Dali House

No, Andy wasn’t dating Divine. They were just good friends. Studio 54 buddies, that sort of thing.

No, the real secret was this special camera, by which Warhol was able to come up with all those great quarptyches, or whatever they’re called. Now you can own one too and come up with terrific “four-dimensional”, multi-hued pictures of your friends!

Silkscreening is a messy business. That’s why Andy invented this amazing Polaroid snapper with a special lens.*

Not making this up! (Well, okay, maybe the part about Osama.) This camera is now available in the Dali House art supplies shop, where the commitment to fine art is inescapable, as further evidenced by this faithful depiction of Andy’s lord and saviour, Jesus “The One They Call Christ” O’Nazareth.

Dan Brown and members of his heretical sect should take note, by the way, that this Jesus is as active as action figures get, yet he is still not married. He doesn’t even have any moveable parts, you know, down there. So shut up.

Full disclosure: The “Pop Cam” and Jesus, Moses, Sigmund Freud and many others are on sale at DollyMixtures.com, where the camera is actually advertised like this: “With some imagination and a little experimentation you might capture that perfect Pop Cam picture that will lead to your 15 minutes of fame.”

*Coloured plastic and glue not included.

A female clown spider, also known as the female green jumping spider (to Caesar, Mopsus mormon), photographed in Australia by Richard Seaman. He’s got metric tonnes of bugs on his website.

Janssen’s alleged 1610 portrait of “Shakespeare” was later chromed, so to speak, to, uh, make him look “more like Shakespeare”.

The Great “Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?” Debate is revisited this month in a Smithsonian magazine article by Doug Stewart, with the focus on an exhibition of portraits of the bard … or someone borrowing his name.

The side argument about who the bloke is in all the Shakespeare paintings does nothing to dilute my recent point that there’s a “Shakespeare” death mask, so we know what we “he” looked like, but Will’s identity crisis makes for an interesting furor nonetheless.

The bickering has seen Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud, among many others, cheering for the professors of the Oxfordian army, who refuse to believe that a barely educated actor from the English boonies who was the son of an illiterate glove maker wrote any, let alone all, of the 154 sonnets and 37-odd plays ascribed to the Shakemeister. See the rest.

Swiss-born American symbolist Patrick Devonas has done okay in competition with this moving painting, done on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, though taking second place in the landscape category of the First International ARC Salon Competition (careful: ARC Salon is a registered trademark) pocketed him a mere $500, a tenth of the top prize, which went to Daniel Gerhartz’s very romantic, very old-fashioned “Hind’s Feet”. That’s to be expected of the Art Renewal Centre.

But “Condolence” has had plenty of play on the Internet, primarily among Mormon-friendly websites and art contests. Devonas, 41, is a Latter-Day Saints Church-goer, which is neither here nor there except that it makes him a large fish in a small pond, so he gets plenty of attention that he might not otherwise.

Did that sound too snarky? We’re all supposed to be trying to get along better now.

A little Photoshop musing for the fifth anniversary. The words that follow aren’t from Genesis, but by Genesis, the band – from “Supper’s Ready”.