Sam Taylor-Wood, now a fixture at glamorous London art-world parties, came from humble beginnings. She grew up on a Peabody estate and then a hippie commune in Crowborough, East Sussex, where the inhabitants wore orange robes and the cats ate out of the chip pan. Her biker father abandoned her mother, who disappeared shortly afterwards; Taylor-Wood glimpsed her in a house down the road, and only then realised she had [...]

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint . . . the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.

This famed description from the beginning of Conrad's Heart [...]

With his pimento-shaped face, reminiscent of an overstuffed hamster, Francis Bacon appears in photos taken by his contemporaries and in a famous portrait by his friend Lucian Freud - stolen in 1988 never to be seen again - as one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century. Doyen of Soho drinking clubs, he led a reprobate life that has been well documented, from an Anglo-Irish childhood, with a [...]

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton wrote about the linguistic similarity between Samuel Beckett and Theodor Adorno. "What is most drastically impoverished in Beckett is language itself," he wrote. "Adorno's style reveals a similar austerity as each phrase is forced to work overtime to earn its keep . . . Like Beckett's, Adorno's is a language rammed up against silence, a set of guerrilla [...]

For those of a certain age, Klimt's The Kiss was the must-have student poster. All that lan guor ous passion, all those Technicolour Dream coats. It went along with loons and long hair, and looked down silently on countless messy college copulations. It became so ubiquitous that it stopped being a painting and became simply an inexpensive way to cheer up grotty digs.

Now Tate Liverpool is mounting "Gustav Klimt: [...]

The big question in art is: "Is it art?" Is an outsized Brillo box or a pickled shark art? Ever since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp's porcelain urinal, scrawled with the pseudonym "R Mutt", was submitted to the Society for Independent Artists in New York (and rejected) for exhibition as Fountain, the cognoscenti have considered such objects as art. The critic Harold Rosenberg called such works "anxious objects". What artists made [...]

What is the point and purpose of public art? Once, it was clear: you were a general or an admiral and if you won a big enough victory you got a bronze statue stuck on a plinth. Or, if it was a very big victory against those dastardly neighbours, the French, you would even get a 151-foot granite column in Trafalgar Square. Nationalism was the point, or, in the case [...]

Surviving into old age is a good career move for a creative woman. Even if she has been ignored during her middle years, she might be "discovered" if she hangs on in there. Never mind that she has been there all along just getting on with it. Suddenly the world will be amazed that she is not only not dribbling in a corner, but actually making new and challenging work. [...]

If it's deep and meaningful that pushes your button, Martin Maloney's work won't be for you. But, of course, that's not what he's after. Surface, not depth, is what attracts this one-time Goldsmiths student and member of the Britart pack. Popular culture, advertising and soaps are what turn him on. It was through Charles Saatchi's 1997 "Sensation", which showcased the work of the Young British Artists, and "New Neurotic Realism" [...]

The poetics of space and the articulation of its geometry are the essence of Nigel Hall's work. Now, a major exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is reassessing his output over 40 years with an extensive survey of both his sculpture and his works on paper.

In his practice as a sculptor, Hall has been primarily concerned, through his execution of elegant and thoughtful lines, with enclosing and occupying space in [...]