Art is full of secrets. It’s one of the best things about it. However well you know a work of art, something in its story will always remain hidden. It doesn’t matter how famous you are — the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel ceiling — it doesn’t matter what you are — Leonardo’s The Last Supper, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers — […]

I went into the Francis Bacon show at the National Portrait Gallery with a noisy doubt wedged in my mind: Bacon was not a portraitist, so what is he doing here? I came out after an hour and a half of being slapped around by exciting paintwork with a new dollop of respect for the […]

Metaphorically, Mike Kelley was a big noise, an artist showcased at every biennale, written about in every art mag, yapped about at every curatorial gathering. Unfortunately, he was also a big noise physically, and Tate Modern’s retrospective tribute to him is so relentlessly and unpleasantly loud, with grunts, bangs, sighs, slurps, giggles, throbs and screams, […]

After six years, the Turner prize is back in London. This needs celebrating not because we Londoners have missed it — we haven’t — or because anyone believes London is its rightful home — we don’t — or because there was anything unworthy about the venues it ended up in on its superannuated tour of […]

The Savoy. It’s a typical September afternoon in London — cold, windy, overcast — and I’m spinning my way through the revolving door that marks the entrance to perhaps the world’s most famous hotel, accompanied by a conga of international rich folk returning from a hard day’s shopping. They are carrying elegant packages wrapped at […]

Michael Craig-Martin is a hugely influential figure in British art. He has done really well out of it: CBE, knighthood and now a lengthy retrospective at the Royal Academy. What a shame he’s such a ghastly artist. His work is a trampling of the delicacies and visual charms of art. World-class insensitivity can, if arrived […]

The exciting Vincent van Gogh show that has arrived at the National Gallery is packed with thrills and achievement. Everything at the event — 60 works, including many of his greatest — was produced in the two tumultuous years he spent in the south of France, from February 1888 to May 1890. It’s Van Gogh’s […]

There’s a Vincent van Gogh exhibition heading our way: a big one. It’s being hailed by its venue, the National Gallery, as a “once-in-a-century event” and will include more than 60 pictures by art’s most anxiously exciting painter. Everything in the show was made in the south of France during Van Gogh’s short but astonishingly […]

We appear to be living through a golden age of political protest in art. OK, perhaps “golden age” is pushing it. But it’s definitely a fine time for artistic moaning. Pretty much every day on what was Twitter and now is X, the energetic agitator Cold War Steve (the pen name of Christopher Spencer) is laying into […]

When Tracey Emin first appeared among us — mouthy, disruptive, selfish, often drunk, a terrible speller — no one could have imagined that one day she would open her own art school and that this art school would nurse ambitions that are traditional and nostalgic. But there you go. With time comes wisdom, and with […]