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

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The more creative work you produce, the better your chances of making a masterpiece.

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.

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

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.

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.

Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject.

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.

Acrylics on canvas - 60 * 80 cm

If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. By Katy Kelleher.

Art is hard. It often looks easy from the outside. ‘I could have done that,’ says Jane. ‘But you didn’t,’ says Peter. That’s art. A true artist is not born. They are certainly not made overnight. Art is the result of a series of events that came together thanks to a commitment. A decision made by the artist or practitioner to show up every day, and to put something to paper. Many never make the art they are capable of. Many will never realise the music that is quietly humming in their souls. Sometimes, art erupts out of a rush of excitement and joy in the artist — from a moment of insight. That works.

Awesome Biceps Tattoo Art By India's Award Winning Tattoo Artist at Inkfinite Tattoo Studio In Nashik Road, Nashik, Maharashtra.

When Jim Costigan saw the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring years ago, he was blown away by Bag End, the tucked-away hobbit home. “I thought that was the coolest house I’d ever seen,” Costigan says. “Architecturally, I thought that that house in the movie was just really well-done, that it was really original. The curvatures, everything about it was unique.”

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

The city installs more public art than any other in the world, and it serves developers as well as artists 

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

Researchers have mapped Venezuela's rock art in unmatched detail. The map features some of the largest rock engravings in the world and some 2,000 years old.

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.

Harry Bertschmann started his art career exhibiting alongside Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. For the next 60 years, he painted in almost total obscurity. Now he wants to get discovered.

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.