This youtube video called the beauty of pollination is a tribute to the wonders in nature that we may easily overlook.

Over the years, Turbulence.org has been an outstanding contributor to the Internet, with funded projects of unusual quality. Their newest offering is titled "We Ping Good Things to Life: An Interactive Networked Installation in 5 acts. I think of opening one of Joseph Cornell's magic shadow boxes and seeing the characters come alive.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Wasilla Alaska is in the headlines once again, this time over a piece of sculpture. A public sculpture at the local high school has stirred up feathers, with some folks protesting that it looks like a female genitalia. (I was involved in a furor like this many years ago: the exhibition at a high school in Santa Monica, California, included one of my photographs with a female breast in the background. The parents protested vehemently, the kids couldn't have cared less, the curator left it up to me whether to remove the piece, I refused to, and the whole bruhaha dissolved.)

Back to the sublime once again: Lucien Freud's exquisite portraits are being shown at the Tate. Freud is a master draughtsman and these examples are a rare treat.

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man has been a source of mystery and controversy for centuries. Described by Tim Howard as "the naked guy doing jumping jacks", it has intrigued art historians. Now a journalist named Toby Lester has decided to write a book about its origins. Titled "Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in his Own Image", Lester takes us through a tour of the artist's thinking and includes more than sixty illustrations en route.

Charles Birnbaum was a bond trader on Wall Street who did his ceramic sculptures on the side. Fortunately for us, he now creates his pieces full time. Intricate, delicate and lovely, his works make us think twice about what ceramics can do.

I was fortunate enough to catch a PBS special on Bill T. Jones recently. A MacArthur Fellow and Tony-Award winning choreographer, Jones has redefined the meaning of dance and reimagined what the human body can do. This article from the Walker magazine discusses his newest piece, Story/Time, a series of one-minute tales based loosely on the 1959 piece by John Cage called "Indeterminacy". The dances are arranged by chance, a feature that Cage would have loved.

Cindy Sherman has had a long and distinguished influence on the world of photograpy, but she is still best known for her black-and-white series of untitled film stills from 1977-1980. For decades she has been role-playing using herself as model, teasing us with the question of where she stops and the characters take over. As "Flavorwire" writes, "Cindy as herself, Cindy as everyone." Sherman doesn't spare herself, and she doesn't spare the rest of us. She fascinates us even when we don't want to look, peeking around the corners of our egos, leaving us nowhere to hide. This article from Flavorwire features 17 of her sometimes relentless images. See them all in amazement. Late note: the Financial Times recently posted an excellent article on MOMA's retrospective of Sherman's work.

No else covered the gritty scene of murder in New York City quite as explicitly as the photographer known as Weegee. Prowling the streets at night with the cops and ambulances, he was the progenitor of what is being called Tabloid Journalism. His images, often lurid, always compelling, occupy a special niche in photography. This exhibition from the International Center of Photography is a good introduction to his work.