If the crowds at the Tate's latest Turner Prize show are anything to go by, contemporary art is as popular as ever. And yet, if you regularly visit such exhibitions and bother to read the catalogues and blurbs that accompany the works, you will be all too familiar with the feeling of incomprehension. The text often reads something like this: "The work on display confronts the viewer with opacity, liminality [...]

Henri Cartier-Bresson has remarked that he liked taking photographs in England because its people played out their social roles with emphasis, as if they were actors on stage. There are many characteristics of Martin Parr's photography that distinguish it from Cartier-Bresson's - vulgar saturated colour versus refined monochrome, the snatching of a typical (even dull) moment from time versus the revelatory decisive moment - yet the English still perform stalwartly [...]

A scene in the film Fight Club is likely to set the blood of any artist or critic racing, in fervent approval or revulsion. In it, the pugilist rebels dynamite the moorings of an ugly, spherical piece of corporate sculpture, sending it rolling down a long cascade to crash through the window of some fast-food chain. That oscillation of feeling may depend on what viewers think is being attacked, for [...]

Bjarne Melgaard, a Scandinavian artist whose work deals with gay sexuality, took a trip to Tahiti and masturbated over Gauguin's grave. The spectre of modernism haunts Scandinavia and requires continual exorcism. Two exhibitions currently showing in Denmark, "Vision and Reality: conceptions of the 20th century" and "Organising Freedom: Nordic art of the 1990s", illuminate opposing aspects of art's relationship to the near and distant past.

The Louisiana Museum of Modern [...]

At "Protest and Survive", an exhibition about politics and contemporary art currently at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Thomas Hirschhorn has built a makeshift bridge over a narrow alley, linking the gallery and the anarchist Freedom Bookshop. It is an unnerving experience to tread on its slightly yielding surface (the bridge appears to be made of cardboard held together with masking tape), but stranger still is the contrast between the [...]