Reviving the Triforium.

Before New York City became the shining metropolis that we know today, with its glass and concrete skyscrapers and wide, shop-filled avenues, much of it was quiet farmland. In fact, prior to the mid-1800s, most of the area that would become New York City was all but undeveloped. Before European colonization, the area we now know as New York was inhabited by a number of Algonquian tribes living in small communities.

The woman who bid $1.4 million for a print by renowned artist Banksy will go ahead with the purchase even though it was shredded just after it was auctioned. Strips were left hanging off the famous work from 2006, titled Girl With a Balloon, after the gavel went down at Sotheby’s last week. A video on social media later revealed that a shredding device was built into the painting to be activated if it were ever auctioned.

Art

Canvas of Girl With Balloon passes through shredder in frame shortly after £1m sale

Twenty six-year old Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up after kodokushi (孤独死) or lonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time.

For an artist that's known for his stunts, this could be Banksy's most perfect art world prank. After the gavel fell Friday at Sotheby's auction house in London, Banksy's Girl with Balloon was reduced to shreds -- another apparent act in the disruptive career of the anonymous British graffiti artist.

There are many studies about how we process tonal music and figurative painting, but philosophers are just beginning to understand how our brains react to more abstract work.

The Bard gave Queen Margaret more lines than any other female character, and more than King Lear.

The buyer of the Banksy print that was partially shredded immediately after its auction will go ahead with the £1m purchase amid claims that its value will have significantly increased following the self-destruction. The art world was left stunned when around half of Girl With Balloon, one of the street artist’s most famous stencil drawings, was reduced to ribbons by a shredder built into the frame after the hammer went down at Sotheby’s in London on 5 October.

Australia's last remaining piano-maker has just created an instrument the likes of which the world has never seen. Most grand pianos have 88 keys but Wayne Stuart's family-run business in Tumut, southern New South Wales, has built the first known piano with an impressive 108 keys. This means it boasts a nine octave range, unheard of on the piano until now.

Before established a certain cause of death for the Baroque painter, scientists first had to find his body.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London recently published scans of two of the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks so website visitors can digitally zoom and flip through the drawings and musings of the Italian Renaissance painter, architect, inventor, and sculptor. Jumbled together in the delicate journals are thoughts on both science and art—detailed charts and speculations contained on the same pages as observational sketches of hats or horse hooves.

For those who believe in the distinction between high art and low, video games have long been near the bottom of the pile. Fortunately, that has not stopped some of the world’s great art museums from putting on exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, began acquiring games in 2012 and a year later invited visitors to play some of them in a show called “Applied Design”. The most recent video-games exhibition, “Videogames Design/Play/Disrupt”, takes place at an even grander instituion – the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Groundbreaking Channel 4 series from 1998 exploring Outsider Art, in which Jarvis Cocker travels the globe in search of large-scale visionary environments. [All three episodes inside the snap.]

Long before Aladdin Sane or Ziggy Stardust, a skinny 16-year-old with ambitions to be a saxophonist agreed to do lead vocals on a demo track, in a small studio in south London. Now the only known recording of the resulting session, with David Bowie singing I Never Dreamed with his first band, The Konrads, has resurfaced in an old bread basket, and is expected to fetch £10,000 at auction.

The Chinese dissident artist tells NPR his studio is in the process of being demolished. The workspace is located in Beijing's Songzhuang District, on the outskirts of the city.

A catchy tune and one of Stephen Gammell’s illustrations from Alvin Schwartz’s trilogy, ‘Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark.’   If you look at the unassuming photo used by publisher Simon and Schuster of illustrator Stephen Gammell, you will, in no way, perceive the smiling, white-bearded and spectacled man was responsible for creating images which have terrorized the minds of children since 1981. But he is, and I hope this helps reinforce the golden rule one should never judge a book (or a person) by their cover.

The colour survives in the work of 17th Century Spanish colonial painters, a symbol of the wealth that ultimately doomed the Mayans, writes Devon Van Houten Maldonado.

Artists head to the desert to build a utopia. But does their work hold up in the real world?

A.E. Hotchner, who grew up to be pals with Ernest Hemingway and Paul Newman, just published a mystery about a boy, a long-ago summer and a jewelry heist.

Museum conservators are racing to figure out how to preserve modern artworks and historical objects that are disintegrating.

The price was astounding, even more so because some experts criticized a Christie’s marketing campaign that glossed over the painting’s flaws.

For 60 years, this Japanese craftsman has been making silicone dinners that look good enough to eat.

In the 1610s, a powerful Catholic cardinal with an insatiable taste for art discovered a sculptor named Gian Lorenzo Bernini. At the time, Bernini was a teenager, and still restoring ancient sculptures alongside his artist-father, Pietro. It wasn’t long after Cardinal Scipione Borghese laid eyes on Bernini’s own early work, however, that the young artist’s prospects began to change. Cardinal Borghese commissioned some of Bernini’s greatest works, amassing sculptures in his villa and helping to launch the career of the Renaissance icon.

The male body of Ancient Greece is ample, firm, and muscular—so why weren’t these same aesthetic ideals applied to the penis?

Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico. Devon Van Houten Maldonado reveals how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status.

An exhibition of art collected from psychiatric hospitals between the two world wars examines the relationship between creativity and madness.

Originally published in 1491, Fasciculus medicinae quickly proved popular, and dozens of editions followed until 1522.

Non-invasive imaging reveals landscape painting beneath Pablo Picasso’s The Crouching Beggar but who created it remains a mystery

Squonks, Lindworms, Dijiangs, and more.

When truck driver Teri Horton bought a painting for $5, she didn’t dream it could be an original Jackson Pollock. This film follows her journey to discover the truth.

Huong Huynh makes fabric fare look good enough to eat.

More than 65,000 years ago, a Neanderthal reached out and made strokes in red ochre on the wall of a cave, and in doing so, became the first known artist on Earth, scientists claim. The discovery overturns the widely-held belief that modern humans are the only species to have expressed themselves through works of art.