Arts and Culture

Erotic Art, Bob Dylan's Paintings, David Bailey Photos for Sale in London Sex, the oldest subject in art, is the newest theme to be explored by auction house Phillips de Pury & Co. in its specialist sales of contemporary works.

Nuremberg Shows Duerer's Teacher, Giant-Footed Africans, Constipated Man America doesn’t exist. The people of southern Africa have giant feet that they use to shade themselves from the scorching sun by lying on their backs, legs in the air. The King of Ceylon has the largest ruby ever seen.

Patti Smith Sins, Queen Beheaded, Spam With Sausage: Great London Weekend Watch the blindfolded Queen of England get ready for execution as the first stop on your London weekend.

Jaguar Ends Years of Boring Sedans With Cool $115,000 XJ: Jason H. Harper Parked on a pebbly shoulder, nose pointed down a skinny country lane, the new Jaguar XJ hums quietly in the sunshine.

Michael Lewis Slams Bonuses, Hails Regulations, Pummels Fuld: Interview The loner with a glass eye, a medical degree and Asperger’s who makes millions betting against the subprime mortgage-bond market is just one of the unlikely heroes in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.

Wyclef Jean, Lang Lang Join Forces at Carnegie to Help Haitian Children After a massive earthquake rocked Haiti in January, concert pianist Lang Lang sent a text message to Wyclef Jean asking if the singer’s friends and relatives in the Caribbean country were safe.

Ben Stiller Builds Doghouse; Kristen Explodes `Cherry Bomb': Rick Warner Reminded by a friend that “life is wasted on the young,” Roger Greenberg goes one step further.

Hamlet in Raincoat, Bloody Ophelia, Where's Denmark? Manuela Hoelterhoff To flee or not to flee? That was the question when the Metropolitan Opera staged Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” Tuesday night after dropping the piece for more than a century.

MacArthur `Genius' Parks Offers Primer on Horrible Playwriting: John Simon Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play (her 375th) “The Book of Grace” may not be the worst ever written, but it surely is the worst by a winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, who teaches at New York University and is the first-ever holder of the Public Theater’s Master Writer Chair.

Top Five Nonfiction Books From Ted Conover to Karl Rove: the Muse List With so many books in the stores, we’re often asked for recommendations. Here’s a list of recent nonfiction titles: