Cultural Capital: Art

As an Italian, I found it an uplifting experience to hear Michelangelo Buonarroti's poems read, in his own language, at the exhibition "Michelangelo's Dream", recently opened at the Courtauld Gallery.

Love, beauty and artistic genius are on display in what the Telegraph has called a "curatorial and scholarly triumph". For the first time, Buonarroti's complex drawing Il sogno ("The Dream") is being shown alongside the so-called "presentation drawings", ... read more

Work by artists from the Indian subcontinent is on display at the Saatchi Gallery in "The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today" until early summer. The show reflects the collector Charles Saatchi's recent interest in the global art scene.

If not everything is worth the visit (for example, a confusing wire-filled robot installation and an ugly stuffed camel in an oversized suitcase recall more a children's play area than the ... read more

A question: what links the following three individuals? Hans Ulrich Obrist. Daniel Birnbaum. Matthew Higgs. I'll give you a clue, it's what all three do for a living. On the tip of your tongue, right? I'll put you out of your misery: they're curators. The three most influential curators in the world, in fact, according to Art Review's 2009 "Power 100" list.

Obrist,"co-director of exhibitions" at the Serpentine ... read more

Margaret Drabble wrote a couple of weeks ago in the NS about Van Gogh's letters, ahead of "The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters", a major exhibition just opened at the Royal Academy in London. Here, our art blogger Anna Maria Di Brina looks more closely at the relationship between that correspondence and the paintings on display at the RA.

More than 35 original letters, mostly addressed ... read more

Is it compassion, or sorrow, or repulsion we see in the heavy glance that brave David casts on the severed head of Goliath in Caravaggio's painting David with the Head of Goliath (1610), on show in the exhibition "Caravaggio Bacon" at the Borghese Gallery in Rome? This is one of the last paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the Italian master who will be celebrated across the world ... read more

Imagine that everyone around you is suddenly and magically turned into a wax statue. You're able to do things you wouldn't normally dream of doing -- peering closely at the faces of passers-by, for example. The Hoerengracht, an installation on show at the National Gallery in London, which features the reconstruction of a chunk of Amsterdam's red-light district (the title translates as "The Whores' Canal", and is formed ... read more

Congratulations to the NS contributor William Wiles for unearthing a fascinating copy of the Observer magazine from 1989. It imagines what the London of 2010 might look like: trams (check), the "Thatcher Museum of Commerce" at Bankside (almost -- except we call it Tate Modern) and "crystalline telecommunications spires" (er, not quite).

Read all about it on Will's own blog.

If you're still in a reflective mood after that, make ... read more

Is it possible to interact fully with an artwork, whatever your sensory and physical abilities and whatever the complexity of the work? "The Roads of Art through Emotions", an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, tries to answer this question. The show, designed specifically for a disabled public, is meant to facilitate a complete emotional immersion -- visual, tactile and aural -- in artworks drawn ... read more

A large, parasite-like form has appeared on the façade of 6 Burlington Gardens, London. It is the installation CO2morrow, by the artists Marcos Lutyens and Alessandro Marianantoni, for the exhibition "Earth: Art of a Changing World", which has just opened at the Royal Academy of Arts. The show presents the creative responses of 35 international artists to the pressing issue of climate change, just days before the big ... read more

On a dark road, a man meets a sinister figure who warns him to turn back, because "things get very serious if you carry on down this road". This is Damien Hirst explaining to the late Gordon Burn the meaning behind Turn Away from Me, which is included in his new exhibition "Nothing Matters" at White Cube. A feebly painted ghost raises its hand, which appears to float ... read more

What would you do for the following? A melting tehnicholor landscape. A telephone earpiece with tiny squawking birds waiting to ravage the caller's ear. A romantic message about the memories we carry in our souls spelt out in solar panel powered lightbulbs. Three box-lit lit close-ups of an anus perhaps?  This is the concept behind Art Barter, an exhibition that is the lovechild of two young curators ... read more

There is something of the rugged craftsman in some of the photographs of the young Frank Auerbach included in the catalogue for an exhibition now showing at the Courtauld Gallery, "Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62". We see the artist's overalls spotted with paint, surrounded by buckets, easels and canvases, sparse pencil sketches pinned on the walls. The photographs were taken in the early Sixties, when Auerbach, a Jewish ... read more