Superman First Edition

A first edition of the comic book in which Superman made his debut has become the world’s most expensive, selling for an eye-watering $2.16 million (£1.4m).

The Action Comics No.1 (graded nine out of 10 for quality) introduced the world’s most recognisable super hero to the world in 1938.

And having originally hit news stands priced at just 10 cents, it has now fetched the staggering sum after an online auction in New York.

The book, one of just 100 thought to be left in existence, had been stolen from the home of a California collector in 2000.

And despite an 11-year police hunt, the valuable and extremely rare comic mysteriously vanished off the face of the earth.

But in April, a Californian businessman who bought up the contents of an auctioned off storage unit, unearthed the pristine magazine inside.

Page 23 is 2011 winner of Best Film, Best Audience Award and Best Editing from the prestigious 48 Hour Film Project in Holland.

Story
Advertisements usually display unruffled domestic happiness. But, as we see in Page 23, this world looks too good to be true. Behind the beaming smile of fashion models loom adultery and the stifling daily routine.

PAGE 23 is the first shortfilm that the young creatives Jeroen Houben, Tim Arts and Stefan van den Boogaard made together. Their first effort immediately resulted in the jury prize and audience award at the 48 Hour Film Project in Utrecht (Netherlands), and nominations in other categories.

48 hour film project

48-hour-film-project

The 48 Hour Film Project has just celebrated its 10th Anniversary Tour.

3,500 films from 96 cities around the world entered this year.

The Tour lasted from March through November with approximately 45,000 participants and 400 screenings across the globe.

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which teams make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours.

For instance, it was very common to photograph the deceased in the past for posterity – something that is practically never done today.

Joseph Niépce 1825 - possibly first photograph ever taken

Second photo ever taken - Le gras 1826 by Joseph Niepce

Daguerre Boulevard de Temple Paris 1838

Middle East Bethlehem in 1934

Soldiers on detail- could be a Monet!

Early color photo from 1872 by Louis Ducos Huro

India 200 years ago

Japan 1850's

Sarah Bernhardt, French Actress, the most famous actress the world had known

The New York Suicide Curve

A post mortem on a child

Example of post mortem photography

Early Fake - spiritualism 1862

Early Expedition

African Soldiers

Bob Dylan Artist

Over the last forty-eight years Bob Dylan has released forty-six albums and written over five hundred songs including ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Make You Feel My Love’.

Selling over 110 million records around the world, his songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Sonny and Cher, The Byrds, the Rolling Stones, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Jarrett, Guns N’ Roses, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Marley, Pearl Jam and Neil Young.

Bob Dylan has been recognised and honoured with many awards.

He received an honorary doctorate of music from Princeton University, New Jersey in 1970 and from St Andrews University, Scotland in 2004.

In addition to winning numerous Grammy Awards, his song ‘Things Have Changed’ from the film ‘Wonder Boys’ (2000) won him an Academy Award in 2001 and his 2009 album, ‘Together Through Life’, entered the charts at number one in the UK and America, and charted Top Five in many other countries around the world.

From his performances in Greenwich Village coffee houses, festivals and rallies in the early 1960s, to his subsequent worldwide tours, Bob Dylan has built his musical reputation on the strength of live appearances. He has played no fewer than one hundred shows a year since 1988.

Although Bob Dylan is best known as a singer and songwriter, he is also an artist, writer and director. His experimental collection of writings, ‘Tarantula’, was published in 1970 and his autobiography ‘Chronicles: Volume One’, released in 2004, became an international bestseller.

Bob Dylan has both directed and acted in a number of films, making his first appearance in ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ (1973) and more recently in ‘Masked and Anonymous’ (2003). A collection of Bob Dylan’s drawings and sketches, made while on a tour of America, Europe and Asia between 1989 and 1992, were published in ‘Drawn Blank’ in 1994. These drawings were re-worked and first shown at a museum exhibition in Germany in autumn 2007, and at Halcyon Gallery, London in 2008.

In April 2008, Dylan received a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize ‘for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power’.

Below are prints from his 2010 collection. They are all limited editions of 295 and are priced at a respectable £1250 each including VAT.

Sunflowers Bob Dylan

Rose on a Hillside

Horse

Dallas Hotel Room

Dads Restaurant

Bicycle

Fisherman

Backyard

http://www.bobdylanart.com

Here is a small selection of street pieces or street graffiti to view. Send us in your favourites if you have some…

Plate from Audubon's Birds of America

The University of Pittsburgh must be gleeful this morning because they own one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon’s Birds of America.

While Audubon was creating Birds of America, he was also working on a companion publication, namely, his Ornithological Biography. Both of these sets were acquired by William M. Darlington in the mid-nineteenth century and later donated, as part of his extensive library, to the University of Pittsburgh by his daughters.

Even in its day, John Audubons paintings were collectors items, selling in sets of 5 at a time to collectors in Europe and North America. But could anyone have guessed that they would fetch £7.3 million at auction in 2010?

You can see in-depth images of each plate by visiting the Pittsburgh website.

http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/

Signed prints range from £20 to £10,000, so there’s stunning, affordable and collectable art for everyone. Plus there’s an extensive range of high quality aluminium and wood frames also available for UK customers. Everything at artrepublic.com has FREE DELIVERY too!

Spread the cost of art over 10 month INTEREST FREE!

artrepublic.com are members of the Arts Council’s Own Art scheme, giving you the opportunity to spread the cost of selected limited edition prints over 10 months, interest free (subject to acceptance). All eligible prints have full details on their website.

Don’t miss their invaluable art information section titled ‘artzine’, this contains all you need to know about the art world including artist biographies, art movement definitions and listings of exhibitions at over 1,000 galleries worldwide.

View the latest limited editions at artrepublic.com

Discover the latest information from the art world

Let’s see if we’ve got this correct.

A retired French electrician – who used to install Burglar Alarms – has come forward with 271 undocumented, never-before-seen works by Pablo Picasso estimated to be worth at least $79 million.

Pierre Le Guennec, 71, an electrician, installed an alarm system at Picasso’s villa in Mougin in the South of France. He says the works were a gift from the great man.

Claude Picasso, Picasso’s son, says this is unlikely because while Picasso was noted for his generosity, he usually gave away doodles, not collections.

The electrician and his wife were arrested when they visited Claude to have the works authenticated.

The pieces date from 1900 to 1932, and even include one from Picasso’s “blue” period of 1901-4.

Hmm…burglar alarms you say…

One of the missing paintings

Music & Words are by Genki Sudo and Takashi Watanabe – all in Japanese.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ua64HbsBUo&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube]

There is definetly something to be said for having a memorable business card, particularly ones that are so good they’re hard to throw away.

Well that’s what you want isn’t it – oh of course, and a phonecall or email from it as well…

This selection comes from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/

There you will you’ll find more interesting creative ideas.

“Art is spending 24 hours a day pouring your heart into something left for the judgment of others and still, I can think of nothing else I would rather do.”

Matt Held takes images of social media users and transforms them into oil painting-portraitures.

By sourcing subjects from a digital city, his goal is to question our assumptions about identity, how we shape our online selves for others to see.

In the process, his work transforms the physical and digital self into something more contextual, and well, more fun.

Enjoy, then visit his gallery at the bottom of the page…

See More At HeldStudios.com

Capturing the behind-the-scenes world of graffiti art, an eccentric Frenchman tries to film and befriend Banksy, only for the artist to turn the camera back on its owner with spectacular results.

Featuring exclusive footage of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Invader and many more of the world’s most infamous graffiti artists at work, Exit Through The Gift Shop is the hilarious true story of low-level criminality, companionship and incompetence.

It can be purchased in the UK online at Play.com

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0b90YppquE&feature=related[/youtube]

The sculpture was shown in Madrid, Spain, in 2007, in a show that was ironically opened by the reining monarch, King Juan Carlos.

Sait the  Sun’s royal photographer Arthur Edwards of the sculpture: “This is quite obviously the work of a lunatic. I don’t see this as anything more than a cheap stunt.”

Maybe he has a point – but hasn’t art nearly always been considered the work of lunatics to begin with?

This sculpture below, titled “Miss Kitty” is also by Paolo Schmidlin, portraying the Pope wearing nothing but thigh-high stockings, a pair of panties and a stole. The sculpture is adorned with a blonde bob wig.

When it was first exhibited in Milan, Italy, it drew harsh protest from the Catholic Anti-Defamation League and others who found the sculpture of the Pope in drag to be unacceptable.

In an official statement, the Catholic Anti-Defamation League declared that the controversial sculpture is a “vulgar offence against Christ’s vicar and the feelings of Roman Catholics,”. However, others have stated the censorship of the sculpture is another example of “Organized religion dictating the role of art.” and that, “This type of censorship should not be happening!”

A nude sculpture of the pop star Britney Spears clutching a dead bear rug has been creating a bit of a stir recently.

The work by Daniel Edwards, titled “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston” shows Spears naked, pregnant, and sensually bent over on her knees.

The artist said this about the pose. “The image from behind of the kneeling pose is very strong so I felt the front of the sculpture needed an equally powerful image which is where the bearskin comes in.”

“The gallery said it received about 3,000 e-mails from around the world in just a week, split between anti-abortion and abortion rights opinions.”

Sculptor Daniel Edwards has a park-bench-sized statue of Angelina Jolie in the nude, breastfeeding her twins.

This artistic work of public indecency (she’s not wearing pants) is called “Landmark for Breastfeeding” and was inspired by Jolie’s cover photograph on W magazine in 2008.

Edwards decided that, in order to encourage more women to breastfeed and to raise global awareness of public nursing, he would depict one twin as African-American and the other as not.

Patricia Piccinini is one of the most well known of Australian contemporary artists.

Patricia Piccinini explores what she calls the ‘often specious distinctions between the artificial and the natural’. By displaying the similarities and differences between the organic, natural and our constructed material world, Piccinini challenges our classification of life.

This inspires her to combine human and animal physiology and technological development in many of her works.

This is a recording of him playing Chopin’s Ballade No 4.

Frédéric Chopin composed four Ballades. They are one-movement pieces for solo piano, composed between 1835 and 1842 while he was living in Paris.

If Chopin is regarded as technically difficult to play, then the Ballades are in a league of their own.

No 4 however, never loses its romantic simplicity. As John Ogden the British pianist put it, – “It is unbelievable that it lasts only twelve minutes, for it contains the experience of a lifetime.”