Anish Kapoor - Royal Academy

We commissioned Kapoor for this year's Brighton Festival, and it was a huge success, indeed the focal and talking point of the entire month. So I was looking forward to this retrospective.

Balls of steel

The RA courtyard has a huge tower of atomic, steel balls, but randomly piled to produce lots of unique reflections, not only of each other but of the buildings and viewers. As they're spheres, nothing remains of the expected perspective. All straight lines become curves. The top few blazed away in the winter sun. The only piece I've seen surpass this in the courtyard was Rodin's Gates to Hell.

Pigment piles

I like the colour rather than the forms. They seem far more intense than paint. Red, black and yellow. But this is like a predictable starter. You already know, with Kapoor, that piles of pigment are on the menu.

Mellow yellow

This huge square is painted in a uniform yellow colour but as it has a deep hollow the light gets progressively weaker and the centre darkens. What really works is getting up and close, so that your peripheral vision is flooded. It's like being in a yellow universe. In this position, as the eye has no depth cues, it's seen as a flat expanse of gradated yellows. It's like walking into colour.

Cannon of colour

A simple steel cannon is primed with pressured air, by a rather serious looking RA bod, then fired every twenty minutes. First time round, we simply saw a sorry slug drop like a slow dogshit from the end of the cannon - a misfire apparently. He reloaded and it was fine. You can see the cylindrical slug of wax move through the air then hit the back wall of the joining room. Our third shot hit the back wall high and hard. You can hear the roar of approved laughter throughout the gallery. Definitely cathartic. This was fun and the mess in the room was true chaos, an absolute cannon up the backside of the stuffy RA.

Mirror magic

Kapoor excels at mirror works and this room allows you to see yourself distorted in a thousand ways. It's fun, and surprising, to work out why you appear upside down, fatter, or in a repeated pattern across a huge concave surface. You forget that light travels only in straight lines.

Vaginal openings

The huge rust-coloured form, that filled the next room, has a vaginal opening at one end, through which one peers into the iron darkness. One then steps through some rather disappointing piles of hardened clay forms to another room with a similar red, crystalline opening and an intestinal tube coiled around behind.

Wax train

This is the centrepiece, a huge block of red wax on rails moving through three doorways across five rooms, being shaped by the doors. The building becomes the sculptor and the form is dictated by the door template and scrapings.

One great frustration is not being able to feel the stuff. You long to stick your fingers into the wax and rub the pigment. For £12, I'd have given everyone a small tub of the stuff to take home and do their own sculpture.

Turner Prize 2009

Usual weirdness in the Turner Prize rooms, but hey, that’s what these turns are all about. If they didn’t surprise, I’d be surprised.

Lucy Skaer seemed lightweight. The whale’s scull is yet another ‘watch through aperture’ experience. I get the idea that she's hiding to slow the perception of the object down, but don't see why this enhances the aesthetic of the object. I’m fresh from seeing Spymonkey perform Moby Dick (see previous review) so am getting mightily sick of seeing whales used as fodder for crap art. As for the chair and sculpture in the centre, language/chair print and book pages were trite, and made no aesthetic impression whatsoever.

YES – Richard Wright was a revelation. Painting, printing directly on to the walls, Wright “challenges the marketability of art”. His works are transitory and are usually destroyed with the surface upon which they are placed. I love this idea, that visual art becomes part of the fabric and architecture of a space. It’s art of the present, not the future. This is an artist with ideas and not just well executed work. The gold wall was a huge, beautiful image against a white background. He’s bound to win (the cards in the hall suggests he should).

Enrico David’s surreal images and sculptures are not only just plain ugly, his verbal exposition on the video was the worst type of reflective tosh. It's all very forced. If he wins, this will be my last Turner Prize visit.

Roger Hioris has a mess on the floor, a liquefied jet engine, apparently. This was interesting, but I liked his bedsit full of copper sulphate, although after seeing his engine covered in copper sulphate at the Hayward some time ago, you could say he’s playing this one out a bit.

Turner and the Masters: Tate Britain

Boat along to the Tate Britain to see the two Turner exhibitions. First Turner himself, and a comparative exhibition, pitting him against other painters. He fancied himself as an old master forgetting that one has be old, and judged, before you get the title. So, as he was so competitive, let’s have some sport.

Turner v Velde England 1 Holland 1

Turner v Rembrandt England 0 Holland 4

Turner v Wilkie England 1 Scotland 1

Turner v Raphael England 0 Italy 5

Turner v Watteau England 1 France 2

Turner v Bonington England 1 England 1

There’s some real disasters here.

Art of darkness? Tate Modern

This is impressive from the outside, as you face a huge rectangle of blackness. It is genuinely frightening, and I really did bump directly into the black, back wall. But, here’s the thing, it was a transitory and brief encounter. The place is packed with people taking photographs, looking around with their mobile light on, and generally being loud and obnoxious. So much for art bringing out the best in people, in this case it infantilised. Ian Jack’s piece on Saturday was spot on. The turbine hall has become a fairground.

It could have been so different. the piece could have been deeper and more frightening, and curated so that you're free to enjoy a personal and not a social aesthetic experience.

Spymonkey dick about

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick is like an extended Goon Show. The whole gamut of funny voices, sexual innuendo and awful puns/jokes is rolled out like a third-rate 'Carry On Whaling' script. There’s that old English favourite; the Spanish waiter voice (for Ishmael read Manuel) the rather forced clumsy oaf (Stephan Kreiss), the Barbara Windsor dolly bird (Petra Massey) and the posh bloke (Toby Park). All of this dicking around the stage like am/dram idiots is just wearing. The writing is that of a second-rate extended sketch and when one of the cast finally shout ‘There she blows!” I couldn’t wait for Ahab to sink without trace. Some of the audience seemed to be having a whale of a time, but let’s be honest, middle-class theatre goers are easily pleased these days. By the end I’d had less of a bellyache from laughing than a bellyful of this nonsense. What was the point of it all?

Brighton & Hove Council have given this lot money and they've received 100% of the Arts Council money they applied for. What's going on here?

I have a half-baked idea on this. The reason this company are so popular down here in the south east is that they're quintessentially middle-England in avoiding politics, controversy, seriousness and, to be frank art. It's like resurrecting Brian Rix and farce - all that physical theatre, puns, confusions - signifying nothing. This is why middle-England just loves the Goons, Cleese and Noises Off. They're inoffensive and unthreatening. You don't have to think.

As You Like It - Globe

Spur of the moment decision but well worth it. Touchstone was hilarious with Eddie Izzard inspired facials and asides. Jaques was just as good. His seven ages of man soliloquy was really moving and got spontaneous applause. Just read this......

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

A bit of a rom-com, as are most of his comedies, and the gender switch is very, very odd to modern eyes.

It was great to just sit back in the sun and let the language do its work. The Globe's often criticised for being too 'heritage' in outlook, but I find the performances thrilling. In fact I'd like them to be even more authentic with drinking and audience heckles. The stewards are like puritan police. I even saw them ask some girls to put their notebooks away!

The groundlings are not what they used to be - as two collapsed because of the heat and had to be carried out!

Love's Labour Lost - Globe

Second play in two days but this is a difficult play, full of tortuous wordplays and difficult to follow, which is why, I presume, it is rarely performed.

It does something quite brave - takes the piss out of schooling and teachers. They're portrayed as boors, full of themselves, producing knowledge filled students through rote learning. Nothing changes then. It's probably the best argument against the teaching of Latin in schools I've ever seen.

The Spaniard is the play's saviour, with his accent and sense of naive fun.

TOBIAS PUTRIH & MOS: Baltic Centre

Now the leaflet says, 'For this installation Putrih has used Styrofoam blocks and stack structures according to the basic rules of equilibrium and ‘maximum overhang stacking’ to produce a lightweight structure that appears on the verge of collapse.'

Now, look at this picture. Sure this huge pile of finely balanced foam blocks, looks on the verge of falling over and is delicately balanced. However, I asked the gallery girl who was sitting there whether it was all glued together, really as a joke. She said 'Yes, the whole thing is glued'. What a con! I felt like knocking the whole thing down.

A Duck for Mr Darwin: Baltic Centre

Take a bunch of artists, give them money to do something thematic, and you have a mini-evolutionary process, where some succeed, some have little or no real effect and some fail.

Charles Avery

Avery's imaginary Island has its moments, but like most people's dreams, ultimately a bit dull. EXTINCTION

Marcus Coates

Sort of comic, reversal film, where Marcus goes around town in the Galapagos dressed as a Booby bird, cracking jokes about the human species. A bit of fun, but art it is not. EXTINCTION

The tortoise film is just as bad. Why does he think the mating is futile and imperfect - that's how they got there. EXTINCTION

Dorothy Cross

Now we're getting somewhere. This film of her naked body being caressed by jellyfish in a jellyfish lake is entrancing. These barely sentient, primitive organisms, encountering our species by touch only. SURVIVAL

Mark Dion

Collector's junk on a beach - didn't provoke a single thought in my head about Darwin or evolution. EXTINCTION

Mark Fairnington

Hey, something really thoughtful, with a virtuoso touch. This life size drawing of a bred bull is finely drawn and as artificial as the real thing, a product of refined breeding, something darwin drew upon when feeling his way towards evolutionary theory. SURVIVAL

Ben Jeans Houghton

Yet another dull, derivative, room full of collected stuff. EXTINCTION

Tania Tovats

A wormery - art no. EXTINCTION

Conrad Shawcross

Interesting but irrelevant collection of balls from a river trip in a boat with a camera. EXTINCTION

All in all, in this show, art has little or nothing to add to the wonders of evolution, a truly startling and idea. A more interesting approach would have been half hte gallery devoted to the reverse proposition, that evolutionary theory has something to say about art. In the last 20 years we've had some wonderful ideas in aesthetics, based on darwinism and evoltionary psychology.

Art as cognitive training

Art, especially literature, allows you to imagine, practice and prepare for the real dangers in life.

Art as propoganda

Storytelling, literature and narrative may be a way of improving memeory and passing down useful knowledge, but it is also a way of gaining power over others.

Art as sexual selection

Look ate me, I'm an artist, and lay bare my talents therough good works. Miller and others have championed the idea that art is basically a good way to get your rocks off.

Art as evolutionary artefact

Stephen Pinker put forward this interesting idea, that art is a by-prodcut of other evolutionary useful features, such as language.

Now an exhibition that made art look at itself through evolotionary eyes would be something!

Fiona Crisp: Baltic Centre

I've always liked underground spaces; Rome's Christian Catacombs, the Paris Catacombs, caves, crypts and my favourite - the stairs down into complete darkness at Mycenae. Crisp photographs these spaces and captures their absolute stillness. The big prints allow the viewer to feel as though they're in the place and with the mine and catacombs, its the idea that the architecture is formed by removing something, not building.