Six works by Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who is currently confined to Beijing, went on sale at a major contemporary art fair that got under way Wednesday in Spain.

The pieces include a dark blue porcelain pillar that is around three meters (nine feet) tall with an asking price of 150,000 euros ($200,000) and a green and black porcelain watermelon for 50,000 euros.

A provocative masterpiece by Irish painter Francis Bacon fetched £21.3 million at a London auction while a Gerhard Richter abstract netted almost £10 million.

Bacon's 1963 work "Portrait of Henrietta Moraes", which features a naked model sprawled on a bed, was snapped up by an unnamed telephone bidder at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art auction, which realized £80.6 in total.

Experts at London's Sotheby's auction house on Tuesday revealed they had discovered an invisible ink signature made by U.S. graffiti icon Jean-Michel Basquiat on his painting "Orange Sports Figure".

The work will be the top lot in Wednesday's Contemporary Art Evening Sale and had been expected to sell for £3-4 million ($4.7-6.2 million, 3.6-4.8 million euros). But it could now fetch more after the chance discovery which occurred when it was viewed under ultraviolet light.

A collection of 37,895 Spanish coins including rare examples from the 15th century went on display Tuesday in New York for an auction organized by Sotheby's next month.

The collection includes coins from antiquity through modern era and feature the only remaining example of Europe's most famous coin, called 50 Excelentes, commissioned by the 15th century monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella as gifts.

The Danish-Arab Urban Arts Festival will seek to gather young underground artists from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Denmark, providing them with a creative and unified platform through which the community and creativity can interconnect.

Through the promotion of dialogue among cultures, the festival aims to strengthen mutual understanding and tolerance, ultimately contributing to a culture of peaceful coexistence in an open and democratic society.

Heavy snow has caused extensive damage to the mediaeval walled town of Urbino and further deteriorated the Colosseum in Rome, already badly in need of repair, Italian newspapers reported Tuesday.

Partial collapses have been reported at the convents of San Francesco and San Bernardino in Urbino and the roof of the Church of the Capuchins outside the town center has completely caved in, La Repubblica reported.

Baghdad's version of a wax museum features figures who depict Iraq's past, rather than replicas of celebrities like Michael Jackson, offering a distinctly different experience from Madame Tussauds.

Eschewing the Western model, Baghdadi Museum provides a window into a time before Saddam Hussein, the eight-year war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait and subsequent sanctions, and the 2003 US-led invasion and its aftermath.

Iran may reject Western influences, but Valentine's Day has become a growing phenomenon thanks to the romantically minded youth of the Islamic state's affluent classes.

Although the ruling clerics and hardline politicians have been waging a campaign against what they call "decadent" cultural imports, the Christian day dedicated to amorous displays has so far survived.

An Israeli planning commission has approved the controversial construction of a Jewish biblical park in an Arab neighborhood of east Jerusalem, the interior ministry said on Monday.

A statement said that the planning and construction commission ofJerusalem gave the go ahead for the establishment of a 5,000 square meter tourist complex in Silwan, a move that will likely further raise tensions in the flashpoint neighborhood.

In the suffocating atmosphere that was East Germany, a whole range of misfits managed to find air to breathe and now, two decades after the Berlin Wall's fall, new films are putting communism's "freaks" in focus.

Screening at the Berlin film festival, "This Ain't California" and "Among Men - Gay in East Germany" look at underground skater culture and homosexuality and the drive for individual freedom against rampant repression.