The UAE continues to push back the unveiling of the world’s most expensive painting. 'Salvator Mundi' by da Vinci was originally purchased for $450,312,500 by Saudi Arabia's Minister of Culture in 2017, but many art historians believe that it isn't actually an original da Vinci painting. Art critic Jerry Saltz tells us why it isn't.

When a former soldier learned that his village was going to be demolished 10 years ago, he picked up a brush and started painting – and he hasn’t stopped since.

VILSHULT is an IKEA ready-to-hang photo of Amsterdam that has been sold over 427,000 times. After many of my friends asked me why I bought such a “mediocre” photo for my living room, I decided to find out how this photo was made and how it ended up on IKEA’s shelves and in almost half a million households. What I learned was fascinating.

It kicked off at a urinal in Cheapside, and ended in a bloody and brutal murder. Poor aim has been responsible for many unexpected deaths, but perhaps none more so than that of Philip of Ashendon. One of a brutal range of fatal scuffles, revenge killings and infanticides recorded by London coroners in the early 1300s, Philip’s demise is among those to feature in a new interactive map that uses death to breathe life into medieval London.

Ruben Cordova used his social media profile as an archive of his research, but his photos of the Met Breuer's Like Life exhibition triggered Facebook's censors, who then permanently disabled his profile. By Zachary Small.

Acrylics on canvas - 80 * 60 cm

In private, the Pre-Raphaelite painter had a silly side

It's dry, barren and sparse. The otherworldly landscapes of northern Chile's Atacama Desert could easily be from Mars. It is the driest desert in the world outside of the polar regions, and its 40,500-odd square miles of red and burnt-orange plains stretch as far as the eye can see. The drive through the desert marks a stretch of the Pan-American Highway, a network of roads measuring around 19,000 miles in total; an admirable notch on any road-trip fiend's travel belt.

Robbie Barrat shared code to generate art with AI. To his surprise, a Paris collective used it to create a portrait that sold at Christie's.

Pretty cool

There is nothing to prepare us for the shock to the senses in the National Gallery of Victoria's latest exhibition combining the works of M. C. Escher with Japanese design firm nendo.

How a staple of luxury décor has gone from work of art to designer must-have – with some ups and downs along the way.

When it was released in 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind sent shockwaves through the music world. It brought alternative rock to the mainstream and almost overnight made Nirvana the biggest band in the world. The record went on to sell over 30 million copies and is widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. Part of Nevermind’s success was almost certainly due to its incredible cover, created by Robert Fisher. The cover now features in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection and is regarded as a design classic. But before Nevermind’s release...

The homeless man found a ratty picture of Bambi, the Disney character, in a trash bin and brought it to antique dealer Alexander Archbold to get a few bucks. The men had made similar transactions before, and Archbold -- who owns the Curiosity Inc. store in Edmonton, Canada -- is generally quick with his appraisals. But this one was different.

Christie’s has sold its first piece of AI art, a canvas named the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, for $432,500. The sale is unusual not only as a first for the 252-year-old auction house, but because the expected price for the print was between $7,000 and $10,000.

Learn a new creative skill or delve into art history and graphic design through online courses offered by Harvard, Yale, CalArts, and more.

The earliest known painting of an animal has been identified in a cave on the island of Borneo.

Beautifully amazing.

How to go from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least live life a little more creatively).

Compared with the sophisticated technology Russia employed to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, the Soviet propaganda in Brutal Bloc Postcards, published by FUEL Design and Publishing, seems downright quaint. Many of these postcards, published by governments of the U.S.S.R. between the 1960s and 1980s, depict the bland, 1960s five-story concrete-paneled apartments known as “khrushchyovka” as if to say, “Look at the modern wonder of collective worker housing!”

Men using the public toilets in Antiochia ad Cragum would have gotten the dirty jokes in the floor mosaics.

Rich visual parallels between [Australian] Indigenous artworks and microscopic natural structures hidden in the world around us reveal unexpected and intriguing similarities that can deepen our respect for our country and its stories. By Roger Wepf.

Despite the adage of not judging a book by its cover, there’s a lot of time, intent, and money spent creating memorable book covers. Get to know the story behind some of literature’s most iconic book covers.

I am a maker/engineer/cartographer with a passion for maps and woodworking. With my laser cutter in my garage, I have been making wood maps over the last year which is budding into a small business. Each map is custom made and tells a story. I have decided to share the details of the process so that it may inspire others to explore the wonderful world of maps too!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Well blow me down! These fantastical, bizarre, hilarious scrolls date from the Edo period in Japan, which spanned the years 1603–1868 for those too lazy to Wikipedia it (I know because I Wikipedia’d it). Authorship for them is unknown, which leads me to believe that they were a very refined form of bathroom graffiti, like those beautiful Japanese ceramic figurines that used to appear in Playboy under the heading “Ribald Art” or something that would reveal the figure’s naughty lady parts if you turned it upside down.

A selection of entries from this year’s competition, which is open for submissions until November 15