ART Hotline

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LACROSSE, WIS.

* Clint and Donald Olson of this Wisconsin city spent many hours creating their anatomically correct sculpture of a snow man, but after getting complaints from other residents, police ordered the brothers to alter the figure's anatomy. The Olsons reluctantly complied. If they hadn't, they could have been fined $90.50 for disorderly conduct. Nonetheless, the brothers named their snowman Monty, after the chap in "The Full Monty," the movie about male strippers.

NEW YORK

* Despite Wall Street's ups 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 ever in this field, $41,162,250, against a pre-sale estimated of $36,915,000. More than half a dozen records, including sales of work by Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Moran and John Marin, were set.

* Meanwhile, a federal judge accepted a guilty plea by 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. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said during a three-and-a-half-hour hearing that while the fine was $8.6 million below the minimum established by sentencing …