said Margarita Silva, a Melbourne-based dentist making during her third trip to the MONA.

Detractors argue that some of the pieces don't belong to a museum, which is also what Malnic initially thought. But upon reflection, she said the Cloaca machine opened her mind and argued that perhaps it was the future of art.

For Silva, her favorites were a soundproof room of 30 Madonna fans who were individually filmed singing a capella the artist's Immaculate Collection album. The other was a waterfall with droplets spelling out a series of words.

Keeping with the MONA's sensibility, none of its art work is grouped or chronological, leaving viewers to walk at random.

"Overall, it's a fantastic experience," said Silva.

The museum charges A$20 ($20) for entry and has drawn around 389,000 visitors in its first year.

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Frustrated by limited government funding, the director of an art museum outside Naples, Italy, set fire to two paintings this week in protest, warning more would feel the heat of budget woes, the Guardian of London reported.

"There's no money for upkeep. We were flooded recently. And there are tons of garbage mounting up outside," Antonio Manfredi, director of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, told the Guardian.

The first painting sacrificed was by French artist Severine Bourguignon, who supported the burning. The painting was worth about $13,000. Bourguignon watched her painting burn via Skype, the BBC reported.

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The second painting was by Neapolitan artist Rosaria Matarese, The Associated Press reported. She also gave her consent to burn her work, worth about $9,000.

Manfredi said he intends to burn three more as part of what he called “art war.”

Italy has faced a series of austerity measures in the last year. Art institutions say they have been hit hard as state subsidies have decreased, the BBC reported.

But Manfredi has asked not just for public funding but also official support.

The lack of funds has resulted in weakened security, which thieves have used to their advantage, the Guardian reported. Manfredi said the mafia, which thrives in Naples, has stolen security cameras and art.

"Our 1,000 artworks are headed for destruction anyway because of the government's indifference," Manfredi said.”This is war. This is revolution.”

He noted that his museum has 1,000 pieces of art by European, African and Chinese artists, so this could be a long protest.

Officials of the center-left Democratic Party in Italy appealed for money for the museum Wednesday.

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BEIJING – Zhang Bingjian’s art studio in the northern suburb of Beijing looks like a simple one. Spiral stairs lead to a small penthouse where he stores his books and makes tea for guests, a big wooden desk sits downstairs, and a huge map of China hangs on the wall. 

But something catches your attention when you walk in: Dozens of huge portraits on the wall, all in bright pink, all of Chinese government officials convicted of corruption charges.

Most of the officials are in prison, some have been executed, and others have been sentenced to “death with reprieve” – which in China means a life sentence.

Zhang came up with the idea of creating his “hall of shame” as early as March 2009, during China’s National People’s Congress, the annual meeting of Communist Party officials.  It was then that he learned that 3,000 officials had been convicted for corruption in the previous year alone. 

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“I was shocked at the numbers, I did not realize there were so many,” Zhang told NBC News during a recent visit to his studio.  “China is in such a transition period, those corruption issues also should be witnessed in a historic context.”

The artist decided to depict the history of China’s shame as part of an ongoing project. But he is not the actual painter – the portraits are mass-produced just like other “made-in-China” commodities. 

Zhang picks a publicly prosecuted government official, finds his age, crime, and most importantly, a photo of him – then he sends it to Dafen village in southern China, a place famous for churning out cheap, Wal-Mart-quality oil paintings for the whole world.  Through an assistant, Zhang finds artists in Dafen village to paint the portraits in a deliberately tacky and assembly-line style to reflect China’s 30 years as the world’s leading exporter of low-end, mass manufacturing. Their rosy hue is the same bright pink color as the Chinese currency.

Zhang doesn’t remember all the names of the officials portrayed and says he doesn’t want to play the role of a judge or prosecutor. “For me, I see the project as a whole instead of each individual portion,” he said.

Widespread corruption
Critics say corruption has long been one of China’s most chronic problems. Chinese presidents and premiers, including the current leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, have publicly denounced rampant corruption for years, but standards of conduct only seem to deteriorate. 

Out of 178 countries in Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perception Index – which measures the perceived levels of corruption in public sectors – China ranked 78th.

That’s lower than most other developed countries, as well as many developing countries such as Brazil and Cuba.
According to a Beijing News report last May, 24,406 government officials were jailed in 2010 for corruption, up 9.4 percent from 2009.  Almost 6,000 of them were sentenced to more than five years in prison.  

China is also one of the few countries in the world that executes its citizens on corruption charges.  Some of the officials captured in Zhang’s portraits have already been executed, including the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration and the former governor of Guangxi province.

As of today, Zhang has produced about 1,600 portraits.  Some hang on his studio wall; others are stacked in wooden crates, waiting to be displayed either in China or overseas. 

Zhang joked about ideas for his next exhibition.

“Maybe we can do another project for the U.S. America also has corrupt officials so the painting would be green, the color of U.S. dollars,” he said.

When asked whether or when he will ever finish the project, Zhang admitted one day he might have to stop producing the portraits if he cannot continue to finance himself and the 20-plus painters he employs.  Still, he doesn’t really know when he’ll move on.
 “It could end soon, probably within the next five years.  It could also be the next 15 years.  Part of the beauty of this piece is it’s open-ended,” he said with a smile. 

(Celeste Ho contributed to the story.)