One of the greatest reports the spoof newspaper the Onion ever produced was about the moon landings. "Holy shit," the headline screamed. "Man Walks On Fucking Moon". Underneath, the story informed us that Neil Armstrong's first words on touching the lunar surface were "Holy living fuck!"

As well as being funny, this pointed to a truth: what else does landing on the moon boil down to? I experienced a version of those feelings myself last week, looking at new photographs beamed back from the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter satellite. I was transfixed. I don't think I've seen images more beautiful and affecting for a long time.

One shot, from Mars's north pole, shows an ice formation two miles thick: colossal grey-white slabs of frozen carbon dioxide shelving irregularly, their vertical faces powdered with rust by the Martian wind. Another shows linear dunes like planetary corduroy. There is an impact crater, serrated at its edges, bowl-smooth within, a honeycomb pattern deep in its base like something mycelial, or the surface of tripe.

Elsewhere there are what appear to be vertical mineral formations bristling from the lines of ridges, like stands of trees; in fact, they are the tracks of debris released by melting ice, tumbling down the dunes. Another image shows salt flats ? perhaps miles across, yet looking like close-up photographs of salt-crystals. A sand dune in Proctor Crater has the sinuous geometry of a Bridget Riley, and is surrounded by a pattern of ripple-textures like the marks left when you pull a piece of paper off the surface of thick paint. It has been coloured steel-blue.

Then there are the moons: Phobos, photographed from no further away than the distance between London and New Delhi, grey-white, like a knob of bone; or Deimos, a pebble in space only a few miles across, with every intricate little pockmark and scar visible.

These are tens of millions of miles away from earth. You feel it shouldn't be possible to see these things. What is it that makes them so powerful? As images alone they have an impersonal beauty, a compelling stillness and strangeness. Some of them look a lot like abstract art, even though they are representative: a compilation of terabits of data sent back by the HiRise (High Resolution Imagine Science Experiment) telescope, translated into the visible spectrum.

Part of their power is, I think, to do with scale. Thanks in part to the computer colouring and the almost unnatural-seeming level of resolution, many of these photographs look like images from electron microscopy. The surface of a moth's wing suddenly looks like the surface of a planet; the surface of a planet looks like a moth's wing. Look at these photographs of Mars, and you often can't tell if you're looking at miles, or metres, or microns. It's a scale with nothing human to anchor it. It suggests an unsettling kinship between the alienness of both the very tiny and the very large.

Time, as well as physical scale, plays a part. The poet Elizabeth Bishop used to say that when she was miserable, as she frequently was, she felt comforted by thinking about things in terms of geological time. There's a special kind of shiver in the idea that these steppes of frozen CO₂ were there, and that these curved dunes were shifting millions of years before humans existed ? just as there is in knowing that the night sky is punctuated with the light from dead stars.

But these images are especially potent because we know they are from Mars. Outer space now holds a place in the collective imagination ? and in our art and literature ? that, in previous centuries, was held by the sea: a repository of everything that is threatening and enticing and other. Outer space is the locus, as the sea was for island people writing Anglo-Saxon poems, of the idea of a special sort of loneliness, a confrontation with the sublime.

Mars, especially among the planets, has taken the place of the mythic island: of Ultima Thule. Carl Sagan once said that Mars was "a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears". This is the Mars not of comical little green men, but of Ray Bradbury's haunting stories ? Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, for instance. It's the Mars Doctor Manhattan visits when he leaves Earth in Watchmen. It's the Mars, emotionally, of the chorus in David Bowie's Life on Mars.

These photographs inspire not only awe and wonder, but also a sort of longing. None of us alive at this moment ? possibly no human ever ? will see these landscapes with our own eyes. And yet here are the pictures. For me, they have the same effect as great paintings or photographs ? a feeling that something impossible has been made present, while remaining just out of reach. That a man and a woman are standing in a room that has never existed, or that a moment in time, irretrievably lost, is just the other side of a pane of glass. It comforts and it saddens. Holy shit, indeed.

For more photographs, go to guardian.co.uk/science/space

The artist Jacques-Louis David was no pacifist. But his epic painting of the Spartans' last stand doesn't merely glorify war

A war leader sits frozen at the heart of a bristling crowd of soldiers in Jacques-Louis David's daunting canvas Leonidas at Thermopylae, a battle painting so vast that it would only inspire numbed amazement, were it not for the figure of the Spartan king who gazes straight out of the drama at you, catching your eye, leading you into the terror and pity of the moment.

That moment is the last stand of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, when the army of this warlike Greek state sacrificed itself to slow the Persian advance through a narrow mountain pass. The Spartans did not believe in retreat. Their battlefield memorial recorded their honour:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.

David was no pacifist. In the late 18th century, this heroically minded French artist painted scenes from Roman history, whose images of sacrifice for the fatherland helped to create the mentality of the French revolution. During the revolutionary years, he was a Jacobin and mourned the murderous zealot Marat. He went on to become Napoleon's official artist and ? together with his pupils and followers, including Baron Gros ? to commemorate the emperor's conquests and glorify his reign.

But David's vision of Thermopylae is no superficial glorification of war. As the Spartan heroes prepare to lay down their lives, their king Leonidas stops and stares into space, arrested by thought. Is the painting a monument to doubt? It seems that Leonidas must be wondering if he has made the right decision, or if the laws of Sparta are correct. Or is he thinking of the glory that will be theirs on the pages of history? For Thermopylae is an undying memory.

The painting was completed, after many years' work, in 1814, the year of Napoleon's abdication. It gives powerful expression to a mood of dignified self-knowledge, of the soldier's sorrow.

But it is not a pacifist painting. Soon Napoleon would be back, and his followers would head for Waterloo to sacrifice themselves like Spartans.

War is one of the enduring themes of art. But we fail to understand its representations if we try to batter them into our own ideology. Since Picasso's Guernica, all respectable war art has been anti-war art; but in earlier history, for a painter like David, or for the creators of the Bayeux tapestry, battle inspired more complex emotions ? or more honest ones.

Cinema is still truthful about war; it sees it as a good story as well as a terrible reality. History painters in the past shared that ambivalence. It is both the heroism and horror of war that Leonidas contemplates on the field of his lost battle.

It looks like a five-star-hotel, but Norman Foster's Circle hospital in Bath could revolutionise patient care

"We wanted to put hospitality into hospitals" says Ali Parsa, the eloquent, confident managing partner of health company Circle, and "a night in a hospital costs more than in a five-star hotel, so why shouldn't people get a similar experience?" Indeed, the first reaction on entering Circle's new hospital outside Bath is that you've entered a hotel by mistake. There's a cheery brown-uniformed concierge, a scent of non-hospital food, and a clean-lined, light-filled, stone-paved modern interior with large cylinders of gauzy cloth hanging, like giant lamp shades, from the ceiling.

The last space I saw like this was the lobby of the Shore Club hotel on Miami Beach, also hung with gauzy cylinders (and whose bedrooms, as it happens, were so relentlessly minimal that they resembled those in a sanatorium). It's a comparison that would make Parsa happy. Circle's aim, according to one of his medical partners, is to "give people good health, not an experience of illness".

In most cities, if you look for the most lumpen, ungainly, charmless building, hospitals from the 1960s and 1970s will be near the top of the list. Gartnavel general in Glasgow, the Royal Liverpool, Addenbrooke's in Cambridge, the Royal Free and Guy's in London, to name a random few, all follow the same type. They are silos for the sick; multi-level garages for parking the unwell. Inside they are more like the interiors of aircraft carriers, vast unwindowed complexes linked by bewildering networks of corridors. You might have thought some decency and dignity would be suited to places where people are born and die, but the makers of these hospitals didn't seem to agree.

Places supposed to make you feel better start off by making you feel worse, and there are reasons, or excuses, for this. It's hard to justify a pound spent on an architectural nicety that might otherwise go on medical equipment, and hospital design is framed by guidelines about hygiene and efficiency to a greater degree than almost any other building type. If there were a contest for budget between aesthetics and saving lives, saving lives would naturally win, and never mind that administrative bureaucracy is rarely presented with the same challenge.

Yet, according to another Circle medical partner, Jonathan Boulton, people are healthier if they are relaxed. Their heart rate is lower, he says, they bleed less in operations, require less aggressive anaesthetisation, and are more likely to respond well to their treatment: "All the really bad outcomes tend to come with anxious patients." Good design can contribute to people feeling relaxed. For this reason, Circle hired Foster & Partners to design their Bath hospital, and are getting other celebrated architects, including the practices of Richard Rogers and Michael Hopkins, to design other hospitals now in the pipeline.

Circle is a business, the first of its kind, in which medical staff are partners, in order to "give them more control". It is planning other centres in places including Plymouth, Reading and Edinburgh. Its income comes mainly from private patients, either on insurance schemes or paying for themselves, but it also treats National Health patients, and expects to do so more.

Ali Parsa is a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs, and his approach is bracingly business-like ? image consultants were brought in to create the Circle brand, "a sign of inclusion, continuity and perfection". The Bath hospital is located, practically but unsentimentally, in a business park, next to Audi and Mercedes Benz dealerships, albeit on the edge of rolling countryside.

Circle's aims include "no compromise on clinical outcome", a determination to "change how hospitals are run from the bottom up", and to be "relentless about changing patients' experience". So doctors were allowed to specify exactly the equipment they thought best, and sophisticated systems were installed for managing patient information and the supply of drugs. A chef was brought in from the Michelin-starred country house-hotel and spa, Lucknam Park.

And the gigantic, award-laden practice created by Norman Foster was asked to design their very first hospital building. In recent years, the Foster company has been making headlines with extravagant blooms, like a project in Moscow seemingly made out of multi-storey orange segments, but the Circle commission brought them back to more strait-laced principles of 20 years ago.

The important things, according to Foster partner Spencer de Grey, are "the clarity of the basic diagram, generous space, easy orientation, natural light and natural materials". Corridors were abolished, where possible, and signs kept to a minimum, as the building is sufficiently clear for people to find their way about without them. Much of the floor is in oak, the architects having demonstrated that it would be no less hygienic than the more conventional lino. Lavender grows outside bedroom windows. Operating theatres, usually windowless, are here day-lit.

The impressive thing is that the building does exactly what its makers say it does. It provides obviously good things that somehow get missed out of other hospitals. If we want our surgeons to be wakeful and happy, which I think we do, it can only help if they can see clouds and sky and sunshine when they take a break. And it can only be beneficial if patients are calm rather than bewildered on arrival.

We have learned to be wary of bankers bearing magic potions, but in Parsa's case there is no catch. Personally, I find the relentlessness of Circle's management-speak unnerving, but when they call their Bath building "one of the finest hospitals in Britain", they're right. I also think the idea of a humane architecture could be taken much further ? there's still something mechanistic about the way it delivers its good things of light, nature and clarity ? but it is still a triumph to have these good things at all.

The government is embarked on a many-billion-pound programme of rebuilding hospitals, under its little-loved private finance initiative. There is every reason to believe it will deliver the same kind of clunkers, with updated styling, that were built over a generation ago. The important question is whether the principles of Circle Bath can be applied to much bigger hospitals, in the less charmed world of the National Health Service.

Parsa and de Grey both insist that they can. They say that they worked to a budget similar to those of NHS hospitals, and that future buildings will be cheaper now they've learned from the experience of their first hospital. They say the principles of their Bath design can be adapted to bigger buildings, and even that the climate of the NHS is changing in favour of their approach. I hope they're right, and that someone in the National Health Service is paying attention.

Charlie Parker lived hard, played hard, died young. Now an uncanny sculpture of him in his last months has resurfaced. Richard Williams on a story of jazz, art and devotion

The last time Julie Macdonald saw Charlie Parker, he was catching a flight home from Los Angeles to New York for the funeral of his three-year-old daughter, Pree, who had died in hospital in the early hours of 6 March, 1954 after a long illness. Two nights earlier, Parker had been fired, for the second time in a week, by the owner of the Tiffany Club in Hollywood after behaving erratically and arguing with the management. He was staying at the Pasadena home of Macdonald, a sculptor, when he received the news of Pree's death.

His immediate reaction, in Macdonald's recollection, was to drink heavily and send a series of increasingly desperate telegrams to his wife, Chan. The fourth and last read: MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD. I KNOW IT. I WILL BE THERE AS QUICK AS I CAN. IT IS VERY NICE TO BE OUT HERE. PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VERY NICE TO ME OUT HERE. I AM COMING IN RIGHT AWAY TAKE IT EASY. LET ME BE THE FIRST ONE TO APPROACH YOU. I AM YOUR HUSBAND. SINCERELY, CHARLIE PARKER. Then he poured a bottle of scotch down the toilet, gave away his remaining supply of heroin, and Macdonald drove him to the airport.

Some time later, Macdonald began work on a sculpture of Parker's head, for which she had been making preparatory sketches during his visits. Then 28 (five years younger than Parker), she was the daughter of an impressionist painter and had studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in LA. She had met Parker during one of his earlier visits to California, probably in 1952. It seems likely that they were a part of a gathering of artists, intellectuals and scenemakers who met at the Altadena ranch of the Turkish-born painter and sculptor Jirayr Zorthian in July that year, a short drive from Macdonald's home. Zorthian's guests had indulged in a collective striptease while Parker played; a surviving home recording of the event reveals the sound of the saxophonist ? apparently fully clothed, despite voluble entreaties ? playing Embraceable You, the Gershwin ballad emerging above the noises of ribaldry. At any rate, Parker and Macdonald became close friends and enjoyed long conversations as she took him to art shows around Los Angeles.

After leaving to bury his child that Sunday morning in 1954, Parker would never return to California. He had only 12 months left to live, a year in which he and Chan attempted without success to create a quieter life for their family outside the city; in which his drinking worsened; in which he almost succeeded in killing himself by swallowing iodine; in which he committed himself to the psychiatric ward at New York's Bellevue hospital; and in which he made his last recordings and played his final gigs, before dying of an accumulation of symptoms while watching television in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Within days his followers were scrawling "Bird Lives!" on Manhattan walls.

Stravinsky and a heroin habit

When William Dickson, a retired architect living in Edinburgh, got in touch last month to tell me that he was the owner of a stone head of Charlie Parker, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It had to be Macdonald's carving, which appeared on the cover of Down Beat magazine in 1965, an issue that commemorated the 10th anniversary of the saxophonist's death. That black-and-white photograph had showed the head to be a work of great distinction, capturing the contradictory elements of Parker's character. Macdonald carved a face which could be that of a child or an old man, simultaneously illuminated by innocence and exuding wisdom. Once seen, even in a reproduction, it was not easily forgotten. And here it was, 5,000 miles and 55 years from its point of origin, with a back-story that demanded to be told.

A few years after Parker's death, in a brief memoir of their relationship, Macdonald wrote warmly of his "ability to perceive" and of an intellect which, although untrained, was "prodigious". "He listened to Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Bartók; looked at art from Egyptian sculpture to Picasso with the same intensity; and he remembered! Bird's memory was uncanny. With that combination of perception and memory he translated experience through his horn. He caught the pulse of our times, the pressure, confusion and complexity, and more: sadness, sweetness and love."

That complexity is distilled in her rendering of Parker's head. Carved out of pale, lightly striated sandstone from a nearby Pasadena quarry, it is a little less than twice life-size, weighs 275lb, and is pinned to a cube of polished black granite. Its individual features ? the sightless eyes, the shapely nose, the slightly pursed mouth, the neat ears ? are finely executed. The back of the head, covered with carefully worked hair, is distended like that of a newborn baby. It bears a striking resemblance both to an Egyptian head of the 15th dynasty, which Macdonald had showed Parker, and to the carvings made by the Yoruba people of West Africa between the 14th and 16th century, currently on show at the British Museum.

Parker was capable of extremes of behaviour and appearance. Emerging from a midwestern background of no particular distinction, he became the second of jazz's great instrumental soloists (after Louis Armstrong) to change the way music was played, engendering a cult which endures more than half a century after his death, continually refuelled by what the American critic Gary Giddins called "the relentless energy, the uncorrupted humanity of his music".

A man of vast and undiscriminating physical appetites, Parker could quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and planned to study composition with Edgard Varèse. Unreliable in every aspect of his life except the quality of his playing, he attempted to dissuade younger musicians from copying his heroin habit, but succeeded only in fostering a generation of imitators who thought that living the way he did would help them play like him, too ? before discovering that no one could do that. The physician who signed his death certificate estimated his age to be between 50 and 60 (he was 34).

From LA to Edinburgh

Macdonald made at least one other sculpture of Parker, a full-length figure carved from lignum vitae, a dark hardwood. On 1 March, 1955, two weeks before his death, she wrote to jazz critic and historian Marshall Stearns mentioning a possible sale of the wood figure and offering to have it transported for viewing to the New York studio of the blind pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano. "I trust the price mentioned did not discourage you," she wrote, adding a poignant postscript: "I would naturally be happy beyond words for Bird to see the carving if at all possible." According to Peter Ind, the British bass player who lived in New York in the 1950s, studying and playing with Tristano, the piece remained in the East 32nd Street studio for some time, given "pride of place".

The stone head remained in Macdonald's keeping until 1961, by which time the wood figure had passed into the possession of Robert Reisner, a New Yorker who had promoted Parker during the last phase of the saxophonist's life. Reisner was compiling stories for a book titled Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, and Macdonald was among his contributors. When she indicated an interest in selling the stone head, Reisner put her in touch with another jazz fan, a wealthy Californian named George E Geisler. "It turned out," Geisler later remembered, "that she had a chance to get a good deal on a Ferrari, and could use the money." The piece remained in Geisler's ownership for four decades.

Macdonald went on to create around 400 other works, including many pieces based on animal figures. Her stone rendering of The Three Graces was installed outside the Downtown YMCA in LA, and she exhibited at the Pasadena Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum, and the LA County Museum of Art. She married twice and had two children; but by the end of the 1970s she was heavily addicted to cocaine and died of cancer in 1982, aged 55.

When Geisler began to disperse his possessions in 2000, Macdonald's stone head was sold to one of the world's leading experts on Parker memorabilia. From there it passed into the hands of Dickson, who had returned to his native Edinburgh after retiring from his London practice several years earlier. Now 67, Dickson works as a photographer, surrounded by his own sizeable collection of material ? records, concert posters, books, night-club handbills ? from jazz's post-war era, with Macdonald's majestically resonant work as its centrepiece.

Never shown to the public, the head has been seen only three times in photographic reproductions since it took shape: first in 1962 as an illustration in Reisner's book, then on the cover of Down Beat, and finally in Esquire's World of Jazz book in 1975. Dickson believes it deserves to be seen by a wider public but is uncertain of its appeal and value to institutions ? or, indeed, what sort of institution would guarantee it an appropriate setting.

Meanwhile, it sits in the unlikely surroundings of an Edinburgh studio, radiating its subject's unique charisma, a direct physical link with one of modern music's most remarkable figures.

Now 63, the grande dame of 1970s performance art is spending three months in silent vigil at at New York's Moma alongside a major new retrospective of her work. James Westcott sits down to see if he can hold her gaze

Last week, the 63-year-old queen of performance art Marina Abramovi?, dressed in a flowing dark-blue dress, and looking extremely pale, sat down at a small table in the towering atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She will be there, motionless and silent, every day during museum opening hours for the next three months. This is the duration of her retrospective, The Artist Is Present ? the first career survey Moma has ever given to a performance artist ? which is taking place concurrently up on the sixth floor. In the atrium, Abramovi? is making the title of her exhibition literal. And members of the public can share in her presence by sitting in the empty chair opposite her and engaging in silent eye contact for as long as they want, or as long as they can.

"I have to be like a mountain," the artist told me a couple of days before going into her "big silence" for the performance. She will go home every evening when the museum closes, but, in order to sustain her meditative state, she will not speak until 31 May. "The atrium is such a restless place, full of people passing through. The acoustics are terrible ? it's too big, too noisy. It's like a tornado. I try to play the stillness in the middle."

While I was talking to her, Abramovi? was anything but still. Her habitual anxiety and jovial hyperactivity ? so different to the formidable power and placidity she has demonstrated in 40 years of extreme acts of endurance ? were in overdrive. "People don't realise it is pure hell sitting so long," she said in her thick Serbian accent, while fidgeting. Cramps will set in after an hour or so. Her bum will begin to hurt. But she will ride out the pain. "The concept of failure never enters my mind," she insists. To insure against it, a masseuse, a nutritionist and a personal trainer will visit her apartment before and after each day's work.

My meeting with the artist was the first time I had seen her in a year, in which time I had finished writing her biography. Her verdict on the book, now that it's finally out (after three years of intensive interviews and research, and four years before that spent working as her assistant, a position I quit in order to start writing) was this: "I will never let anyone write my biography again." We both laughed, even though she was deadly serious. I began dreading the inevitable moment when I would sit opposite her at the table a few days later.

But Abramovi?'s conclusion was also validating: the book was always meant to be both intimate and critical, and it was not written at her behest, or subject to her approval. However, it did rely on her total co-operation. I came to think that the process of writing the book was like her 1974 performance Rhythm 0, in which she stood totally passive for six hours while members of the public were allowed to do whatever they wanted to her. Chains, feathers, a Polaroid camera, olive oil, razor blades, an axe, a rose, a bullet and a gun were among the objects set out on a table nearby. She surrendered control of her biography to me without knowing what the result would be; she simply had to trust that I would not put the gun to her neck, as someone did in Rhythm 0.

Before queueing to sit opposite Abramovi? on the opening night of the performance, I checked out the retrospective. It's a cacophonous, mercifully unpious treatment of her often ultra-serious work. It opens with videos, photographs and objects relating to her first performances in the early 1970s. In these, the svelte and self-conscious young artist performed acts such as stabbing knives repeatedly in the gaps between her splayed fingers, often missing and stabbing her hand instead (Rhythm 10, 1973); lying down in the (empty) middle of a burning five-pointed star, symbolic not only of the occult but of communism in her native Yugoslavia (Rhythm 5, 1974); and, in 1976, brushing her hair with increasing violence while repeating the mantra: "Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful." Abramovi?, always obsessed with her physical appearance, was probably not being that ironic.

Why did she do such things? I later came to think of them as the artist's revenge against the givenness of life. Growing up under dictator Jospi Broz Tito and the domestic regime of a militaristic mother, body art was a way for Abramovi? to create rules even more extreme than the ones she found herself subjected to. In that way she could demonstrate a different kind of freedom. Her performances were also irrepressible expressions of her natural theatrical bent, and her craving for attention and devotion. It's impossible to disentangle the narcissism from the public service in her work; the diva from the high priestess.

At Moma, most of Abramovi?'s work (which includes live performance pieces as well as documentation) is taken from her 1976?1988 collaboration in love and art with the German artist Ulay, here remade by a troupe of devoted young artists. A couple stare and point at each other without moving (a remake of 1977's Point of Contact), another motionless couple sit back-to-back with their hair braided together (Relation in Time, 1977), and another two stand and face each other naked in a doorway (Imponderabilia, 1977). You can pass between them, but Moma has neutered the confrontation of the original by placing the performers so far apart that you barely brush against them.

But there's a bigger problem than Moma's institutional prudishness: these re-performances cannot invoke the conditions ? the audacity, trauma and charisma ? of the original pieces. Abramovi?'s work is inseparable from her and Ulay's history and magnetism. The pieces seen here seem to sap the originals of their unpredictability and strangeness.

The Ulay phase of the retrospective includes photos of Nightsea Crossing, which is Abramovi?'s inspiration for this three-month-long sitting. In the 1980s, she and Ulay sat opposite each other, locked in eye contact and without moving, for a total of 90 (non-consecutive) days in museums around the world. If, in the first part of her career, she was masochistically confronting herself, and in the middle part she was confronting Ulay; since 1988, she has been directly confronting the public, though with an emphasis on physical presence rather than pain. The House With Ocean View (2002) is another prototype of her new performance in the atrium: the artist lived for 12 days without eating or speaking on three raised platforms in a gallery; her only nourishment was sustained eye contact with members of the audience.

So there is an irresistible force of historic logic behind what's going on in the atrium. And history revisited Abramovi? on the opening night, as a parade of fellow performance artists sat with her: Tehching Hsieh (the undisputed king of endurance, legendary for his one-year performances in the 1980s), the Austrian feminist (and friend of Marina's) Valie Export, and Joan Jonas, perhaps the only artist of Abramovi?'s generation to continue with performance art after the 1970s.

In between each of these sitters, Abramovi? looked down and closed her eyes, resetting her gaze and gathering energy. When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramovi? immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay's calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl ? smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramovi?'s cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene ? as Abramovi?, of course, was well aware.

As a steady stream of people sat down opposite Abramovi?, it became clear that she was trying to engage with them all on a personal level, mirroring their posture and the varying intensity of their gaze. She was being anything but a mountain ? and her frailty made an already difficult performance even more exhausting. But the apparent nightmare of the piece is an illusion: what could be better than three months of sustained eye contact with a public hungry for connection? What more fundamental human activity could there be?

After 90 minutes of queueing on the opening night, it was finally my turn to sit opposite the artist. I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain. After about 10 minutes, I started to relish our unspoken dialogue. Then, suddenly and involuntarily, my head dropped. It was as if Abramovi? had sent me a laser beam, and the moment was over.

Website showcases furniture designs and holds public votes with the most popular going into production and voters receiving a discount, in a move described as 'me-tailing' by investor Brent Hoberman

Investors including Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch have pumped £2.5m into a new dotcom company that hopes to use the internet to cut out the middleman in the furniture trade and deliver cut-price designer goods.

The new venture, Made.com, launches today and is the brainchild of 28-year-old entrepreneur Ning Li. As well as Hoberman, who is already interested in the home furnishings business through his mydeco.com web venture, Made.com is backed by PROfounders Capital, whose investors include Michael Birch, as well as Marc Simoncini, founder of online dating group Meetic which also owns the European operations of Match.com.

Li reckons that Made.com can more than halve the price of contemporary furniture by cutting out the wholesaler and the retailer. The website showcases furniture designs and holds public votes, with the most popular designs going into production. Anyone who voted receives a discount in return for their participation in the selection process. Orders are then placed direct with a manufacturer for mass production in container quantities. In theory, there is no unsold inventory and no wastage as the factory only manufactures the exact number of items ordered.

Using the power of an existing pool of willing buyers to reduce the cost of particular items is a business model that was unsuccessfully attempted during the dotcom boom, by companies such as Letsbuyit.com. But Made.com is different in that it is not looking to reduce the cost of everyday items such as electrical goods, but of one-off pieces of designer furniture.

Hoberman reckons Made.com is part of a new e-commerce trend: "From an investment trend perspective we see an exciting transition from retailing to 'me-tailing' where consumers are in control, influencing which designs make it into production and with a more direct connection to the factory. Made.com is good news for talented designers who struggle to achieve scale production as it will showcase the best new talent to the buying public and generate demand for their products."

Consumers are also now far more used to using their computers to make purchases than they were a decade ago, when the internet bubble burst. Last month, for instance, British consumers spent £4.1bn online, up from £3.6bn in the same period in 2009. Sales of Valentine's Day gifts helped support the market, according to figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, but they were still down 4% from January, which is buoyed by new year promotions.

The sorts of presents people were giving their Valentines also changed, with the gifts sector ? which includes items such as flowers and hampers ? down by almost a third in the week prior to February 14, while sales of lingerie and beauty products showed strong annual growth of 30% and 25%.

Prof Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire is an expert on laughing, giggling and guffawing. He even has his own iPhone app. He's giving a talk at the Royal Institution on Wednesday 31 March.

We also reveal the world's funniest joke as told by people on the streets of London.

The European premier of the new Imax film, Hubble 3D, has taken place at London's Science Museum. David Brower tells us about the complexity of rendering some of the fly-throughs, including the 'star' of the show, the Orion nebula.

A new exhibition at the Royal College of Art attempts to predict some of the ways current research will help create future technologies. Producer Andy visited Impact.

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Cheap land prices and the recession mean that more and more people are donning hard hats and opting to self-build their own houses

When Glyn and Jane Martin decided to convert a wooden shack on the Devon coast ? complete with spiders, mice and rampaging ivy ? into a more permanent home, it is safe to say they did not envisage exactly how it would impact on their lives. The first stage was to commission a design from their architect daughter Annie; this agreed, builders were called in to lay the foundations. Then the family took over ? Annie and her partner Mark, a carpenter, moved on site to supervise the project; Glyn and Jane bought a caravan so they could join them, and Jane took a year out from her job as a teacher. New skills were learned (plasterboarding, tanking the blockwork), but work progressed more slowly than expected, particularly in winter when the weather could be, as Annie says euphemistically, "quite wild".

"It was a dream we wanted to realise, so we just went for it," says Jane of the two-year period. "Of course there are times when you are working in a blizzard and you know the next delivery is coming and you don't know where to put it. And you think: 'Whose idea was this?' But we could always stand back and say, 'Look what we've done. Look what we're achieving.'"

What they have achieved is certainly spectacular. The Seacombe residence is a spacious, luxurious two-storey house with impeccable eco credentials. It also has total wi-fi coverage, a state-of-the-art kitchen and a secret cinema hidden behind a bookcase. And the hard work has more than paid off: the land costs were £300,000, building was £350,000, but the property is now valued at £1.2m.

There's always been a small band of intrepid BYO (build your own) pioneers prepared to don hard hats and construct their own castles ? saving thousands in the process ? but their numbers are on the up. And the recession is helping. Plot prices are down 20% on last year (and 33% since January 2008), according to BuildStore, the largest one-stop shop for self-builders. Additionally, small builders who have traditionally snapped up such "windfall" sites have had their financial plug pulled by banks less inclined to dole out cash, leaving the door open to those who want to do it themselves.

"If you've had a long-term dream to build, now is probably the best opportunity for 10 or 15 years," says Michael Holmes, editor in chief of Homebuilding & Renovating magazine. Holmes, who has both renovated and built from scratch, has found building much easier, and if you're handy and you've got the time ? most self-builders are self-employed, retired or able to take time off work ? it's definitely worth it.

"It is a time commitment," says Holmes, "but you get a bespoke house and you end up with a property worth considerably more than it cost. You are building in equity. You are building in a profit margin. For people who are climbing the housing ladder, it's a fantastic way of actually making it happen. And it's tax free."

Monty Ravenscroft became a self-build sensation overnight, when he showed what could be done with an unprepossessing scrap of urban wasteland in south London. Armed with a tiny budget, a pile of books, a gang of mates and impressive derring-do he transformed a narrow, derelict plot into an open-plan, cutting-edge family home ? his antics closely followed by Grand Designs. And the nation loved him for it: "It was a David and Goliath thing," says Ravenscroft, who works as an engineer, actor and film producer. "We were struggling against the system, as self-build mortgages all catered for the standard process, for a standard house with a standard value. Which ours had none of. We were going to use weird materials, in a weird site, with a weird design without any windows." The skinny strip of land was cheap at £40,000, because windows were not an option ? his neighbours are too close ? but, after 18 months of hard work and a spend of £170,000, the house was valued at between £600,000 and £700,000 in 2006.

But it's not all about saving cash. Boxy Victorian terraces, for one, are constricting, and knock down as many walls as you like, there's a limit to what can be done with them. Self-builders, on the other hand, have the luxury of living in a tailor-made space, and they know what they want. "Large entertaining spaces, a kitchen breakfast room, glass doors opening out on to the garden, under-floor heating? These are all the basics that go into self-builds now," says Holmes.

In 2009 there was a 145% jump in the number of plots sold between the first and third quarter, according to BuildStore, and of all new detached houses at least a third are estimated to be self-build projects. It's no wonder television shows such as Grand Designs pull in the crowds. As for those contemplating taking the plunge, top tips include: don't pay up front for work; don't get disillusioned in your hunt for a plot; do your research; set your budget; project manage yourself; claim back VAT on all your materials; and when you're up against it and feeling the strain, keep an eye on the bigger picture.

For Ravenscroft the pressure peaked on concrete days: "I hate concrete," he says. "Stress levels are very high because you are spending a lot of money. The trucks are arriving, the pumps are arriving, the people are arriving. You start pumping and things start going wrong, and you can't do it, and you can't finish, and meanwhile it's setting behind you? It's just really miserable." Even on good days, he says, the construction process is still all-consuming: "You are looking at it. You are thinking about it, you are dreaming about it and you are having nightmares about it, because it takes up every moment of your life. But then you end up living in what some people say is paradise."

Ian and Sarah Gluyas, Oxfordshire

"I paid for it to be a water-tight shell and for an electrician," says Ian. "But I did the plastering, painting, fitted the bathrooms, a bit of plumbing, tiling, hanging doors, the carpentry?" A Formula 1 engineer, but a boat builder by trade, Ian was working five days a week and 17 weekends that year, but somehow made the time needed to complete the house within 18 months. "I would start at 8pm after work and go through until 2am."

With Sarah as on-site manager and fellow painter, they put in a £30,000 kitchen for just £6,500, and after a total building spend of £125,000, they had the house valued at £450,000. The other good thing about being a self-builder, Ian points out, is that you can keep tweaking and adding little extras; he is now building a bespoke car port for £6,000 ? saving nearly £30,000.

Donald and Catherine Bisset, Peeblesshire

In between abseiling off oil rigs in the North Sea where he works as an inspector, Donald set himself the task of building a large family home from scratch, learning all the trades as he went along. With a stack of books and the help of knowledgeable friends and family, the Bissets took nine months to complete their new home. Donald, who had previous experience with various roofing jobs, dug the foundations in apocalyptic conditions, built the timber frame and did the roofing and the plumbing. He pushed himself so hard he came down with pneumonia.

The Bissets believe they have found the perfect location for their family and, having paid £165,000 for the land and a further £150,000 for building costs, they have recently had the house valued at £400,000.

Brad Lochore, East London

In 2005 conceptual artist Brad Lochore decided to overhaul a Victorian warehouse he had bought in Shoreditch in east London in 1996 for £120,000, and turn it into a contemporary studio and living space. He employed Tony Fretton Architects to design the space and building, but quickly became disillusioned with the builders he called in to price up the job.

"The contractors either came back and said: 'We can't do it we're so busy', or they came back with such ludicrous prices, so the only option left to me was to roll up my sleeves and do it myself." Being self-employed left Lochore free to manage his time, and as an artist he had a basic understanding of materials. He spent £280,000 on the rebuild, plus £30,000 for extra land from his neighbour. He believes he saved a couple of hundred thousand by doing the work himself, and has since had an informal valuation of £3m.

Lochore has ended up with a building with two to five bedrooms (depending on what rooms are being used for), two bathrooms and three kitchens. "I've produced a unique, beautiful building," he says. "I know every single nut and bolt in it."

V&A, London
Lost children, poverty, imprisonment: 300 years of stories both personal and political are sewn into the quilts in this wonderful show

The soldier looks peaceful but alarmingly pale. He has a metal plate lodged in his head. They've patched him up at the military hospital and even given him something to keep his mind off the horrors of the Crimea. He is sitting up in his nightshirt stitching the most startling quilt.

The triangles alternate black and white, black and red, red and yellow in fierce chevron stripes. It is a terrific piece of op-art geometry. The painting that commemorates Private Walker's labours shows not only the quilt and exactly how it is done, right down to the difficulty of keeping each fiddly little triangle from curling up as you stitch it to another, but something else too.

There on the bed lies Walker's uniform, complete with medal. The quilt turns out to be made of his regimental colours, almost literally ? a piecing together of the torn clothes, if not the bodies, of the dead.

Are all quilts an act of commemoration, more or less public or private? It seems so from this tremendous exhibition. Quilts 1700-2010 has had more advance bookings than any other at the V&A, with visitors due to fly in from all round the world. It deserves its enormous success.

For what it shows is an art form that takes scraps of the real world and transforms them into visions and images, that shores up the fragments of the past while making something new (and warm) for the future. This is not quilting as commonly imagined ? Laura Ashley pre-cut squares machined together for the guest room ? but something infinitely more imaginative, idiosyncratic, personal; another way of drawing or painting, another form of narrative or expression.

Look at the unknown 18th-century woman who has stitched her entire world into a coverlet, beginning with the clock at the centre that measures time and life, radiating out through the day's objects ? comb, thimble, scissors, the very needle she is using right now ? to the emblems of her home and the garden beyond, where the spring birds arrive, then depart for the winter sun. It feels like the whole of an existence, circumscribed, confined and yet rich in the mind, condensed to the visual equivalent of a sonnet.

Look at James Williams's anthology of wonders ? a camel, an elephant, a Chinese pagoda, the whale swallowing Jonah; to which he has proudly added a perfect cloth reprise of Thomas Telford's miraculous suspension bridge in Menai. Williams was a Welsh tailor. It took him a decade to piece the quilt together after work, and no wonder, for each vignette is united in a web of tiny shifting mosaics that feels like a dream adrift in the mind.

Ten years, 40 years: the curators have been able to determine from the fabrics themselves how long some of these quilts were under the needle ? picked up and abandoned and picked up again. Each quilt is the measure of its own making. And as time passes, relationships and events are both implicit and explicit in the work. The death of a husband is felt in darkening tone and sombre embroidery; the length of a pregnancy apparent as the baby's name is eventually added after the relief of a safe birth. Quilts reflect family history as much as private lives.

Some of these histories turn out to be dark or sorrowful. Miss Nixon's quilt, made in the 1870s, and known as a strippy piece for its bold stripes of turkey-red and white cotton, was stitched in poverty at a miner's quilting club in Northumbria. The painstaking art is all in the patterning of diamonds, roses and leaves described with infinitely small stitches, perhaps compensating in this case for the lack of affordable cloth with which to vary the design.

Even an inexperienced eye can gauge how many long months of patience, skill and eyestrain were involved just by examining a single inch. But such quilts earned for Miss Nixon and her friends nothing more than the equivalent of a miner's wage for a fortnight.

Other quilts tell of lost children, unfaithful husbands, imprisonment and poverty, of persecuted Baptists and women convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land. One of the most dynamic ? and vitality, not weakness, remains the dominant characteristic ? is the so-called George III coverlet which shows the monarch reviewing his troops in the middle. But this formality is surrounded, and nearly upstaged, by a wonderful border in which official portraits of soldiers alternate with unofficial portraits of women: talking, writing, painting, laughing, walking and ? of course ? making quilts. There is no sense of Penelope sadly spinning away the war years; this is Homer revised, with women rising to the moment, refusing to waste either life or time.

This coverlet includes fragments of regency petticoat. The condition of life is materially apparent, so to speak, in a quilt. A tiny piece of expensive brocade, a circle of Indian fabric illegally imported during the 19th century trade ban, the lace from a Victorian wedding dress: what's prized is presented like a jewel in the ordinary cloth.

There are quilts made entirely from striped pyjamas, blankets, old coats, black-out curtains. Ingenuity is underpinned by frugality. The curators of this show had their ears to the ground when they first began to gather quilts five years ago, for this is an art that speaks more clearly than ever to our make-and-mend era.

And it does feel like speech. The most obvious (and commonly drawn) analogy is with abstract art: primary shapes, blocked colours, modular non-representational arrangements. Quilts have the shape and form of paintings; museums and collectors like to hang them on the walls. The great Amish quilts look like precursors to the minimalism of Sol Lewitt, Joseph Albers and Frank Stella.

But this is an exhibition of British quilts, and though there is one stunning abstraction, mute in its glowing cobalt and red, the sense is far more of representation, of the power of quilts to make a direct address.

Which is precisely the subject of a piece by Sara Impey, one of 10 works specially commissioned for this show. Impey found a letter in a drawer after her mother's death that breathed a hint of lost love; she has preserved it, like scented air in a bottle, in a most beautiful quilt in which phrases and half-phrases are stitched into the spectral surface of the fabric in broken lines that both imitate the patterns of speech and the motion of sewing itself, piercing the cloth, then drawing the thread slowly away.

We are all familiar with quilts that anthologise a family's old clothes, or commemorate its story through births or marriages; with quilts as complex pixellations of colour, tone and shape, patterned in jockey's cap or sawtooth star. But what this show reveals is the sheer originality that can thrive within such precise parameters. It is a show to enthral and inspire in equal measure, not least because there is such a sense of order in this hardwon art, this creation of a world out of scraps. It is all there in the portrait of Thomas Walker in his bed: the strange peace of making a quilt.

Peter Conrad is intrigued by a book that blames Andy Warhol for our unhealthy obsession with image

Americans, who expect to live in paradise, are always asking why they have been expelled from the happy garden. Lately the inquest has become urgent. David Thomson's new book on Psycho surveys the country's current moral squalor and blames its venality and violence on Hitchcock's sadistic film; now Gary Indiana returns to the same problem of disillusionment and despair, bemoans his image-crazed, commercially obsessed society, and fingers Andy Warhol as the joking demon who was responsible for its corruption. For Indiana, Warhol is consumer capitalism in person, the embodiment of a "corporate monoculture" that equates high and low, art and kitsch, celebrity and nonentity. Hiring lookalikes to represent him at parties and on lecture tours, he put an end to the illusion of human individuality, and transformed himself into a contentless image, the perfection of "boredom, apathy, emotional emptiness, partial autism, and ugliness".

It is a heavy rap to lay on some brightly banal paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and Indiana ? whose little book contains no illustrations, since its real concern is Warhol's persona not his art ? has trouble making sense of the thesis proclaimed in his title. Warhol's Soup Cans certainly sold. When the blotchy canvases were exhibited in 1962, they didn't cost a lot more than the mass-produced supermarket items they so reverently imitated; recently, one of them was auctioned for $11m. Inflation as insane as that in the Weimar republic, I agree, but does this mean that Warhol had sold the world on a vacuous idea, or persuaded the world to sell its soul for a mess of industrialised pottage?

The abstract expressionist painters, who scoffed at Warhol's swishiness and disparaged him as a department store window-dresser, extolled a rugged cowboy individualism that turned their hurling of paint at canvas into a kind of gestural politics. In the Eisenhower era, Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns were pressed into service as advertisements for American freedom; the Rockefellers began hanging abstract art in branches of their Chase Manhattan Bank, as an ideological riposte to socialist realism. Warhol bided his time, and spent the 1950s sketching shoe advertisements. Then, at the start of the next decade, he unveiled his alternative to the "polemics and agonic practices" of the macho AbEx brigade.

Pop art, as Indiana says, was "the negation of subjectivity", a style that corresponded to the neutered emotional blankness of Warhol himself. Rather than vistas of infinity ? present in the earliest American landscape paintings of the Hudson river and its gorges or the Grand Canyon, and still discernible in Pollock's jungles of dribbled pigment ? his work displayed the spectacle of man-made glut, symbolised by those stockpiled cans. Warhol detested Campbell's soup, having been force-fed it by his mother during his childhood in Pittsburgh, so the images stimulated hunger but could not satisfy it; they took insolent pride in "the absence of substance". Consumers in any case were expected to remain ravenous, feeding their stomachs in order to make up for spiritual famine.

At this point Indiana takes a risky intuitive leap from art to the psychoanalysis of society. He calls Soup Cans "a window into the abyss", through which we can see the hole in which we're all still living. The cans demonstrate that image matters more than reality; this, he argues, is "symptomatic of an affectlessness invariably found in sociopaths", and is also "the prevailing character of American life today". It's a breathtakingly bold assertion, and it's probably right. Indiana's evidence is the moronic or robotic role Warhol played ? a whispering ninny in a skewed silver wig. At the time this was a mad affectation, but it has since become the norm: "In American society, having an image was steadily becoming more rewarding than being a person. People have problems, whereas images just have spectators? Neuroticism became a lively asset rather than a liability." Of course the malaise is no longer confined to America: look at Gazza, Pete, Amy, Naomi and all the other damaged creatures who stagger through our national life.

The so-called "superstars" in Warhol's gang of groupies were at least endearingly zany and ? since redundancy and rapid turnover were imperative at the Factory, as in any industrial enterprise ? obligingly self-destructive. Nowadays we can't rely on celebrities to overdose or jump out of high windows. They have become an economic necessity, a rare and precious proof of economic health: as Indiana says, "capitalism in its current, all-pervasive form exacerbates the pre-extant desire for fame and money and ratifies egregious opportunism". Here you have an explanation of the vile-bodied and empty-headed Katie Price, who appears to be as indestructible as a plastic bag discarded in the gutter. Warhol was over-generous when he allowed every human being 15 minutes of fame: he surely never expected that his prophecy would come true! Luckily his shorter-tempered successor is Simon Cowell, who like an overworked executioner ensures that the hordes of self-deluded wannabes will enjoy at most three minutes of exposure, followed by humiliation and a merciful return to invisibility.

The zeitgeist occasionally arranges creepy coincidences. Thomson's recent study of Psycho and Indiana's diatribe about the poisonous soup cans both home in on the assassination of JFK in 1963. Thomson sees the event as part of the nihilistic crime wave that began at the Bates motel, while Indiana, a little more plausibly, notes that the president's death exemplified Warhol's theory of democratised celebrity: "world's most important person killed by world's most insignificant person". Murder ? either the random slaughter of passersby or the targeting of someone great and famous ? rewards rancorous nobodies with immortality, or at least infamy. I'm alarmed by the way both Thomson and Indiana brood about that awful day in Dallas. Americans, who not so long ago believed they had found a saviour, appear to be bracing for another shock. It would be bad magic to say more. Anyway, you know what I mean.

Photographs showing seven days in the life of the enigmatic Irish actor, including a suspicious cat and an oversized lion

It was once an narrow, dark alley between two listed buildings. Now it's a stunning contemporary home

It takes an architect to look at a narrow, dark alley, a gap between two buildings, and think, "Yep, that's where I want to live." But that's exactly what Luke Tozer did. Unintimidated by the fact that the street frontage was a mere 2.3m wide, or that the houses on either side were listed, or even by the fact that the space, an alley opening out into a garden, was bang in the middle of the Bayswater conservation area, west London, Tozer made models of his house before he had even bought the site, and took them to planners and his would-be neighbours. "They listened quietly to what I had to say," Tozer says, "then wrote long objection letters to the council."

How did he convince them his Gap House was a good idea? "We worked hard to reduce the impact on the neighbours as much as possible," he says. Following some serious negotiations, in return for their side entrance, which was situated in the alleyway, Tozer got planning permission and paid to dig out the neighbour's front garden and build a utility room in its place. He also turned the neighbour's small, dark courtyard into a raised, sun-filled terrace with a new living space underneath.

"In a conservation area in London, you have to either preserve or enhance the character of the area," he says. "We were hoping to enhance its urban character and create a listed building of the future." Tozer's aim, along with his business partner Tim Pitman (together they form Pitman Tozer Architects), was to build a contemporary, low-energy house.

It's hard to picture from the street, but the narrow white render housefront cascades into a 185 sq m Tardis of contemporary living. "It reminds me of Mr Benn," Tozer says, "when he goes through the magic door in the clothes shop and enters a whole other world." Living, eating and entertaining are done at the back, in an open-plan lounge-cum-courtyard, while the narrower front of the house is dedicated to three smaller, identical bedrooms, one stacked on top of the other. "Having the sleeping areas so separate is great because we have two young kids," says Tozer's wife, Charlotte. "We just retire to bed. The rest of the living is done downstairs." And what's it like to turn your lounge into an outside space with one push of a glass door? "It feels like you are in LA or the Mediterranean."

Below the courtyard are three 50m bore holes serving a ground-coupled heat pump, which provides the heating and hot water for the house. Rainwater is collected on the house's roofs to minimise water consumption and passive solar gain minimises lighting and heating requirements. Charlotte says, "I was worried about the rainwater harvesting because I thought it was going to be stinky, and I was worried we'd be living in a freezing house and never get enough hot water for a shower." The outcome couldn't be farther from the truth. Not only has the house won a Riba Manser Medal ? the annual prize for the best one-off house in the UK ? but with it came an engraved silver plaque, affirmation that the Gap House can stand, narrow and proud, as a listed building of the future.

If the Conservatives win the election, most of their MPs will be first-timers, part of a new elite that includes more women, gay and non-white candidates than ever before. From the chick-lit author to the black farmer, Julian Glover investigates how deep the reinvention really runs

Sir Tufton-Bufton is in for a shock. Whether or not the Conservative party finally wins this spring, the coming election will bring an extraordinary purging of the Commons. In the wake of the expenses scandal, almost 150 MPs are quitting and many more may lose their seats. If David Cameron takes office with a majority, most of his MPs will be first-timers, part of a new Tory elite that includes more women, more non-white and more out gay candidates than ever before ? along with a sprinkling of media darlings whose only previous response to the words "Conservative party" might have been to ask why they hadn't been invited.

This gilded intake is the product of much strong-arming by Cameron's team, desperate to show that his party has changed. But beneath the surface gloss, opinion varies as to how deep the Conservative reinvention really runs: there will still be scores of public schoolboys, and even quite a few old Etonians, among the new crop, and most candidates are still male. At one recent selection, candidates were asked to confirm with a single word that they will vote to repeal the hunting ban. Perhaps old money has just taken to wearing Paul Smith jeans rather than Harris tweed.

But the figures still say a lot. At present there are 18 female Tory MPs; if Cameron gets a majority, there will be more than 60. There will be at least 10 ? maybe more ? Tory MPs from ethnic minorities, which doesn't sound a lot until you remember that between 1906, when Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree lost his seat, and 1992, when Nirj Deva won, every Tory MP was white and almost all of them male.

Cameron must be kicking himself that several of the candidates who most represent change, such as community activist Shaun Bailey, whom Tories are desperate to see win in Hammersmith, were picked early on to fight seats where victory is far from certain. No one imagined then that the expenses crisis would create far safer vacancies, several of which have gone to established party insiders.

Nonetheless, it is striking that Chippenham is being fought not by any old Tory backwoodsman out of the pages of Horse & Hound, but by Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, the self-appointed "black farmer" turned would-be MP. He was born in Jamaica and brought up in a Birmingham terrace house. Selected in 2006, he was the early embodiment of Cameron's vow to change his party, fighting the Lib Dems in a marginal seat in which just 722 out of 87,977 people described themselves as non-white in the last census. Cameron cited him in a recent pre-election speech as proof that Tory reinvention is real: "The young black British boy, looking at parliament, looking at Britain and thinking, 'What's my role? Do I belong? How am I going to get on?' can look at the Tory party, yes, the Tory party, and say: 'They've got to the top of British politics, I belong here, and so can I'."

Up to a point, David. Emmanuel-Jones was a beneficiary of the A-list, which sought to fast-track preferred candidates, but that faded away after internal opposition. Only a third of A-listers eventually made it into winnable seats and many of those are marginals. Since then, the party has tried holding open primaries ? meetings where any local voter can attend and vote ? and in two places all-postal primaries, in which every elector was sent a ballot paper. GP Sarah Wollaston won this way in Totnes after Tory grandee Anthony Steen was forcibly retired after pronouncing the public jealous of his "very, very large" house. Yet many traditional candidates have still got through.

If parliament is to be representative, then its new generation must represent the country. That familiar disconnection between politicians and people is, after all, one of the reasons the expenses catastrophe occurred. "It will do the Tory party a power of good to get rid of the useless, appalling characters who packed the Commons," says the political commentator Peter Oborne. "They had long since lost any sense of public duty. Why would anyone want to have anything to do with a party that contained the likes of Anthony Steen and Andrew McKay [also forced to stand down after his expenses claims were made public]?"

But there are big questions about the sort of people being selected in their place. Oborne is pleased people "who are not known at Westminster, are not lobbyists and are proudly provincial" are standing, but the reality is many new Tories have emerged from a very old Tory womb.

In Somerset, the son and daughter (Jacob and Annunziata) of the former Times editor William Rees-Mogg are both standing. East Surrey may be about to get its first black MP, Sam Gyimah, who may live up to his billing as a future cabinet minister, but to get there he was president of the Oxford Union. A few days later, Tories in Stratford-on-Avon selected Nadhim Zahawi, whose family originally came from Kurdistan. He helped found the successful polling firm YouGov and once worked for Jeffrey Archer.

Many ? but by no means all ? of the new candidates are the sort of people who always got selected, wealthy and well-educated middle-class professionals. To be truly representative, the party needs to reflect not just ethnic and sexual diversity, but social and economic difference, too ? and here the story is less clearcut. "Has the party just substituted white barristers for black barristers, and straight accountants for gay ones?" asks Tim Montgomerie, founder of the ConservativeHome website, which has been tracking the new intake.

Out delivering leaflets in the marginal seat of Reading East, Nick Herbert says: "The change is visible and real. You can't be a successful party unless you have candidates from all backgrounds." But: "No one thinks the journey is complete."

Elected for Arundel in 2005, Herbert was dismayed at first when one national newspaper captioned a picture of him "Gay eurosceptic". "I didn't want to be typecast. I am an MP who happens to be gay." Recently, though, he has come to believe that "it is important to talk about such issues, to encourage people not just in politics but in all walks of life".

The change in attitudes to homosexuality has been rapid in all parties, but most of all, perhaps, among the Tories. No out Conservative stood for parliament until David Gold, the unsuccessful candidate for Brighton Pavilion in 2001 and now candidate in the key south London seat of Eltham. These days, Tories joke that they may soon need a straight A-list to help openly heterosexual candidates into parliament.

That is an exaggeration, but it is likely that there will be more out lesbian and gay Tory MPs by the summer than Labour and Lib Dem ones. Alan Duncan, who came out in 2002, did not find his sexuality a hindrance to his career, and nor do people such as Herbert, who will become the second gay cabinet minister to represent Britain's farmers if the Tories win. Meanwhile, in the key marginal seat of Stourbridge, Margot James, who is lesbian, looks on course to win.

If anything, Tory associations may have found it easier to accept gay candidates than ones with modernising metropolitan views. This year Team Cameron famously confronted the "Turnip Taliban" in Norfolk who tried to oust Liz Truss as their local candidate after they discovered she had had an affair. Then the leader himself had to swing into action closer to home to bail out Joanne Cash, who briefly resigned in Westminster North after falling out with her local party. The charge against her was that she was a woman, pregnant and posh ? and all this in Notting Hill's backyard.

In Cornwall, first-time Tory candidate and former Cameron aide George Eustice says local Tory associations "have been pushed out of their comfort zone, but not too far". He thinks the media's interest in a small, glamorous elite ? people like Zac Goldsmith, Louise Bagshawe and many of the candidates photographed on these pages ? "is not unfair, but not the whole picture. People latch on to celebrity candidates. But you can't judge the whole party on a few rising stars."

In Penrith and the Border, Rory Stewart is one of those stars who is almost certain of election ? an Etonian Harvard professor with an extraordinary life story and lively media career who joined his party only last summer. "I saw Cameron's speech asking people to stand after the expenses scandal," he says. "And the more I thought about it, the more good I thought it would do.

"I suppose the assumption is that politics will change, but always more slowly than people would like. There hasn't been a fundamental constitutional rejig, just a more diverse group of candidates getting in."

This sort of talk has set many Tories grumbling ? and not just the old guard. They didn't fight for the party in opposition just to see a smart set hurried past them into ministerial jobs via a VIP entrance. "They have brought in David's chums," one senior Tory says. "I'm worried that they have taken in symbolic people who don't know anything about the party ? social workers who are delighted to wear the badge of being an MP."

Others worry that this new generation is, if anything, too pushy and able: that many candidates know they could earn much more outside politics and are not prepared to tolerate treatment endured by Labour's more humble new intake of 1997. Some say, "I'm serving eight years and then I'm out" ? as Labour's James Purnell has just done ? and have no intention of staying on for decades as backbench knights of the shire.

Such attitudes will surely refresh Westminster. The new MPs are largely untainted by the Tory backbench factionalism that has beset the party since Margaret Thatcher was deposed. They want to get on ? and fast. They are open to the idea of Commons reform. The men will hate having to wear ties into the chamber. One, at least, jokes that he will get a clip-on to make it easier to pull off as he heads back to the office.

Yet no one should mistake this for empty-headedness. The new Tories have strong views, often stronger than the genial, pinstriped backbenchers they will replace. "Cameron's cuties", as they are unfairly called by the press, have attitude.

Most modern Conservatives are opposed to capital punishment, according to one recent survey, and tolerant of gay marriage. But they are also keen on reducing the abortion time limit and deeply sceptical of action on climate change ? perhaps their biggest immediate contradiction with what their leader says he believes. Their diversity may represent some change; their views often represent a Tory retreat to the right.

Many have a pull-up-your-bootstraps enthusiasm for individual self-reliance forged by a record of community activism. They dislike state spending, are keen social entrepreneurs and want Cameron to push forward a Conservative revolution with cuts ? radicals in Thatcher's mould. They are also almost all deeply antipathetic to the EU.

How will they cope if elected? Some will be political innocents, ready to do the whips' bidding, as many new Labour MPs did initially after 1997. "They have no roots in the party, no understanding of what the job entails," says Phil Cowley, Britain's leading academic expert in parliamentary behaviour. But a Tory government with no majority, or a very small one, would be at the mercy of these new MPs. "There will be a mass of conformity and some loose cannons," he predicts. "Will the buggers all be prepared to turn up for the 10pm vote night after night? If they don't, legislation will fall."

In short, the government could be held hostage by a few disappointed stars. People such as Emmanuel-Jones may prove the ultimate whips office nightmare. "I'm not keen on the whipping system," he said recently. "If [Cameron] surrounds himself with people who understand the code... the Eton boys... that will be my struggle."

Goldsmith, if he wins Richmond Park, is another likely rebel; others ask whether Rory Stewart, already a public figure, will be willing to serve his time as Commons lobby fodder. Cowley argues that the MPs likely to do best are "those with allies, patronage and who already know the game". Before Labour won in 1997, journalists tipped Oona King as a future cabinet minister. In fact, less flashy politicians such as Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears were the ones who made it to the top.

On election day, an extraordinary bunch of people will become Tory MPs. Some are already famous, some will become so, while others, against all expectations, will sink without trace. It will be the most remarkable assembling of egos and political inexperience. It may also be the future of British politics.

Readers' favourite family photographs, songs and recipes

Snapshot: In Uncle Harry's garden

I'm the one in pink, and next to me is my three-year-old sister, Helen. Taking us for a ride in his wheelbarrow is our grandmother's brother, Harry Osborn. It is the summer of 1973 and we are in Harry's garden in Kelvedon, Essex.

This is Harry as I remember him: the rolled up shirtsleeves and tanned arms of a gardener and the smile of a genial man who called everyone "mate". He is wearing a tank top in his favourite shade of green. It is the exact same colour as his wheelbarrow, his garden fence and his Austin van, which he used in his job as a plumber. Harry was good with his hands. The son of a master builder, he built his own bungalow. He also made things ? including this wheelbarrow by the look of it ? in his big, dark shed, which had too many cobwebs for my sister and me to do much more than poke our noses round the door.

This wheelbarrow ride gave my sister and me our first inkling that there were fun times to be had in Harry's vast wonderland of a garden. Each visit presented us with a new and thrilling experience. On one occasion, we found two goats grazing in the orchard, and, on another, we came across a run full of rabbits. My headstrong sister disliked being told that she should not touch the animals. As soon as we were alone, she stretched out her hand to a goat and received a butt in the stomach. The rabbit that she picked up had a better temperament, fortunately. My sister flouted rules (which surely were made by my parents and not by our gentle, fun-loving great-uncle) while I took advantage of rules that had not been made, taking running jumps in an effort to clear Uncle Harry's king-sized flowerbeds.

Harry was devoted to his wheelchair-bound wife, Iris, who had brittle bones. They did not have any children. When Iris died, Harry decided to sell up, but before he moved out of the bungalow, he invited my sister and me to choose something from his house for our very own. My sister picked the doll that covered the toilet roll, while I chose a brass nutcracker in the shape of a dog, which Harry was using as a doorstop.

Uncle Harry died eight years after this picture was taken. It was only later that I learned of his respected status in Kelvedon. He had been head of the Sunday school, chairman of the parish council and a recipient of the British empire medal. I also discovered that another pair of sisters (my mother and my aunt) had roamed Harry's garden, years before us.

The garden is all but gone now. The home of the master builder's son passed through the hands of another builder who erected houses on the one-acre plot. The bungalow remains, but its garden is heartbreakingly small. I still have my memories, though ? and my brass dog. Anna Dale

Playlist: Between rock and a hard place

Black Betty by Ram Jam

"Whoa Black Betty, bam-a-lam/Whoa Black Betty, bam-a-lam/Black Betty had a child/the damn thing gone wild" I was having a whale of a time, young and carefree and at college, totally in love with the rock music of the 70s and totally in love with my boyfriend. My nickname was Biddy and his surname was Black; his friends called me Biddy Black. We frequented the Pound music club at the back of the city hall in Belfast. These were the classic rock days of 1976 and 1977 before punk. We lived and breathed music.

The Troubles were at their peak, and getting in and out of the city centre was difficult. We lived with it because at 18 all we wanted was life, love and music ? we didn't care much about anything else.

I was a few months gone before I realised I was pregnant. There were no pregnancy-testing kits in those days, and it took a lot of courage to present yourself to the family GP. Month after month I had put off telling myself that my period was late. The baby was due in December. It was August when I found out for sure. Being a pregnant 18-year-old girl from a strict Catholic family wasn't a good place to be in. I had been successful in my studies and my future looked good without the responsibility of a baby. Although those around me worried and fretted for the future, I still felt alive and carefree and felt a sense that everything would turn out right.

It was the beginning of September and I turned on the radio ? Ram Jam thrashed out. I smiled. It sounded like they were singing about me. There was much energy in that song, it made me feel good and touched my teenage rebelliousness. I wanted to put two fingers up to the world and shout that I was doing what I wanted to do.

I had a sweet baby boy in December who did a good job of calming me down throughout the following years. And that steady boyfriend that I had, after 32 years of marriage, I'm still totally in love with him. Brigid Black

We love to eat: Dad's fancy eggs

Ingredients for 12 fancy eggs

6 eggs

Mayonnaise

Salt

Pepper

Cayenne pepper

Boil the eggs and when cool, peel them from their shells. Slice the eggs in half and scoop the yolk out into a bowl. Mix the yolk with mayonnaise and some salt and pepper. Scoop the yolk mix into the empty egg whites. Sprinkle with a touch of cayenne pepper.

Both my parents cook well but my dad has always added a touch of magic in the kitchen. He'd make these stuffed eggs occasionally, and to my sister and me they were the absolute height of sophistication to our primary school selves. Many years later, both of my parents were made redundant within six months of each other. Times were really tough, and for five years money was tight and tensions were high. We became adept at turning every penny over before spending it and making budget-conscious meals.  

Every so often, though, Dad would go into the kitchen on a Sunday night and make us a plate of snacks that would consist of these fancy eggs. We'd sit around chatting and eating our eggs, and for a while the worry was broken. I'll always remember how Dad's fancy eggs still tasted like luxury, even in the middle of some very bleak years. They will always count very highly on my list of soul foods. Claire Mason

We'd love to hear your stories

We will pay £25 for every Letter to, Playlist, Make do and mend, Snapshot or We love to eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@guardian.co.uk. Please include your address and phone number

John Tunnard, Chichester

Amorphous shapes dance in dream-like landscapes of seemingly infinite regress in the canvases of British artist John Tunnard. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Tunnard fused surrealism with abstraction in paintings exploring inner worlds, the Cornish vistas that surrounded his home and even space travel. Melodically composed with upbeat colours or introspective muted hues, his paintings are a little-known delight. Tunnard worked in a time when artists clustered in groups and he was clearly in step with modernist currents. He showed work alongside Max Ernst, Magritte, Henry Moore and Paul Nash, was championed by artworld linchpin Peggy Guggenheim and the St Ives artist Ben Nicholson invited him to join the Penwith Society. But he resisted being part of a gang. Perhaps that's why he's been sidelined in art history, something the first survey of his work in 30 years should rectify.

Pallant House Gallery, to 6 Jun

Skye Sherwin

Without From Within, Nottingham

René Magritte's La Condition Humaine is a painting of a painting of a landscape on an easel in front of a window that looks out on to the very same landscape that the painted painting depicts. Got that? This intriguing exhibition curated by Anne Goodchild focuses both on paintings of windows looking outside and painting as a window on reality, with works ranging from the early-20th century Camden Town post-impressionism of Spencer Gore to the painstakingly enamelled provincialism of a recent George Shaw. In between we get the poetic graphic reveries of David Jones, the kitchen sink squalor of John Bratby, the Californian hedonism of David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin's delightful Proustian daubs.

Djanogly Art Gallery, to 3 May

Robert Clark

Anni Albers, London

Although she wanted to be a painter, when Anni Albers enrolled at the legendary Bauhaus college, she was sidelined into the weaving workshop. Yet with what she described as "limp threads" she flourished, emigrating to the States where she and her husband, the painter Joseph Albers, established the Black Mountain College as an avant garde powerhouse. Balancing usefulness with aesthetics, Albers put textiles on the art map, uniting hand-weaving with industrial production. Typically working in hushed hues true to her materials, her abstract patterns nudge at the pure art of painting while drawing inspiration from traditional Peruvian weavers. This show focuses on her later work as a printmaker, and boasts every print she ever made, evolving from maze-like patterns to her later eye-popping geometric constellations.

Alan Cristea Gallery, W1, to 17 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Alan Davie, Leeds

A Scot with a taste for zen spontaneity and free jazz, Alan Davie is the bearded beatnik of abstract expressionism. His paintings, no matter how apparently abstract, always contain hints of archetypal symbols. Davie also loves gliding, and it shows. His bold primary colours swoop and zoom. With Davie you can feel the fun of throwing the paint about, the excitement of laying it down and seeing what weirdness it comes up with almost of its own accord. This is Jungian auto-suggestive doodling on a flamboyant scale, producing a carnival array of mystic convolutions. Life-affirming get-up-and-go stuff.

Stanley And Audrey Burton Gallery, to 6 Jun

Robert Clark

Curtain Show, Birmingham

The starting point for this show is a faded photograph of Lilly Reich's Silk And Velvet Café, made for the 1927 Women's Fashion Exhibition in Berlin. The cafe itself was an elegant architectural maze of coloured silk and velvet curtains. So here contemporary artists, including Tacita Dean and Hannah James, present installations that play with the idea of curtains, blinds and screens. There are aspects of divided spaces, shrouded figures and the onset of dusk and dawn. A typically spooky affair, Douglas Gordon's Off Screen is a video installation in which an image of a curtain is projected on to a curtain, setting a stage for visitors to become shadowy silhouetted protagonists.

Eastside Projects, to 17 Apr

Robert Clark

Ben Rivers, London

Ben Rivers's films follow a back-to-basics ethos. He shoots on out-of-date stock on an old Bolex wind-up camera, processing the film in his kitchen sink, and his subject matter is people and places on society's fringes. These have included the modern-day hermit Jake Williams, abandoned houses and a family living off the land. Conjuring alternative worlds not so far from urban bustle, Rivers's work has a fantastical quality, more collagist poem than documentary, with moody soundtracks which filter a noirish, ghost story vibe. His recent film, Origin Of Species, is the focus here. A patchwork of aged-looking footage chronicles the life of an elderly man in a rundown cottage while a narrator muses on subjects such as Big Bang theory.

Kate MacGarry, E2, to 2 May

Skye Sherwin

Mark Francis, Kendal

Mark Francis first gained acclaim in the early-90s with paintings of what looked like close-ups of sperm. As he developed, the animated blobs looked like anything teeming with small-scale or cosmic energy. This was distinctive stuff, like a microscopic or telescopic super-reality. Yet, even at their most pulsating, Francis's organic goings-on were always set on a grid-like backdrop of darkness. His more recent work retains the micro/macro ambiguity while the grids now evoke aerial or astronomy maps, or a mass of musical notations. Scenes that lie at the limits of vision.

Abbot Hall, to 3 Jul

Robert Clark

Bharti Kher, London

Bharti Kher's trippy sculptures of fabulous beasts suggest she's had a good dose of William Blake and Hieronymous Bosch with a hit of Indian and Greek mythology on the side. In memorably weird fibreglass works she's conjured the likes of a centaur woman with green skin, hooves and a peacock's tail of shopping bags. While the British-born, Delhi-based Kher is one of India's best-known contemporary artists, her creations outpace any easy classification. Fragmented identity, domestic drudgery and the hidden meanings in everyday stuff are some of the themes she juggles. Her first London solo show includes bizarre disjunctions such as a rocking-horse unicorn, a room like a confessional box whose inner walls are decked in glittering bindis arranged to form watching eyes, the meditative ring of a singing bell, and aged medical charts about giving birth, enveloped by sperm-like bindis.

Hauser & Wirth, W1, Sat to 15 May

Skye Sherwin

In his latest work at UCLA, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave combines everything from vintage toys to sequins to create suits that make extraordinary sounds

From spooky shadows in Birmingham to a rare survey of John Tunnards's work in Chichester, see what's happening in art around the country

From innovative office art to rainy day activities, your best photographs on this week's theme: boredom

? Terry Richardson told his work degrades women
? Everyone has 'fun' on photo shoots, he says'

To some he's the king of fashion photographers whose sexually exuberant pictures are feted by designers and the editors of glossy magazines.

But to others, it would appear, Terry Richardson is less fashion chic and more pornographer-in-chief; a man who wields his power to exploit vulnerable young girls.

Richardson's soft-porn take on fashion has always been controversial. Now, however, a huge ethical question mark hangs over the 44-year-old American whose shoots grace the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, after a leading model condemned his work as "degrading" and his modus operandi as manipulative.

Richardson has now found himself at the centre of a storm as debate rages across the US fashion media after Rie Rasmussen, the Danish model-turned-filmmaker, confronted him at a party at club Le Montana in St Germain during Paris fashion week.

"I told him what you do is completely degrading to women, I hope you know you only [bleep] girls because you have a camera, lots of fashion contacts and get your pictures in Vogue," Rasmussen told the New York Post. She claimed Richardson fled the party, then called her agency to complain.

Warming to her theme, she continued: "He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures of them they will be ashamed of. They are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves. His 'look' is girls who appear underage, abused, look like heroin addicts ? I don't understand how anyone works with him."

Richardson's hallmark pictures are starkly-lit and suggestive. Sexual themes dominate ? including spanking, group sex and lesbian couplings.

He has recounted how his photoshoots can end up with consenting models performing sex acts on him ? moments his assistants have captured to share with the world at exhibitions such as his "Terryworld" show in Manhattan five years ago. "I don't like to exploit anybody. That's not my bag. Everyone has fun on my shoots," he told one interviewer when promoting that show.

Today, however, he is less voluble. A call to his agents at Art Partner in New York for a comment on the Rasmussen's remarks was met with a curt "no comment" and a swift hanging up.

And since Rasmussen's remarks have been reported, Richardson has found himself the subject of various online and unsubstantiated anonymous postings by others claiming to have posed for him, and alleging they found that his methods left them feeling uneasy.

Richardson, a geeky-looking, tattooed, former punk musician, has always pushed the boundaries and attracted criticism that his work is fashion taken too far.

The women's issues website Jezebel claims people from all facets of the industry ? models, bookers, agents, stylists ? had contacted them in response to internet postings over the way he works.

"I think for people in the fashion industry, the way Terry Richardson works has been an open secret for a long time," Jezebel's fashion editor Jenna Sauers said. "I think a lot of people tolerate it in public because of his extraordinary power within the industry. In private I think many are very disturbed by his history of behaviour with many of the models he works with."

Richardson, who poses with President Barack Obama on his website and has photographed many celebrities and advertising campaigns, has spoken of these spontaneous exploits in interviews.

"My rule is that I'd never ask anyone to do anything I wouldn't do myself," he said in one interview.

"That's how it's got to go this far. At first, I'd just want to do a few nude shots, so I'd take off my clothes, too ? I'd even give the camera to the model and get her to shoot me for a while.

"It's about creating a vibe, getting people relaxed and excited. When that happens you can do anything."

He continued: "I don't think I'm a sex addict, but I do have issues," pondering his issues with, "maybe it's the psychological thing that I was a shy kid, and now I'm this powerful guy with his boner, dominating all these girls".

The blurb to Richardson's coffee-table book, Terryworld, promotes him as the man "who took 1970s porn aesthetic and made it fashion chic", and boasts: "Pop stars, supermodels, transsexuals, hillbillies, friends, pets and celebrities all do for his lens what they'll do for no other."

Dunja Knezevic, a British model who helped models gain trade union recognition through Equity, said potential exploitation was a major issue for the fashion industry.

"But it is a sensitive subject. Nobody wants to speak about it. The girls want to work and they don't want to get blacklisted," she said.

"I've never met Terry Richardson, so I cannot comment on him. But I think his work is pornography passed off as high fashion."

My final stop on my preview mini-tour of the East London Line extension on Tuesday was at the brand new Shoreditch High Street station. Large portions of the surrounding Bishopsgate Goods Yard plot stand cleared and ready to accommodate new, post-credit crunch buildings. How will they compete with their flashy neighbour? Have a good weekend.

His new installation at Tate Britain sees him guiltily return a stolen stone to the Pyramid of Giza. It's a gripping work of art

It's unusual to see a new work of art about conscience. I mean individual conscience, not some generalised idea of political guilt. There are plenty of contemporary artworks that might play on our collective guilt about the environment or global relations. But for a young artist to meditate on the power of personal guilt, in a private and introspective way? That's quite striking.

Andy Holden's Art Now installation at Tate Britain tells the story of a childhood crime and an adult's attempt to make amends. On holiday in Egypt, the young Holden plucked a loose piece of stone from one of the pyramids of Giza. In his imagination, this archaeological theft assumed massive proportions. The tiny fragment became a gigantic boulder ? almost a mountain. That is the scale it assumes in his sculpture, Pyramid Piece, a towering fragment of rock, like a fallen meteorite, that dominates the gallery, covered in knitted wool like a Joseph Beuys piano covered in felt, and revealed by that incongruously soft surface to be a dream, a phantom stone, that exists only in his guilty mind.

A film playing on a TV monitor, which Holden made by giving a camera to someone he met at the pyramids, records his attempt to return the stolen fragment. On shaky handheld video, the artist clambers up the vast stepped sides of the Great Pyramid, looking for the right place to put his shard; vainly, madly trying to identify its original location in the immensity of stone.

The film has a wonderfully sad soundtrack, recorded by Holden's band the Grubby Mitts, that you can listen to on headphones. It adds hugely to the conviction and emotion of the work.

Replicas of the pyramids sit on a table, a final comment on memory ? how fragile it is, how reducible to cheap souvenirs. But Holden's attempt to return the stone is a poetic and haunting parable of remorse. Inward-looking and subtly monumental, Holden's work confirms the seriousness and intelligence of young art at the moment.

'It's like blowing the dust off buried treasure!' David Smith revels in his discovery of township artist Ephraim Ngatane

When I lived in London, I was a sucker for the blockbuster art exhibition. Caravaggio and the Terracotta Army lived up to the star billing. Others did not. But there was an equally special pleasure in stumbling on the unexpected and revelatory somewhere out of the limelight.

Blockbusters are thin on the ground in Johannesburg but surprising, striking, serendipitous shows are not. I watched a bulldozer knock down the wall of the Goethe-Institut to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Johannesburg Art Gallery, located in the now unfashionable downtown, has a terrific combination of old masters and contemporary talents. Arts on Main, the Everard Read and the Goodman Gallery also stand out.

Last weekend I arrived at the Standard Bank Gallery, 90 minutes before the end of its latest month-long show, Ephraim Ngatane: Symphony of Soweto. I'd never heard of Ngatane and didn't know what to expect. It was one of those wonderful moments of blowing the dust off buried treasure.

He was nicknamed the "Hogarth of the township". I could see why.

This retrospective featured his acutely observed images of music, sport and social life in Soweto in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Ngatane, who died young, was far from the only township artist in the apartheid years, but I imagine he was the best.

His eye settled not on the bland generality but the telling particular. "Celebration" shows a family at a dinner table. Their faces, body language and clothing give an ironic rebuttal to the title. The geometric shapes of the figures seduce the viewer up close or from afar.

"The Wedding", similarly, has all the joy of a funeral. "Seated figure" depicts a man in a hat, slumped with hands on knees in cosmic despair, but his left shoulder standing improbably tall in defiance and pride.

"Snow Scene, Township" is a sublime impressionist rendering of that rare occurrence, snowfall in Johannesburg. "The Penny Whistlers" nods to a cheap and popular musical instrument, while "Fah Fee" recalls a widely played Chinese numbers game not unlike working-class bingo.

A "Township Scene" from 1969 is a glowing red and orange haze of people and animals that evokes San cave paintings from millennia ago.

Ngatane walks that tightrope from which many fall. He captures the warmth of township people, even with a tinge of nostalgia, yet never glosses over the hardship and degradation represented by shacks, dirt roads and stray dogs. He eulogises the poor but never glamorises poverty.

The grimmest of scenes are parodied with flamboyant colours. Neville Dubow, an art critic, put it: "This is life in the raw, but couched in terms which are always life-enhancing and not life-defeating."

What's also remarkable is the range of subjects and styles, borrowing from old masters but bending them to his own expression. Aside from these scenes from Soweto, you are caught off guard by "Nude Woman", a tender portrait that, the caption noted, "is a rare reminder that the nude does not have to be the prerogative of white artists only".

A still life painting shows a feather in a jar, the silence inviolable, the fibres so exquisite you long to touch them. A portrait of Ngatane's younger brother shows him an earnest and hopeful student; but a stylised version in violent colours locates him in some Van Gogh or Munch nightmare.

Impressionism and cubism, abstract and documentary realism are all here, delivered in watercolours and oils but also in varied materials including sand and plaster-of-paris. He belonged to an artistic community but followed the beat of his own drum.

Ngatane was born in Lesotho in 1938, went to school in Soweto and studied at the influential Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, where Picasso was a lodestar. His teacher, Cecil Skotnes, said: "We soon discovered that painting was not just a hobby for him, but a way of life."

A book accompanying the exhibition, A Setting Apart, notes that the perpetually difficult life of an artist was heightened by South Africa's apartheid legislation. Failure to show a regular job in their pass book when it was inspected by police could see them sent to labour farms or prison.

Ngatane held down a day job for a while, but became a successful painter and teacher able to exhibit and sell his work. He was also famed locally as a registered boxer and for playing the penny whistle in jazz bands.

But in 1970 he was involved in a car crash that led to the death of his wife, Thembi. His health and his art went into decline, and a year later he collapsed and died from the effects of tuberculosis. He had worked in a small studio which lacked proper ventilation to remove the turpentine fixatives that slowly poisoned his lungs.

Ephraim Ngatane was 32 years old, though it seems perverse to say that such a body of work represents promise unfulfilled. His father lived to be 100, his mother to be 99. At their request, new tombstones were placed at the graves of Ngatane and his wife in 1993.

Unfortunately, the engraver misspelled the name of this neglected genius. So it stands, carved in stone, as "Ephriam".

Stephen H Smith participates in the night photography monthly assignment

A review of Trell Burton's portfolio

Eebygumcaptain participates in the night photography monthly assignment

Photographer Pål Hansen explains why he chose the winning shot

Photographer Pål Hansen judged the macro competition, and he has chosen Patrick Widdess' shot of a drop of water. Pål explains why:

"The picture is competently executed and although there were images which felt more technically complete in terms of macro imagery I feel that this image of the droplet is creative and an interesting image in comparison to most of the other images. The bland colours and mundane subject becomes interesting by looking at a very small detail that introduces you to the greater picture around it. The image is a result of a photographer that dares to look away from the obvious and what immediately appeals to the eye."

Patrick Widdess wins a Nikon D5000.

A local's guide to galleries, warehouse studios and quirky cafes in the city's burgeoning arts district of Chiesa Rossa, ahead of next month's Milan Design Fair

Milan, the world capital of design, has much more to offer than its exclusive Via della Spiga and Via Monte Napoleone, where fashion victims and models air kiss and live off froth. Beyond the historical Duomo, beyond the boho-chic Brera, the southern district of Chiesa Rossa - ensconced between Porta Ticinese, Porta Genova, the canals and the art deco former central electric on Via Giovanni da Cermenate ? was once home to factory workers, but is now where young designers dream up the shapes of the future.

Our guide was born and bred in Chiesa Rossa - film director and photographer Marina Spada, former assistant to actor, comedian, screenwriter and director Roberto Benigni, who garnered international awards for Come l'Ombra, her 2006 film which takes place over a summer in Milan.

1. Design at SuperStudio

Twenty-six years ago, Italian fashion photographer Fabrizio Ferri and fashion editor Flavio Lucchini decided to convert the disused factories and warehouses off the Via Tortona into a place to train aspiring fashion photographers. "Their initiative really started the conversion of the area which until then was still considered an industrial suburb," says Spada. During the 90s, Ferri and Lucchini opened 19 studios. Soon after, Armani asked Japanese architect Tadao Ando to transform the former Nestlé building into his new headquarters. Today, SuperStudio offers some of the best fashion photographic studios and sets in the world. However, the area has retained its 20th-century industrial and artisan spirit; via Tortona, via Forcella and via Savona are worth a long détour. SuperStudio organises fashion and design events, art shows and concerts all year long.
? Via Forcella, 13-17; superstudiogroup.com.

2. Forma

Opened only five years ago in a disused tramway warehouse, this international centre for photography is the first of its kind in Milan to offer a print lab, an exhibition space, a school, a bookshop and a restaurant. "Located on a former cemetery, it has a special atmosphere and is full of art students," says Spada. "I also love taking a peek at the nearby tramway depot through the big glass windows on the terrace." Until 2 June, there is an exhibition of Paolo Morello's vintage prints covering the history of Italian photography from the post war years through to the mid 1970s.
? Piazza Tito Lucrezia Caro, 1, formafoto.it; admission: ?7.50 (£6.70).

3. Café Divan

Launched exactly a year ago, Café Divan offers freshly baked brioches, panini and soup, which will keep you going while you surf the web for free surrounded by black candelabras and white stucco, black lacquered tables and giant white sofas. "It may look extremely sleek, but the atmosphere is very relaxed" says Spada. "More than the décor, I come for their food which is very fresh, and prepared and cooked on the premises."
? Via Vigevano, 33; cafedivan.it.

4. Mercato Communale

"This covered market is a miracle," says Spada. "I go there often just to see something that may be natural in France or Britain but feels revolutionary here in the land of Berlusconi: old local ladies sharing recipes and jokes with South American grocers." Open Monday to Saturdays, this 1940s public market with its traditional Italian butchers and newly-arrived Peruvian and Argentinean grocers is a lively, colourful and aromatic meeting point for Milanese of all ages, right by the canals at Porta Ticinese.
? Piazza XXIV Maggia.

5. Le Trottoir

This 400-year-old gate house where visitors had to pay to enter the city now offers drinks and all-night music at weekends. Conceived as a meeting point for artists, it is located in the middle of Piazza XXIV Maggia. It's spread over three levels, and has a grotto-esque feel thanks to its candle-lit bar and its many little salons all connected to each other through little corridors. It also has a terrace for daytime coffee. Le Trottoir organises cultural events throughout the year.
? Piazza XXIV Maggia, 1; letrottoir.it.

6. La Darsena's canals

"The canals give Milan the charm and warmth it may lack at first sight, especially for first-time visitors," says Spada. Designed by Leonardo da Vinci then redesigned by Mussolini's architects in the 1920s, they offer an exquisite respite from the frantic pace of Milanese life. Lined with art galleries, cafés and bars, Naviglio Grande and Naviglio Pavese are also famous for their boat-restaurants and mini-cruises (?12 for an hour cruise, running every hour from Friday to Sunday). Also, every year, since the 1930s, 11 teams compete on racing boats to win the Leonardo Trophy (8 and 9 May).
? naviglilombardi.it.

7. Gelateria di Ripa di Porte Cinese

The walls of this compact antiquated shop are covered with wooden and glass cabinets displaying hundreds of rows of ice-cream cones turned upside down. Located right at the angle with Via Gorizia, and facing Naviglio Grande, it has a wooden bench outside with a view on to the canal. "My parents used to come here when they were teenagers during the war," says Spada. "Many shops around here haven't changed at all since the 1920s, sometimes earlier." If you're wondering what the Italians call "English soup" (zuppa inglese), it's custard flavoured ice-cream, and it's delicious. "They also do Nutella pancakes," adds Spada.
? Ripa di Porte Cinese, 1; Two scoops: ?3.

8. Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro

Milan's answer to Tate Modern is located in a former 1926 turbine hall. The museum, which bears the name of the great Italian sculptor, Arnaldo Pomodoro, opened its doors in September 2005 and is primarily dedicated to sculpture. The Fondazione welcomes guest curators and cross-disciplinary arts and there are exhibitions all year round, as well as events and concerts. Currently showing is Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias' poetic sculptures. "I love what architect Pier Luigi Cerri did with the space of this former electric factory," comments Marina Spada, "it's so full of energy. I never know if it's the art or the ghost of electricity."
? Via Andrea Solari, 35; fondazionearnaldopomodoro.it. Open Wednesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm. Admission: ?8.

9. Il Libraccio

With a permanent 50% off tag, Il Libraccio offers the best book bargains in town and the secondhand section extends to another shop opposite. Don't miss the art and architecture section with more than 5,000 titles, among them small publishers' books. Il Libraccio has a foreign language section and very helpful assistants. Discreet browsing is also allowed and made possible in the bookshop's large alleys. Il Libraccio at number 2, on Naviglio Grande, is dedicated to books at ?2. You can also sell your books there.
? Naviglio Grande, 2 and Via Corsico, 9; libraccio.it

10. Villa Necchi

This place is outside the Chiesa Rossa, but it's worth the detour. Built between 1932 and 1935 by Milanese architect Piero Portaluppi, Villa Necchi has been left unchanged since then. Bequeathed to the Italian National Trust a few years ago, it tells the story of a rich family who, on returning to their villa after the war, decided to embellish it with rococo and neo-renaissance additions. A clash of powerful styles makes for an unforgettable experience. Don't miss the black bathroom in the guests' apartments on the first floor, the impeccably art-deco butler's tea-room and the framed autographed pictures of Europe's royalties who often stayed here as family friends.
? Villa Mozart, 14; casemuseomilano.it. Admission: ?8 (with a free 75-minute guided tour).

? Milan Design Fair runs 14-19 April, 2010.

Japan's population is shrinking, leaving a landscape of crumbling architecture and shuttered neglect. Blogger Richard Hendy has fallen for its eerie beauty

Outside Tokyo and its other metropolises, Japan is dying a strange death. It's due to demographics. First: advances in medicine and a diet high in raw squid have helped to make Japan the oldest society that has ever existed in the long history of human societies. Second, because of its ridiculously low birth rate and frosty attitude to immigrants, Japan is now the first large industrialised country to experience a population decrease as a result of natural causes. In short, as its oldsters get even older, and its youngsters spend all their time commuting on packed trains in identical black suits instead of having wild unprotected sex, Japan's population is shrinking. Very rapidly, in fact. In 2008, it lost 79,000 people. If such trends continue, the Japanese child and working-age population will decrease by almost half in the coming 50 years, while the ranks of the elderly will swell.

What does this mean? To Richard Hendy, whose ongoing online essay Spike Japan is some of the funniest and saddest writing on contemporary Japan today ? and to whom I am in debt for the statistics in the preceding paragraph ? it means rust. Lots and lots of beautiful rust.

A self-proclaimed "luster after rust", Hendy travels the Japanese hinterland taking photos of crumbling architecture and shuttered buildings. He goes to the remote, and not-so-remote, places from which the population is disappearing. He tracks abandoned railway lines. He takes pictures of deserted schools. He wanders through silent factories. And he revels, if that's the right word, in the melancholy beauty of his adopted country's air of neglect. He says things such as "What a patchwork quilt of corrugation" or "Look how delicately the embers of rust lick up and down the ridges and furrows; how the windows shed tears, grow beards of rust". Meanwhile, he unspools a wry and uniquely informed commentary on Japan's twin woes: economic (aka "the malodorous pall of the Bubble") and demographic. Together, these two demons have all but utterly consumed hundreds of towns, thousands of villages. Hendy is determined, in his odd way, to honour them.

You can scan through Spike Japan for the spectacular snaps, but you'll likely soon be snared by the stories, too; the rhapsodies about decaying infrastructure. He goes to Oizumi, where the Brazilian descendants of Japanese emigres had a large, vibrant community until the recession shuttered most of the main-street shops. He follows the Kashima Tetsudo line, which recently joined the ranks of Hokkaido's dead railways; between 1985 and 1989 it lost a full 20 passenger lines, "an axe even more brutal and wielded over a shorter span than the one Richard Beeching brought down on British Rail in the 1960s". He takes snaps of disused bridges, forsaken hamlets and station platforms lost to encroaching greenery. The photos have an eerie poignancy. Can this really be the world's second-largest economy?

Like most Japanophiles, he has a taste for kitsch. He gets drunk at a bad dance party in an abandoned brewery in Kushiro. He raves about "the magnifience of [the] squalor", of the dilapidated former party district of Monbetsu. He visits what must be the least scary House of Horrors ever constructed, a shabby joke of a ride populated with creaky animatronic monsters that ends with two talking bears pleading for the disputed Northern Territories to be returned to Japan.

But he saves his best photos, and his best writing, for "the big one": Yubari, in Hokkaido. Explaining his fascination with Yubari, he writes:

It's always been about the unparalleled enormity of what Yubari has been through in the last half-century, as it lost almost all its coal mines in a single generation, from 1965 to 1990, and a staggering 90% of its population in two generations: 1960 to the present. The poster children for the industrial decline of the US, places like Youngstown, Ohio, Gary, Indiana, even the baddest of them all, Detroit ? none come close to the experience of Yubari, which has gone from being a vibrant if still gritty metropolis of around 120,000 people in 1960, replete with cinemas, dancehalls, and even a five-storey department store, to a mere shell of a city. It's a city in name only, its 11,500 people strung out across the hills and mountains in what now amounts to no more than a straggle of villages.

Yubari now staggers forward on the crutch of its comically optimistic melon industry, as well as an exceedingly creepy caramel factory, where the employees on the assembly line wear white biological-hazard suits like something out of ET. Hendy takes awestruck photos of the posters of Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and John Wayne films that Yubari administrators have seen fit to erect throughout its desolate town centre. Elsewhere, he finds a poster for a sweet potato liquor that proclaims: "Our town will revive full of smile in near future," and a huge, corroded pillar reading: "Model town: with everyone's effort we can drive away bad behaviour." The pillar is the only remnant of the nearby town of Kashima, home to 20,000 people in 1960, now vanished from the map in all but name.

Most affecting of all is the hilarious, terrifying, heartbreaking ruin of Coal History Village. Like failing mining towns the world over, when supplies ran low, Yubari turned to the dark alchemy of tourism in a desperate bid to turn coal into gold. Coal History Village was half museum, half theme park. The entire complex, water slides and all, now stands derelict. The photos are incredible. "Everything in Yubari rusts," Hendy writes.

As Yubari, so Japan. Hendy's demographics seem implacable: the dependency ratio of retirees to the working population will skyrocket. Medical costs will join it in the clouds. The pension system will run out of money. Spending on infrastructure will stop. The economy will shrink, year after year after year. "Japan is on the threshold of turning into the world's first post-growth society," Hendy writes. That he's able to find beauty on the other side of that threshold is, perhaps, his most remarkable achievement.

A new online archive records painted advertising across the country. Find out where your local signs are
? Get the data

The History of Advertising Trust launches its Ghostsigns Archive today, documenting and archiving painted advertising on buildings across the UK.

Painted signs were once common but have been replaced by printed billboards, and those that survive are fading fast, or being demolished during building work.

Project manager Sam Roberts has documented over 650 painted 'ghostsigns' around the country, with the help of interested photographers through the Ghostsigns Flickr group.

The spreadsheet here records the location of each advert (with partial postcode where available), enabling you to find your local signs. The History of Advertising Trust has also provided image links for some of the ghostsigns, and further URLs will be added as they become available.

Are there painted adverts in your area that haven't been documented yet? If so contact the Ghostsigns archive, and help the History of Advertising Trust to preserve this important piece of our advertising past for future generations.

Check out the list of images below, or download the spreadsheet for the full dataset of archived adverts, and see what you can do.

Download the data

? DATA: Ghostsigns archive with location and image links

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Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk

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David Smith revels in his discovery of fabled township artist Ephraim Ngatane, aka 'The Hogarth of Soweto'