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‘Ai Weiwei: According to What?’

Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.

A video artist who uses YouTube clips, a print-maker and an artist who pairs spoken word with photography are among this year's Turner Prize nominees.

Fiction, which I believe suffers most from modern readership, is by definition not factual. It may be about the real world and it may try to illuminate some facts about the real world or how real people behave in it or, as is so often the case in modern literature, it may also be about the impossibility of portraying any such reality since the very nature of art is artifice. Primarily, however, fiction (and biography, essay, history, memoir only perhaps to a lesser degree) is a creative act, an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.

ostering innovation and helping people to think analytically,

Called simply Bronze, it celebrates a metal so important it has its own age of history attached to it, and so responsive to the artist's skill that it breathes life into gods, humans, mythological creatures and animals with equal success.

It is remarkable to think that had Bronze been mounted say 15 years ago, the portrait of the past that it delivered would have been subtly different. History is very far from a done deal.

The first page of my notebook holds a column of place names, some cuneiform letters taken from a tomb in the British Library and a collection of oddly-named English meadow flowers (wet-the-bed, yellow rattle, adder's tongue fern).

Most people, he said, think art and science are two different worlds. “I used to think they were very separate, but they’re actually very similar. You have to be creative and you have to be observant.”

Contemplating such works, we can think in two modes at once, the aesthetic and the historical-political—generally a wise way to navigate the labyrinth of art. To debate whether politics is always present or always absent is to play a parlor game irrelevant to the complex, ever-shifting reality in which both artists and their audiences reside.

There is much in Wagner that has nothing to do with Hitler; there is much in Wagner that contradicts Hitler. That said, I would never dream of suggesting that Wagner’s operas should be detached absolutely and utterly from politics. It cannot be done; it can never be done.

Many concert-goers are often frustrated by the sound of people coughing during classical music performances. These coughers have now become the subject of an academic paper concerning "the economics of concert etiquette", which analyses a stark fact: people appear to cough more in concerts than in they do in normal life. The German economist Andreas Wagener told the Today programme: "The statistics indicate people cough during concerts twice as much as they do in normal life." Concert pianist Susan Tomes said: "I certainly do notice it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that people have gotten so used to hearing music amplified. "Many types of music are so loud, but classical music is not, and when you go to a classical concert, you forget how quiet acoustic instruments are." First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme on Monday 28 January 2012.

Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. It’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.