I won't say that cruise ship art is bad, because everyone has their own tastes. But I will say this is not stuff you're going to see at Christie's, unless Rembrandt ever did super-saturated landscapes starring Snow White, or Francis Bacon attempted colorized photos of the Rat Pack (pictured, on a Princess ship). But that's exactly the kind of stuff the cruise lines'' "fine art" departments try to sell passengers after a long day of piña coladas and free buffets.

I also won't call these kinds of events scams, because lots of people already have, pointing out that because they happen in international waters, consumer protection is scant. I have myself already pointed out the free alcohol, which says a lot, too, and which has a documented history of making ugly things look attractive.

I just picked this wonderful book up at my local Barnes & Noble store, and I was excited to see that the same deal is available online as well

You're probably familiar with Tony Bennett as one of the last living legends of the Great American Songbook, but you might not know that he's actually just as good an artist as he is singer.

Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art and Music is a 212-page, beautifully bound coffee-table book that tells the story of Bennett's life and art, richly illustrated with some of his amazing paintings. It even includes a CD of some of his favorite songs!

If you're a Tony Bennett fan, or know someone who is, this is an amazing gift. It's regularly $29.95, but Barnes & Noble has it for $9.98.

A couple of months back, I wrote a post about how a beginning investor could use artist's prints to start an art collection. In the piece, I quoted art dealer Jennifer Watson, who suggested several techniques that the novice collector could use to select pieces that were likely to go up in value. Over the last month or so, I've discovered a couple of key suggestions to add to the list.

Buy Ugly Art: Watson suggested that the first consideration that one must make when choosing a piece to buy is whether or not you like it. While that is definitely an important suggestion, the recent "Bad Paintings/Good Art" show at Vienna's Museum of Modern Art demonstrates that even truly terrible art can become highly valuable. Featuring works from several famous painters, the exhibition argues that great artists used ugliness as a strategy for changing the viewer's perceptions of the world. Whether or not that central thesis holds, one thing is for certain: a god-awfully ugly painting from a famous artist is still worth a ton of money.

Buy Art That Belonged to Evil Men: After Saddam Hussein fell from power in Iraq, liberating forces discovered that, in addition to being a homicidal maniac, the former President for life also had truly horrific tastes in paintings. In a love nest, they discovered two incredibly tacky dungeons and dragons style fantasy pieces by Coxsackie, NY artist Rowena Morrill. While Morrill was already well known in swords and cape circles for her depictions of Fabio-esque heroes and snarling dragons, Hussein's appreciation made her a household name.

I'm not one to follow the travails of America's debutantes and their persecution by paparazzi. However, I have been puzzled by the brouhaha this week that has broken out over Hannah Montana's photos in Vanity Fair. The pics show Mily Cyrus, the actress/singer who portrays the television character, wrapped in a sheet, revealing considerably less skin than would be on display in a bikini.

What no-one seems to be discussing is that the photos were taken by photographer Anne Liebowitz, certainly the most renown and one of the most artistic of current-day photographers. She's not a sleaze-monger, and her photos of celebrities, many gracing the cover of Rolling Stone, are among the most praised of this art form.

I'm guessing this is another instance of the morality police, who wouldn't know art if you wrapped it around a brick and hit them between the eyes with it, dragging Joe Average into their sex-obsessed version of reality. The same people fantasize about taking a hammer to the package of Michelangelo's David.

Given the current economy, most people probably aren't thinking about buying art. However, as savvy investors often point out, going against the prevailing current can be quite profitable. Besides, President Bush has told us that we are supposed to pour our tax refund checks back into the economy. Buying art is a great way to do just that--after all, you buy the art and the artist spends the money on booze, drugs and cheese. This, in turn, makes it possible for the breweries, distilleries, dairies and drug dealers to hire more employees, leading to economic recovery and a bright, shiny future. Best of all, you end up with a beautiful piece of art to hang on your wall!

If you've looked at art prices recently, you've probably noticed that most art pieces are really, really expensive. Unless you plan on visiting one of those "starving artists" shows that feature a lot of boring, uninspired landscapes, you're probably going to pay at least a few thousand dollars for a decent painting, and the prices go up quickly when you start looking at work by well-known and well-regarded artists. On the other hand, artists' prints tend to be an outstanding value. They cost a fraction of the price of paintings while offering a good investment opportunity.

Every day, WalletPop will be bringing you information about a fantastic freebie. Like what you see? Check back tomorrow for more!

Promotional posters for alcoholic beverages might not be tops on your list of freebies, but these 18x24 inch vintage travel poster-style ads from Redwood Creek are actually really, really attractive.

Just check the little boxes and they'll send you the complete set of 3 -- perfect for your husband's "man cave" where he and the boys watch fishing in the underwear.

If you like the vintage travel art look -- I think it's wonderful -- check out AllPosters.com's extensive selection.

I have a number of artistically-inclined friends who believe that one man's junk is their own personal treasure trove of art supplies. I've reaped the benefits of this philosophy in my own home: My coffee table boasts a top made of used dice my friend collected during his frequent visits to an Indian gaming facility, and another end table sports a mosaic attesting to his love of beach glass.

Another mosaic/collage artist I know isn't content to wait until she drops a plate or rips a sweater to collect material for her work. She shops for other people's shards and scraps or buys whole pieces of crockery or clothing at thrift stores then takes them home to destroy and reform. Her resulting creations are both fun and functional; she's put her personal touch on everything from window frames to light fixtures to planters.

I don't pretend to possess the artistic skills of these two, but my attempts at recycled art have shown me that this is a good medium for anyone who wants to get her creative ya-yas out while giving new life to stuff she'd otherwise be throwing away.

As one of maybe three people left on the planet who still shoots film, I find collages are a great way to turn a bunch of less-than-fantastic images into one far more interesting one. And you can create them in more than one dimension: Now instead of just giving a framed photo as a gift, I'll put together a photo montage on one of those three-for-$2 unfinished wood frames from Ikea. It's more personal -- not to mention cheaper -- than an unadorned mass-produced picture frame, and it keeps my scrapbook rejects from becoming just more recycling fodder.

Obviously, there's an endless supply of materials you can use to create recycled art. So if you're in spring-cleaning mode, look at the junk you're purging from your hall closet for artistic inspiration before you chuck it. After all. 'tis the season of rebirth and renewal.

This is the first in a series of posts about why and how to collect art -- even when you don't have a lot of extra money.

I don't know if this counts, but the first piece of "art" I "collected" was one of those Paper Moon art-deco greeting cards that were popular in the '70s. Yes, I was a little kid then with nothing more than babysitting money to spend at the mall, but I couldn't keep away from the fantastic images. I started buying them just so I could study them, enjoy them, and display them on my bedroom wall. I planned on being an illustrator or comic book artist when I grew up.

Alas, in college I discovered that I am more nimble with turn of phrase than I am with a Rapidograph pen (this is pre-computer, remember),so I opted for journalism instead. But imagery and color continued to lure me.

My first job out of college was for a weekly paper in an affluent community. Wealthy, urbane people lived there, and I was sent out to interview many of them. I got to into their lavish homes and oggle their fine furnishings and beautiful artwork. And it is here, gentle reader, that my story really begins.

As a board member of my neighborhood association, I can attest to great horror at the cost (and bureaucracy) involved with public art. Even the most innocuous of pieces starts at several thousand dollars, and months and months of hoop-jumping and consensus-building.

Enter knitting. While the solitary art of knitting has always had its community focus (think socks for soldiers), the concept of knitting together has had its resurgence in the past half-decade. This weekend, my friends Larissa and Martin Brown are celebrating the release of their book, Knitalong, which discusses knitting community through public art projects, knitting get-togethers, and (of course) online knitalongs; they write about fiber artists who have created "installations" ranging from the knitted wedding to a lovely project of a thousand knitted "peace cranes." Larissa is in the middle of creating a lovely installation of a hundred knitted cotton dishcloths.

If you can't build it, knit a cozy for it! An AP piece yesterday investigates the phenomenon of knitted trees, a public art trend which seems to range from artful tree sweaters to small-ish tree warmers to whole knitted trees (without the tree underneath). The tiny town of Yellow Springs, Ohio has a tree whose rather garish striped "sleeves" are compared by a local artist to graffiti street art -- but better, presumably, because of the overall lack of defacement (whether or not you think the tree cozies are artistic, they're quite simple to remove with a sharp pair of scissors if the public cries out).

Tree cozies are great projects for the community organization without major funding, or patience. Forget the RFP, the regional arts council board meetings, the high cost of bronze. Grab some spare yarn, some needles, and a couple of crafty friends and pick a tree.

See what Larissa has to say about this project:

As a girl, I was a perfectionist. I can remember my boxes of watercolors, and how I obsessively rinsed my brushes between colors so as not to turn them into a rainbow of blacks and browns. Pastels were even more precious, and took a soft touch to blend them on paper, but not on the instrument itself. It's hard to create when you're spending your energy focused on keeping things neat and orderly.

And then I had kids.

The first time I let my two-year-old destroy a perfectly good watercolor box in a happy hour, I took lots of deep yoga breaths and then faced facts: I was not about to run back to the art supply store after every messy creation to get a new box. Painting in the black and brown spectrum didn't faze him at all. Why fight the power of a preschooler's exuberance?

So during my next trip to the Goodwill Bins, the outlet where everything is sold by the pound, I "picked" until I found some treasures. A very good quality, but heavily used, watercolor set, missing its brush. A treasure trove of fancy pastels, half of them dumped out of their box. In five minutes, I'd gathered up all the broken and chalky bits and ended up paying less than a dollar for my artistic treasure.

It turns out that the art supplies are now partially destroyed, and I often end up discovering a brilliantly-colored pastel chunk underfoot (note to mothers out there: don't clean up pastels with vinegar. It's like dying your floor). But I don't sweat: I rescued those supplies from the trash, so I can let go of my obsessive-compulsive self and just let the little boys be. Thrifting art supplies for little ones is the way to go.

This post was written as part of a series on how to thrift shop smarter. Read more on what to buy, and not to buy, at thrift stores.

You know how it is. You're sitting around the house with your wife, looking at a blank space on the mantle, and wishing you knew what to put there. Finally, she turns to you and says "Honey, we've waited long enough. It's time to buy a 5,000 year old Sumerian phallus statue." You look back at her, stare deeply into her eyes and say "my God, it's like you're in my head."

Or you're hanging out in the bedroom and something just doesn't feel right. You try moving the furniture, taking down the framed posters, rearranging the curtains. Still, something is off. Finally, you realize that the room's fung shui is out of balance and can only be rectified by the addition of an ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus amulet.

Okay, it's not like anybody needs to buy antiquities. But they're still really, really cool. There's something about holding an item that has survived for thousands of years. It helps you weed out the nonsense. After all, when you're contemplating the eternal, it's easier to forget that your best buddy "accidentally" beaned you in the head when he got a little too excited by his game of "Guitar Hero."