Munch’s “Scream” sets auction record

The art market entered a new phase on Wednesday evening when one of four versions of  “The Scream”, a pastel drawn in 1895 by Edvard Munch, was sold for $119.92 millionat Sotheby’s auction of Impressionist and modern art. The winning bid, which came by telephone, set a world record for any work of art offered at auction.

“Journey Of The Heart” – Karunesh

Karunesh is a German-born New Age and ambient musician. His music has strong Asian and Indian influences prevalent throughout, with liberal use of Indian instruments, such as the sitar. Having sold 450,000 albums, Karunesh is one of the best-known New Age artist.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652)

Artemisia Gentileschi was the most important woman painter of Early Modern Europe by virtue of the excellence of her work, the originality of her treatment of traditional subjects, and the number of her paintings that have survived (though only thirty-four of a much larger corpus remain, many of them only recently attributed to her rather than to her male contemporaries).

Birth of a Book

A short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods. 

Aziz Nesin – Be Silent

Aziz Nesin was a Turkish poet and political activist who fought for freedom of speech. His poem “Be Silent” is a timeless great poem. 

Amy works entirely without a paintbrush.

Amy Shackleton  applies the paint with squeeze bottles… and rotates the canvas to manipulate each drip. She uses gravity to control the flow of paint.

Flash mob at Copenhagen Central Station, playing Ravel’s Bolero.

As one of the first professional symphony orchestras ever Copenhagen Phil (Sjællands Symfoniorkester) did a flash mob at Copenhagen Central Station on May 2nd 2011 playing Ravel’s Bolero. Conductor is Jesper Nordin.

The Valuable Time of Maturity

An excellent poem of Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945) a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer.

Artist Cecilia Paredes Disappears Into Wallpaper

Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredesexperiments with her own body by painting these floral wallpaper designs on herself and blending with the background. The result is pretty effective and in some of them you can barely see her.

The Future of the Book Is the Stream

Cloud storage is paving the way for books that are sold not by title, but by time.

Rethinking Thinking

How a lumpy bunch of tissue lets us plan, perceive, calculate, reflect, imagine—and exercise free will.

Sixteen Years for Fifteen Seconds: How long should you view a work of art?

In 2010 James Elkins, Art Critic and Historian of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, wrote a piece entitled How Long Does it Take To Look at a Painting? for The Huffington Post. In this piece the author describes an encounter with an elderly lady who he estimates, over decades of visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, spent at least 3,000 hours looking at Rembrandt’s painting Young Woman at an Open Half-Door (below).

Who Killed 3-D?

This time last year, there were whispers among film executives and industry-watchers that 3-D cinema had worked its way down a blind alley with its pockets full of cash. That summer, the format seemed like the answer to all of Hollywood’s problems: shrinking ticket sales, video piracy, home-theater viewing. The studios had put out a run of record-smashing, premium-priced blockbusters: Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, Clash of the Titans, Shrek Forever After, and Toy Story 3—a half-dozen 3-D movies that earned more than $2 billion in domestic sales. Yet by the end of August 2010, the future of cinema was starting to look unsteady on its feet. Box-office returns from the next wave of 3-D films were disappointing. The revival needed reviving.

Attenberg, Dogtooth and the weird wave of Greek cinema .

Are the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari a product of Greece’s economic turmoil? And will they continue to make films in the troubled country?