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The eccentric inhabitants of a crumbling Irish manor house have invited in the reality TV cameras in a desperate attempt to avert its collapse. The plot of a new play by Belfast’s award-winning Marie Jones echoes the real-life battle of the Lyric Theatre in the city, which has for years been struggling to raise funds to prevent its roof caving in. Yesterday, after a struggle in which the actor Liam Neeson begged New York’s literati to save his spiritual home, the theatre was finally assured of a new £12m building.

Artists who want their work to boldly go beyond the upper atmosphere have three weeks to come up with ideas for the planet’s most unusual gallery.

Initial consultation on a cultural use for the International Space Station, which orbits Earth 250 miles into space, finishes at the end of this month.

In the wonderful world of contemporary art the nominations for this year’s Turner prize are suitably bizarre. A collagist who customises bicycles, a photographic artist who films digital clocks, and a musician who works with plastic bags, wool and safety pins.

But the most subversive element on the shortlist announced yesterday is the appearance of a conventional painter whose subject matter is traditional - the landscape, the bunch of flowers, the sunset - and whose medium is the choice of Joseph Mallord William Turner himself, oil paints. As Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, announced the artists on the shortlist for the £25,000 prize, the bookies William Hill made Gillian Carnegie, 34, from London, the even-money favourite as the first artist who exclusively uses paint as a medium to be nominated for the prize in five years.

This is a press release from Granada Television

Are you an aspiring artist or budding portrait painter? Have you held a life long dream of seeing your carefully crafted drawing or painting receive national recognition…?
We are looking for anyone and everyone who has ever fancied putting paint to paper.

We are holding a national portrait painting competition this summer giving aspiring artists a chance to paint some of our best loved celebrities.

Our contestants will come from all walks of life and may not have painted anything but the garden gate before. Perhaps you’re already a keen amateur artist or maybe you’re simply a van driver who’d rather be Van Gogh. If you’re over 18 and fancy having a go then apply for an information pack by calling:
0871 200 2200 (calls charged at a local rate)
Leave your details and we’ll send you an application pack. Or click title of this post to visit the ITV website for entry details.

Irish artists will be entitled to a cut from resales of their work from next January. Legislation introduced in the autumn will give painters and sculptors at least 4% of the hammer price of works worth €3,000 plus.

The Queen has sat for more than 120 artists, including Lucian Freud and Pietro Annigoni. This time the cameras will roll as Her Majesty sits for the popular art evangelist as he dabs away at an oil portrait marking the landmark birthday next April.

We are delighted to launch Contract Image dealing with art for business.

It may have been the most expensive game of rock, paper, scissors ever played.

Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie’s or Sotheby’s should sell the company’s art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week’s auctions in New York.

So he decided to get the two auction houses to have a game of rock, paper, and scissors.

Charles Saatchi has sold Marc Quinn’s Self, a cast of the artist’s head in nine pints of his own frozen blood, one of the works most fiercely emblematic of Britart.

Gregory Crewdson uses Hollywood techniques to create glossy, Hopper-like portraits of American life. But where Hopper stripped lives bare, these images offer an overabundance of detail. Adrian Searle reports.