Installed in the main exhibition space, this could have been a blockbuster show introducing a large audience to an important moment in Russian Theatre; but tucked away in the Department of Theatre and Performance, where spaces are narrow and galleries small, there is little room to show off these superb exhibits to their best advantage. Only the initiated will, I fear, brave these claustrophobic corridors and persevere long enough to appreciate the goodies on offer.Faced with walls painted bright red, labels hung too low and hard to read, copious detail about each production but little Read more ...

The night before he was locked up, Chris Huhne had that Grayson Perry round for tuna steaks. Who knew? Perry was embarking on a series of portraits about identity at a crossroads, and can there be a more public crisis of identity than a Cabinet minister going to prison? But first Perry wanted to get to know his subject. Huhne was resistant to probing. “People are not like Russian dolls,” he volunteered. “They are exactly like Russian dolls!” countered Perry.Perry’s theory of the portrait is that a good one “tells you something a thousand selfies never could”. A portraitist is somewhere Read more ...

In a tavern somewhere in Tokyo, two Japanese macaque monkeys work a daily, two-hour shift (under Japanese law, these hours are regulated). Dressed in miniature uniforms, the monkeys’ main task is to deliver hot towels to amused customers before drinks orders are taken by a human. The customers tip the monkeys in boiled soy beans. A search on YouTube throws up quite a few of these monkey-waiter skits. Who knew? Perhaps all the footage comes from the same restaurant, since it seems unusual enough to have warranted a jolly “strange but true” item on Japanese news. One segment of this news Read more ...

On Saturday at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Alternative Miss World was staged for the 13th time. Having launched this gloriously tacky event in his Hackney studio in 1972, artist Andrew Logan promises to carry on the tradition until the day he dies; but it’s last showing – at the Roundhouse five years ago – nearly bankrupted him. This time round, crowd funding has helped solve the problem.Not surprisingly the theme was numbers, though Logan insists: “not the dull, monochrome numbers of finance, but oversaturated, excessive neon numbers, brimming with energy and potential, just like the Read more ...

Wicked women have always sold well, but more than that, they have fired the artistic imagination in a quite exceptional way. Exploring the depiction of the witch from the 15th to the 19th century, this exhibition is packed with images that must number amongst the most dramatic, atmospheric and gripping ever made, proof if it were needed of the energising effects of a truly inspiring subject. From wizened hags to beautiful seductresses, witches could embody every sin and vice associated with women, and long after the fear of witchcraft itself had subsided, witches served as repositories for Read more ...

In China there are more than 100 million fans of Manchester United. At least that’s what I’m told when I get to the the city's National Football Museum. And in a sartorial decision unusual in the art world, we are greeted by artist Chen Wenbo wearing an Arsenal football scarf. In sport, as in contemporary art, the Chinese are often playing the same game as us.The Asia Triennial Manchester hosts the UK’s largest exhibition of contemporary art from south of the Great Wall. Harmonious Society, who make up the bulk of the triennial, has a display co-ordinated by the Centre for Chinese and Read more ...

The chatty, loquacious, exuberant Simon Schama, whose seminal 1987 book on Holland in the 17th century, The Embarrassment of Riches, transformed the anglophone’s understanding of the Dutch Republic, describes himself as historian, writer, art critic, cook, BBC presenter. He is also the University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia, and has written 14 substantial and even significant books. On several of his subjects, from British art, slavery in America and landscape in culture to the history of the Jews, he has presented popular television series. The energy and curiosity is Read more ...

The septuagenarian American sculptor Richard Serra can treat the most massive sheets of steel as though they are handy pieces of paper for his version of origami; or he can decide to stack huge dense metal blocks as though they were children’s play bricks. He can playfully balance huge slabs of steel held just so by a perfectly judged tension, and he almost persuades us that one huffing breath might bring the whole thing down, particularly so in London Cross, which is just what it says it is: two huge elevated steel planks crossing each other at an oblique angle in a specially constructed Read more ...

There is a 1953 Volkswagen parked in the Great Court of the British Museum, and we are reminded that Hitler persuaded Frederick Porsche (who gave his name of course to a hideously expensive luxury automobile) to design a people’s car. The postwar economic miracle of the defeated Germany finally allowed the Beetle to go into mass production; 21 million of them in fact – the largest number of a single model ever produced, until its hugely successful run ended in 2003. Here is a neat paradox: how an idea of one of the monsters of history became a protagonist of effective technological advance Read more ...

It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...

Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera; he stands up and balances precariously as the boat bobs up and down on the swell; he falls overboard, climbs back on and stands silhouetted against the blue sky, grinning down at us.With his lithe young body, bleached dreadlocks and disarming smile he seems very amiable and laid back; it's impossible to imagine him in any sort of trouble. And Read more ...

All human life, as they say, is here: we witness displays of warmth and tenderness in virtuous matrimony; reflection and contemplation in quiet solitude. We respond to the soft seductions of the flesh in its yielding ripeness, and we feel the pathos of the withering of the flesh in age; there’s even the mocking of the aged flesh still lusting for the piece of the old action. There’s civic pride and intellectual curiosity. And then there’s simply being; being in a fully conscious, thinking and feeling sense – don’t we get exactly that when we stand before a Rembrandt self-portrait? Here is a Read more ...