Under this motto, the online art show »Buy Some Damn Art« every week brings a new hand-picked selection of independent original art directly to buyers. The initiator of the site, Kate Singleton, wants to offer art at affordable prices for a new generation of art buyers. Since the beginning of November, each Tuesday at noon a new show launches featuring six originals for sale from $200 to $500.

This week it is Rachel Sitkin’s turn. Her landscape paintings quite unexpectedly show surface coal and copper mines in West Virginia and Arizona.

Lying in bed with an unseasonal flu has its good sides, too: The last two days I browsed through the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog of the U.S. Library of Congress. It contains an unbelievable amount of digitized images and offers you an insight into U.S. history in a very direct way. It includes everything you might think of, just go ahead entering some keywords into the search field and you’ll get hooked! I was amazed by the photographic footage of the encounter between settlers and Native Americans in the 19th century, Civil War photos and the oil rush in the early 20th century.

Of course, the well-known images by Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration are included, depicting life in rural America between 1935 and 1944. But until today, I had not seen the color series from this huge collection of 175,000 images.

Another tip for your next flu is the Picture Library of the Royal Geographic Society. These pictures will take you on a journey round the world in the footsteps of famous explorers and travellers.

Pics: Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection

Panther Club is an independant publishing platform from London that produces limited print editions in collaboration with international artists and illustrators. Originally, they started out as a blog covering the field of Graphic Arts and illustration. The blog is a fun source for inspiration where you’ll find a mixture of works by new talents as well as interesting material from past decades.

1. Panther Clubs second print
series »Dionysus, The Ecstasy & Madness«
2+3. Collages by Virginia Echeverria

Hurry, hurry, until Saturday, January 15th, you can watch the Valentino documentary on Swedish public service online channel SVT Play (that means if you can tolerate that the parts in Italian language are subtitled in Swedish, only). Besides insights into the crazy world of fashion, the documentary offers entertainment, tension & supense and a lot of emotions exchanged between Valentino and his partner and companion Giancarlo Giammetti.

»To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.« This is Google’s idea behind its vast Street View project that allows us to take digital promenades in many cities, from Aberdeen to Adelaide and from Zürich to Zaragoza. On The Nine Eyes Of Google Street View Tumblr, artist Jon Rafman has collected the most amazing Google Street View moments that were captured totally randomly.

Not the easiest task to redesign www.fluter.de, the magazine of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) since it´s really content-heavy and has grown over the last 8 years. We had to clean up and restructure quite a bit to achieve a straight layout. It was a fruitful coproduction with Redaktion und Alltag who are still working on technical improvements and we are happy that the beta-version is finally online.