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The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer painted “The Love Letter” around 1670 but the mood is timeless and so appropriate for Valentine’s Day….capturing that glorious moment of surrender to the magic of loving and being loved….

...While describing the museum's intention "laudable", he said it was not "the Louvre's role to come to the aid, via exhibitions, of populations that are victims of cataclysms." "(If so), why not do it in all countries hit by earthquakes, forest fires, volcanic eruptions or even wars? ... Why doesn't the Louvre just send the works onto Bagdad?," he complained. France's nuclear safety and protection institute, IRSN, had advised French citizens only to visit the areas for essential reasons and to "regularly pass the vacuum cleaner over the surface of furniture and carpets" in the fallout zone. "What about the...

WRONG WRONG WRONG! Lambanana by Taro Chiezo

William Adolfe Bouguereau, "Notre Dame des Anges." A long-standing lawsuit over the sale of a 19th-century painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau has been lost by New York State-based Catholic nuns who sued a Santa Fe, N.M., art dealer and a local art appraiser.In 2008, the nuns claimed that dealer Mark Zaplin and appraiser Mark LaSalle had colluded to defraud them of $1.7 million from the sale of their painting "Notre Dame des Anges," an 1889 work by Bouguereau depicting the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child.The Daughters of Mary Mother of Our Savior and St Joseph's Chapel, in Round Top,...

A Colorado woman dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over a painting valued at $30 million, according to police. Carmen Tisch, 36, was arrested after scratching, punching and, well, rubbing her butt against Clyfford Still's "1957-J no.2" and causing an estimated $10,000 damage to the artwork at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Police believe she was drunk during the late December incident. "You have to wonder where her friends were," a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office told the Denver Post. Tisch was charged with felony criminal mischief on Wednesday and has been...

Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. Let it load then use your mouse to look around. http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html

Yes. Taxpayers paid $600,000 for this toad and fairy girl statue. It sets in the lobby of the restricted DoD Mark Center building in Alexandria, VA and can only be viewed by about 2000 employees. That comes to $300 an employee for the pleasure of enjoying this art piece. As an added plus, it reportedly makes a gurgling sound. Oh, that noise may be coming from the taxpayers who paid for this pork toad.

A New York artist believes he's "cracked the code" of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" painting. Ron Piccirillo stated on his blog that the painting is an optical illusion with one painting hidden within another. He refers to a "secret that has been hiding for five hundred years" as he claims to have found a lion's head, an ape head and a buffalo head in the painting while turning it around. "I had first Googled this, but could not find anything on it," he stated. "How could something like this have gone unnoticed for five hundred years?" The key to...

Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry Relax. This won't last long. Or if it does, or if the lines make you sleepy or bored, give in to sleep, turn on the T.V., deal the cards. This poem is built to withstand such things. Its feelings cannot be hurt. They exist somewhere in the poet, and I am far away. Pick it up anytime. Start it in the middle if you wish. It is as approachable as melodrama, and can offer you violence if it is violence you like. Look, there's a man on a sidewalk;...

In their zeal to bash Wal-Mart, Occupy Wall Street protesters are even complaining about the company giving $1.4 billion to found a free art museum in Arkansas. Alice Walton, Wal-Mart heiress, is being criticized by Occupy Wall Street for giving $1.4 billion to found an Arkansas art museum. The incoherent and absurd messaging of the Occupy Wall Street movement continues. Recently, the OWS crowd joined forces with Wal-Mart workers to protest Crystal Bridges, an American art museum that opened on Nov. 11 in Bentonville, Ark. Art snobs are outraged by the notion of a major art collection in Arkansas, but...

Shepard Fairey on Occupy Wall Street: ‘I Support the Movement.’ The Artist Says He’s at Work on Images That ‘Call Out the Villains’ by Sarah Douglas11/15/11 [snip] This morning, we spoke with artist Shepard Fairey, who was recently chosen by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation as its first “Artist as Activist,” for which Mr. Fairey created 100 signed prints of a new poster called “The Future is Unwritten,” which is available through Artnet.com, starting at $1,250, to benefit Coalition for the Homeless. We asked Mr. Fairey, who spoke with us on the phone from the James Hotel, not far from the...

Using a new technology known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a team of Belgian scientists and Professor John Coleman Darnell of Yale have determined that Egyptian petroglyphs found at the east bank of the Nile are about 15,000 years old, making them the oldest rock art in Egypt and possibly the earliest known graphic record in North Africa. The dating results will be published in the December issue of Antiquity (Vol. 85 Issue 330, pp. 1184–1193). The site of the rock art panels is near the modern village of Qurta, about 40km south of the Upper-Egyptian town of Edfu. First...

BERLIN - A modern art installation valued at euro800,000 ($1.1 million) was damaged after an overzealous cleaning woman scrubbed away a patina intended to look like a dried rain puddle, a Dortmund official said Friday. Martin Kippenberger's "When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling" remains in place at the city's Ostwall museum, despite the damage sustained earlier this month when a cleaner scrubbed away the painted puddle beneath a rubber trough placed under a stacked tower of wooden slats. The work by Kippenberger, a German-born artist who died in 1997, was on loan to the museum from a private collector,...

The Last Supper is one of the most famous of Leonardo’s pictures. Commissioned by da Vinci’s patron, Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, it was painted on a wall inside the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan in the 1490s. The Last Supper had always been a popular subject for devotional painting but Leonardo’s interpretation lifted the image to a higher plane in terms of art.

Roland Emmerich's film "Anonymous," which opens next week, "presents a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare's plays." That's according to the lesson plans that Sony Pictures has been distributing to literature and history teachers in the hope of convincing students that Shakespeare was a fraud. A documentary by First Folio Pictures (of which Mr. Emmerich is president) will also be part of this campaign. So much for "Hey, it's just a movie!" The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, dates from 1920, when J. Thomas Looney, an English writer who loathed...

For Portland bicycle commuters hoping that TriMet would build a “sonic bike path” connecting to the nation’s largest car-free bridge, Thursday was the day the music died. The idea was for an intricate sequence of concrete grooves on the path that would play Simon and Garfunkel's "59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)” when bicycle tires rolled over them. . . . Citing concerns about cost, safety and design, the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail project’s art advisory committee told TriMet and Portland’s Bicycle Advisory Committee today that it has voted to ditch the proposal.

The Met is no longer non-prophet. After at least an eight-year absence, images of Mohammed will return to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the renovated Islamic galleries reopen in November. The controversial depictions have not been seen in years, and there was some doubt about whether they would resurface when a $50 million renovation of the gallery space is completed.

For more than two decades, Houston has been home to a large pair of restored 13th-century Byzantine frescoes that Menil Collection founder Dominique de Menil purchased from art thieves in 1984. Now the Menil is working to return them to their rightful owner, the Holy Archbishopric of Cyprus. While that seemingly recalls recent decisions by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and others to return priceless artworks that improperly left their countries of origin, there's a difference: Neither de Menil nor the museum she founded ever claimed to own the frescoes.... READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT SOURCE LINK

This is breaking news, so unfortunately I do not have a tremendous amount of details. This is what is known: Swedish security police have arrested four terror suspects on suspicion of "preparing a terrorist attack." Today being September 11, fear of terrorism is much greater than on normal days. The four were arrested in Sweden's second largest city Goteborg early Sunday, according to Security police spokesman Stefan Johansson. No further comments were given.

Barwick's subject, John Holmes, a pornographic star who died from AIDS when he was 43, was also a suspect in four murders. He also chose NOT to tell his porn costars that he was infected with AIDS and continued to make movies with them unprotected.

A 400-year-old painting of Christ is at the center of an investigation. The painting is at a museum in Tallahassee, but it's believed to have been stolen from its original owners by Nazi soldiers. The grandchildren of a Jewish man claim the painting was stolen from their grandfather in the 1930s, and now they want it back. The CEO of the museum got a call from the U.S. district attorney about the artwork. “She had information that indicated that it had been alleged that there was a family who claimed to have prior ownership of the painting and it had...

David Bowie's "Space Oddity": The Children's Book [PDF]

President Barack Obama has taken a decidedly low-key approach to racial issues since he became America’s first black president two years ago. But in a hallway outside the Oval Office, he has placed a head-turning painting depicting one of the ugliest racial episodes in U.S. history. Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” installed in the White House last month, shows U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant response from the white community. The thrust of the painting is not...

A Rembrandt drawing, valued at $250,000 (£153,625), has been taken from a hotel in California in a "well thought-out, well-executed theft", police have said. The piece, called The Judgement, was taken from an exhibition at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, a Los Angeles County Sheriff spokesman said. It was stolen on Saturday between 22:20 and 22:35 local time when a curator was distracted by a guest, he added. Police are studying surveillance video from the hotel. The Dutch master's quill pen and black ink drawing, which dates back to about 1655, was part of an exhibition at the hotel...

The Marilyn Monroe that now stands tall on Michigan Avenue, her head high enough to see passing boats on the Chicago River, is fortunate to be all aluminum and stainless steel, unable to read the nasty things being written about her. Since rising up this month in Pioneer Court, she has been called "creepy schlock" and "a giant, silent avatar of nonconsent." Some are appalled at the seemingly endless stream of tourists hugging her legs and voyeurs young and old unabashedly shooting upskirt photos on their iPhones.

Immediately after President Obama took office, his Hollywood benefactors clamored for the creation of a "Secretary of Culture." Tinseltown was disappointed with the administration's crony arts czar choice (Chicago lawyer Kareem Dale), but left-wing artists and entertainers have now been mollified. Instead of one government-supported arts czar, the White House has designated an entire herd of them. On Tuesday, as part of Obama's "Winning the Future" initiative, the president designated members of the liberal activist group Creative Coalition as official "America's Champions of Change for the Arts." This is the latest in a series of "public engagement" efforts overseen by...

African artists make images of the Blessed Virgin Mary out of butterfly wings!

NORCO, Calif. — Fifteen men darted across the room, their faces slathered in greasepaint, reciting lines from “Tartuffe.” The stage, such as it was, was a low-ceilinged recreation room, and the cast was a troupe of felons who had just stepped in from the dusty yard of the California Rehabilitation Center. For four hours, they conducted workshops under the direction of the Actors’ Gang, an ensemble from Los Angeles, which goaded them into acting out emotions that could be put to use in the 17th-century Molière farce about, appropriately enough, a con man working a swindle. “Why are you angry?”...

Yesterday morning in Sofia, Bulgaria, anti-Communist street artists painted over a monument commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Soviet "liberation" (i.e. a Communist coup d'état) of Bulgaria in 1944. Who did they add to the statue? The Joker, among others.

My family and I went to an art exhibit recently. It was dingy, dirty, unkempt, probably dangerous, and just plain creepy, and I could not wait to leave. The artist was inspired by God to create his numerous and various works. As we were leaving, there was a quote from the artist on the wall to the effect of: God provides the art, I am just the brush (not the exact wording) and I thought "I am sure that God could come up with something better than this!" I am not a fan of this particular art style to start...

In view of a new encounter between Benedict XVI and artists, two blistering criticisms of the Church hierarchy. From art historian Jean Clair and philosopher of aesthetics Enrico M. RadaelliROME, June 6, 2011 – This July, Benedict XVI will again meet with artists, a few hundred of them from all over the world, less than two years after the previous encounter in the Sistine Chapel. That art, together with the saints and before reason, is "the greatest apologia for the Christian faith" is a thesis that Benedict XVI has supported on a number of occasions. For him, beauty is "the...

FRUIT HEIGHTS — Utah's Chad Hawkins is well known for his paintings of Latter-day Saint temples. But he recently won a major commission to create a scene from Afghanistan. In 2007, Hawkins traveled to Afghanistan to work on a project. "When I got there it was horrible," he said. "To me, it wasn't third-world conditions. It was Stone Age." Chad Hawkins Despite those conditions, little did Hawkins know that visit would eventually turn into one of the most significant works of his career. With that experience, along with his extensive background, Hawkins won the commission from the U.S. Army War...

Sacred Art: a Rebirth?   by Jeffrey Rubin If you want to comprehend the utter poverty of Catholic art over the past few decades, try to imagine someone being converted by it. Converts (including this writer) often tell how the rich artistic legacy of Catholicism—the magnificent cathedrals, the masterpieces of painting and sculpture, the soul-stirring music—helped draw them to the Church, convincing them that only the highest truth and goodness could inspire such beauty. Yet none that I know—not even the liberal converts of my acquaintance—has ever claimed to find a motive for faith in, say, '60s pop "hymns," or...

Then in 1990, browsing in a local discount bookstore I picked up a copy of “Exploring The West” by Herman J Viola and there, on page 240 was this picture, “Open Range”, painted by Maynard Dixon in 1942…..

The Catholic Understanding of the Saints: Detracting from Christ? (Part 2) See Part 1. In this post I continue my response to the thoughtful concerns regarding the Catholic understanding of the communion of the saints offered by my Baptist friend and biblioblogger extraordinaire, Jim West. I appreciate all the feedback I received on the last post and I hope to hear more of your thoughts in the comment box below. A New Idolatrous Pantheon? Given that, as I explained in my last post, many non-Catholic Christians think that Catholics actually believe salvation comes through works and not purely through God’s...

- DAWN.COM | Latest news, Breaking news, Pakistan News, World news, business, sport and multimedia - http://www.dawn.com - Threatened rock carvings of PakistanPosted By Suhail Yusuf On May 18, 2011 @ 2:01 pm (1 hour ago) In Home > Top Special,Latest News,Sci-tech > Top Special,Uncategorized | 1 Comment A collage of carvings and inscriptions of different periods shows the heritage on the brink of destruction as the proposed site of the Diamer-Basha Dam hosts some 30,000 ancient art carvings and inscriptions which may vanish forever. – 3D artwork by Mufassir A. Khan Pakistan is going to lose one of the...

Is there any way to save this animation? Right-clicking options didn't seem to help.

*57-year-old accused of 'creating a public disturbance' *Show caused 'public disorder and chaos' *Artist wished to beautify love-making, lawyer claims A Chinese artist has been ordered to serve a year's re-education after he performed live sex as part of an exhibition, Chinese sources report. Cheng Li was detained and sentenced after his lewd public show in Songzhuang in eastern Beijing - and will now endure 11 months labour for his prurient act. The 57-year-old's actions - which are akin to those you might see in an Amsterdam peep show - apparently led to 'public disorder and chaos' in the capital...

American Thinker's Rick Moran recently wrote a blog piece about the destruction of Andres Serrano's creations, excreta that some euphemistically refer to as art. Rick opened by saying that his topic would make for lively debate among commenters, and he was right. And it has also provoked a lively response from me. In his piece, Rick states, "Art, as we learned when growing up, is in the eye of the beholder." Yes, most of us did learn this growing up -- and we learned wrong. That is to say, unless "art" doesn't really exist.

Police say there’s been an increase of graffiti and vandalism around a Los Angeles museum that has opened an exhibit on the work of taggers and street artists.

Ms. Robinson is an engaging, self-taught 33-year-old artist whose work has mostly tweaked gender and racial stereotypes... ...Ms. Robinson imagined a 13-week-long performance-art piece, and offered herself up as a guest

I thought that this topic might make for a lively debate in the comments. Artist Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" photo has caused more anguish, more anger that just about any piece of art in American history. Yesterday, while on display in France, it was destroyed by a fundamentalist Christian group: Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an "anti-blasphemy" campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon.The violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph of a meditating nun,...

Here's the direct link. Check it out and let me know what you think. I posted this one other time and think I have improved it a bit since then.

Featured Term (selected at random):MARIAN ART The Blessed Virgin in Christian art or architecture. The most ancient image of the Blessed Virgin still extant is a painting in the Roman catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. Dating from the early second or late first century, the fresco pictures Mary seated with the Child Jesus in her arms and what appears to be a prophet standing next to her, volume in hand and pointing to a star above the Virgin. Three other Marian paintings in the same catacomb date from the second and third centuries. One image on the tomb...

Book release: Benedict XVI and Beauty in Sacred Art and Architecture Posted on February 9, 2011 by verbumpatris From St. Colman’s Society for Catholic LiturgyPress releaseBenedict XVI and Beauty in Sacred Art and ArchitectureProceedings of the Second Fota International Liturgy ConferenceSt. Colman’s Society for Catholic Liturgy is pleased to announce the publication of  Benedict XVI and Beauty in Sacred Art and Architecture: Proceedings of the Second Fota International Liturgy Conference by Four Courts Press, Dublin, Ireland on 25 March 2011.The book is edited by D. Vincent Twomey and Janet Rutherford.In an historic meeting with artists in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI...

Maine GOP Gov. Paul LePage followed through with his decision to remove a mural depicting the history of the workers' movement from the state's labor department lobby, a spokeswoman said Monday. "The mural has been removed and is in storage awaiting relocation to a more appropriate venue," said LePage press secretary Adrienne Bennett in a prepared statement. "We understand that not everyone agrees with this decision, but the Maine Department of Labor has to be focused on the job at hand."

Gov. Paul LePage has made the national news again, this time by ordering the Maine Department of Labor to remove a huge mural in its offices that depicted him frolicking nude with nymphs who looked suspiciously like members of the Maine Women’s Lobby. Oops, sorry. That mural has already come down. The one LePage told his minions to get rid of this week shows the history of the labor movement in the state. This prompted a predictable round of outrage from unions, Democrats, artists, and the poor workers who’ll have to cart the thirty-six-foot-long painting to its new home high...

The way in which we view art is turning out to be another means by which right and left divide. Both the highbrow among us who are searching for beauty and the lowbrow, such as your servant, who like pretty shiny things, are at odds with savants who tell us we are missing the point. Unfortunately, these elites also bring to mind the observation of the late, great Redd Foxx as his alter ego Fred Sanford: “Beauty may only be skin deep but ugly goes straight to the bone.” “For us as radical teachers, what is most important is less...

Cathedra PetriAltar of the Chair of St. Peterby Bernini, 1666          This grandiose sculpture monument was created to enclose the wooden throne of St Peter.The four gigantic statues of Doctors of the Church are: St. Ambrose, St. Anthanasius (left); and St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine (right). The fine alabaster window shows the Holy Spirit as a dove.

ROME (AFP) – Archaeologists have unearthed a set of six marble sculptures in Rome that likely belonged to a high-ranking official of the Roman Empire, Italy's culture ministry said Wednesday. Led by Roberto Egidi, the group of archaeologists dug up five marble heads representing members of the Severan imperial dynasty as well as a statue of the Greek god Zeus while excavating a public site. The figures were buried in an ancient fountain of a lavish Roman villa along the Via Anagnina street in southeast Rome. The "extraordinary" discovery, one of the biggest and most important in recent memory in...