Free Republic

They say the best things in life are free, but try telling that to the art-lover who owns a Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent van Gogh masterpiece. World-renowned auction house Christie's has revealed its top 10 most expensive lots sold in 2017 including da Vinci's 500-year-old mystical masterpiece, Salvator Mundi, which was bought for an eye-watering $450,312,500(£342,182,751). An Andy Warhol painting, two pieces of work by Cy Twombly, Max Beckmann’s Hölle der Vögel and Fernand Léger’s Contraste de Formes all made it into the top 10 list after buyers battled it out in the auction room.

A collection of artistic images from Daily Mail articles shown to the music of Joseph Blanchard.

A music video made to the black and white images, and color versions when I could later find them, from Dupont Vicars' book "Master Paintings of the World," 1902. The music is "When I Dream" by Joseph Blanchard.

New York City Opera said Tuesday it is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy protection after seven decades as a fixture on the metropolitan cultural scene. The company announced Sept. 12 that it needed to raise $7 million by the end of September. Spokeswoman Risa Heller said about $2 million had been raised, plus another $301,019 was pledged from 2,108 donors in an online campaign. … Junior to and often feistier than the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera was a spawning ground for top opera talent that included Beverly Sills, Placido Domingo, Renee Fleming and Samuel Ramey. But it was derailed...

Something is terribly wrong. Used to be, I could safely attend the annual Delta show at the Arkansas Arts Center here in Little Rock with serene confidence that I would never agree with the judge's picks. It gave me the feeling, hollow as it might be, that I marched to a different drummer from the cognoscenti's. For my taste in such things has long been irreparably bourgeois -- middle-class, middlebrow, middlin' in general. Even verging on the sentimental, and maybe not just verging. Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning," Charles Demuth's "I Saw the Figure Five...