Arts Reviews

I’m beginning to feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: almost the last person on Earth who hasn’t been assimilated by the evil, shapeshifting, floral pod creatures from outer space. Losing my comrade Christopher Booker the other day didn’t help. Nor did turning to the once robustly sceptical Sun newspaper this morning to find a spread on how to cut your carbon footprint and recycle. The final ‘reeeee!’ moment (fans of the movie will get the reference) will no doubt come when I next bump into Matt Ridley and he tells me: ‘We really must heed the wise things the Prince of Wales and Greta Thunberg are

Last month a painting that had been found in an attic in 2014, supposedly by Caravaggio, was put up for sale in an auction in Toulouse. The vendors must have known there was little interest, as they accepted a pre-emptive offer for an undisclosed amount. Surely it wasn’t what they were hoping for; but they will have done well enough so there’s no need to feel sorry for them. It’s just business. But what about the painting? Why does it look so different – to put it politely – from everything that is known to have come from Caravaggio’s hand? Do our eyes deceive us, or have so many esteemed

Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter Tate Modern’s survey show. And ‘Magnetic Fields’ (1969) is pretty enough: the work of this self-taught artist, now in his nineties, has rarely been so gentle, or so intuitive. But there’s a problem. ‘I would like to render [electromagnetism] visible so as to communicate its existence and make its importance known,’ Takis has written. But magnetism hides in plain sight. A certain amount of interference is necessary before it will reveal itself. Does the interference matter? Does the fact that gallery assistants have to activate this work every ten minutes

The art-history books will tell you that sometime around 1912, Picasso invented collage, or, actually, perhaps it was Braque. What they mean is that sometime around 1912 a man of sufficient standing took up a technique that had been quietly practised in largely domestic spheres by a largely female army of amateurs, and applied it in his own work. Cue the universal astonishment of observers who pretended they had never seen such a thing before. This narrative has been recycled ever since, assuring us that the collage techniques that shaped the language of dada, surrealism and all the other isms that made up modernism, as well as pop art and

The selfie is, of course, a major, and to me mysterious, phenomenon of our age. The sheer indefatigability of selfie-takers, not to mention their number, is amazing. Recently, I stayed in an apartment not far from the Trevi Fountain in Rome — a selfie-magnet so powerful that not only was it surrounded by a dense crowd during daylight hours, but a small, determined knot could still be spotted late at night, doggedly snapping away in the dark under a steady drizzle. This global fixation adds an extra interest to the retrospective of work by Cindy Sherman at the National Portrait Gallery. She has been making pictures of herself, and little