'Their bodies are full of light; they shine' ... Titian's Diana And Actaeon. Photograph: Getty

The last critic to write seriously about the nude in art was Kenneth Clark, the posh, brilliant art historian whose television series Civilisation is still talked about and argued with. Clark's book The Nude got him satirised by Monty Python in a sketch about an art critic who slavers over "the nude in my bed". But at the risk of appearing similarly nuts I would like to ponder the beauty of the human body. Continue reading...

Out of the shadows ... Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt (left) and a still from Steve McQueen's film Hunger. Photograph: Corbis

Steve McQueen's film Hunger is the answer to a lot of questions. Perhaps the most radical and pertinent is one asked by critic Dan Fox in an editorial in this month's issue of Frieze magazine: where's the beef? Where's the content in art now? As the world faces recession, will the clever-clever games of the art world continue to satisfy? Won't people want art to be about something? Continue reading...

The B of the Bang steel sculpture in Manchester. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA

We like our art dangerous. We want to be provoked, shocked, teased. We like our public art big, brash and spectacular. But, it turns out, no one told the artists that "dangerous" was a metaphorical term. When councils all over Britain called up sculptors and said "surprise us", they didn't mean "drop steel spikes from a great height".

Not that anyone has actually been injured by Thomas Heatherwick's gigantic steel starburst, The B of the Bang, which is next to the City of Manchester stadium. But serious safety problems have led to Heatherwick's studio agreeing to pay Manchester city council £1.7m in an out-of-court settlement. It may mark the end of an era, the moment when public art's wave broke. Continue reading...

A graffiti artist made me want to cheer yesterday. I laughed out loud. I got it.

I needed to check something out in the National Portrait Gallery, so there I was, among the videos and photographs and paintings of celebrities in its contemporary galleries, gawping at the hideous lurid dumbness of Michael Craig-Martin's illuminated portrait of Zaha Hadid and a pretentious video portrait of Duncan Goodhew. But it was while I was looking at some bad paintings of actors and musicians that a portrait of Damien Hirst caught my eye. It was a collage of the diamond skull with the word "censored" written over its face, clad in a piratical bandana, with jewellery and long hair - Hirst as rock star? As heavy metal prophet? It was funny - but who had done this? For a second I thought it might be a self-portrait. Continue reading...

'Souls stranded in limbo' ... Susan Hiller's From Here to Eternity (green) and (red) 2008

Does the artist Susan Hiller believe in ghosts, or doesn't she? Is her fascination with the paranormal a study of mass psychology, an aesthetic pose, or a personal spiritual vocation? Is she a modernist or a medium? It's not just ghosts with which Hiller's art flirts. Flying saucers, telekinesis, levitation and the idea of a personal aura all fascinate this pioneer of video and conceptual art. Continue reading...

Max Von Sydow and a statue of Pazuzu from The Exorcist. Photograph: Kobal Collection

Bible tours are a familiar sight at the British Museum. There are many artefacts in its collections that are associated with various books of the Bible - the current exhibition Babylon makes these links explicit. But why should Christians have it all their own way?

The devil too has left traces in archaeology. In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries you may chance on a case containing small bronze and stone figures of an Assyrian demon called Pazuzu. He has a face of pure malignity. This wrinkled monstrosity resembles at one and the same time a medieval gargoyle and a Chinese dragon. It was, however, a more specific association that stopped me in my tracks when I came across it a few months ago. It can't be, I thought ... Continue reading...

For menaces and minxes ... The Beano annual 2006. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Regular readers of The Beano will know that one of its traditional characters is no longer with us. Lord Snooty has passed on. I don't know how it happened, having stopped reading the great British comic when I was, oh, about 20 and only recently come back to it. Perhaps he choked on an extra-large plate of sausages and mash, or perhaps he was lynched by art lovers irate at his attempt to sell off the ancestral collection of Titians. Continue reading...

Tracey loves Titian ... Emin holds a reproduction of Titian's Diana and Actaeon on the steps of 10 Downing Street, London. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Is the campaign to save Titian's Diana and Actaeon going terribly wrong? Pictures of Tracey Emin holding up a print of the painting outside 10 Downing Street don't suggest it's thriving. The print looks silly and kitsch, and Emin seems a daft spokesperson for the campaign. Or does she? Continue reading...

Never forget ... the Menin Gate memorial in Belgium. Photograph: Brian Harris / Rex Features

I never knew my maternal grandfather, William Davies. He saw me born but died soon afterwards. So I was never able to ask him about his experiences in the first world war - and anyway, my father says he would never reveal much. He had been a runner in the infantry on the western front. He survived, went home, worked all his life in Courtaulds. As a child I was intrigued by a porcelain figure in my nana's house of a soldier firing a machine gun. My paternal grandfather William Jones also survived because he was a skilled joiner and his mother cannily got him to apply for the newly formed naval air division, as a technician. Continue reading...

Barack Obama, hero of a new national epic. Photograph: AFP

As a famous novelist once said, American reality always trumps American fiction. For what novelist could have written a story like this week's and billed it as anything but science fiction? Not so long ago, Philip Roth (the author of that remark) published his counterfactual story The Plot Against America. The election of an African American president on a radical, world-changing, nation-saving agenda is surely just as counterfactual as his idea of an American fascist presidency. Or more so. We're into the territory of Roth's altered worlds, that he has also employed in books such as Operation Shylock and The Counterlife. We're through the looking glass. Or to put it another way, Americans have just written the first chapter of their greatest novel of all. Continue reading...

A Rothko painting in the Tate Modern exhibition. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Seeing Mark Rothko's Seagram murals - the expansive
canvases he originally painted for the walls of the Four Seasons
restaurant on the ground floor of New York's Seagram Building - in the current exhibition of his late work at Tate Modern is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As well as the Tate collection's own group of nine of these red and purple marvels, you can see works in the series lent from museums in Washington DC and Japan. The total effect of such a large group of great paintings is fascinating - almost every painting in the cycle is a masterpiece. Rothko in this, his finest hour, was painting abstract works as rewarding as the portraits of Rembrandt or the landscapes of Turner. Continue reading...

Barack Obama addressing a town hall meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

"America flips a coin", as The Simpsons put it in a classic Halloween parody of Clinton v Dole back in the 1990s. Except this time the coin will determine so much about America's relationship with the rest of the world. A country stands poised to leap in international eyes from zero to hero. And yet, this has happened before, sort of. It's truly amazing how profoundly American elections shape the culture of an era. In the two-term Clinton presidency, it was OK for the European Left to love America. I certainly went on a journey. I remember as a student in the Reagan era sitting in a police cell after a demonstration, telling jokes about the shuttle astronauts. But when I actually got to see the US they had a charismatic Democrat in the White House, we still had John Major, and the liberal east coast seemed a utopian land of coffee, conceptual art and free cable. Now a new generation of Europeans may allow themselves to recognise America's strengths. Continue reading...

'A source of magic and vitality' ... The Assumption procession in Marseille. Photograph: Patrick Valasseris/AFP/Getty Images

I don't completely understand the Richard Dawkins–atheist bus approach to life. To me, the whole point of atheism is not worrying too much about it. Campaigning against God, making an issue of unbelief, is merely producing a mirror image of religion itself. Maybe Dawkins should found an atheist church. God does not exist. However, I think human cultural history to date would have been poorer without the illusions of religion. In a completely rational world would art exist? Maybe, but only as a sort of post-Duchampian ironic plaything. Great art feeds on the same sources as god-bothering. Continue reading...

A bargain at any price: Titian's Diana and Actaeon. Photograph: Getty

Should we be put off supporting the campaign to buy Titian's Diana and Actaeon for the nation by the fact that £50 million will go to an aristocrat who inherited it through no merit of his own? The Directors of the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh who are jointly trying to raise the money felt constrained to reply to a letter in the Guardian this week that questioned handing over so much dosh to the Duke of Sutherland. Continue reading...

Byzantium at the Royal Academy, in London, is a mind-expanding exhibition. It's the kind of exhibition the Royal Academy has always done superbly, shatteringly well - the colossal blockbuster that lets you encounter the treasures of an entire civilisation in one go. Continue reading...