Personal record … John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Museum of Syracuse, 1971. Photograph: Jonas Mekas
Exhibition of the week: Jonas Mekas
The film-maker Jonas Mekas has been a hero of the New York art scene since the 1960s. He is not just an underground film-maker but the organiser and orchestrator of an entire cultural movement of alternative cinema that transformed ways of making art 50 years ago and still resonates today. Mekas helped Andy Warhol to become a film-maker and provided a personal record of Warhol and other avant garde figures, as well as of New York, in his own film diaries. Back then it seemed a strange idea for artists to make deadpan visual records of real life. Today the radical idea of everyday cinema that Mekas pioneered is everywhere in art galleries. Here is an artist who has truly shaped our time.
• Serpentine Gallery, London W2 until 27 January 2013
Other exhibitions this week
Mariko Mori
Rituals of the New Year are given a fantastical kitsch twist by Japan’s art pop star in a proper seasonal show.
• Royal Academy, London W1S from 13 December until 17 February 2013
Jim Shaw
Shaw is a superbly imaginative graphic artist with a surreal take on life, and this is the first big British survey of his work.
• Baltic, Gateshead NE8 until 17 February
Matt Saunders
Prints made on light-sensitive paper and a film feature in this exhibit called Century Rolls.
• Tate Liverpool, Liverpool L3 until 20 January 2013
Kevin Harman
This exhibition offers subversive meditations on portraiture involving mirrors and “pixel portraits”.
• Ingelby Gallery, Edinburgh EH8 until 22 December
Masterpiece of the week
Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate (1871-72) by Gustave Courbet
This painting is a crabbed, shadowy, gnarled thing that lodges in the mind and never leaves. Like an ugly memory, it haunts and troubles me. Courbet was being persecuted for his politics – he was a leader of the Paris Commune – when he painted this. It has his pain deeply encrusted into every apple skin.
• National Gallery, London WC2N
Image of the week
What we learned this week
All about the real Oscar Niemeyer, after his death aged 104
That 2012 Turner prize winner Elizabeth Price was in 80s indie band Talulah Gosh
And exactly how she feels about the Ebacc
How the Louvre is rejuvenating a French mining town
That pavements of the future might be bouncy
And a house made of polystyrene has won the RIBA Silver Medal
A Raphael drawing has fetched a record £29.7m at auction
And finally …
Do you want a job as a gallery assistant?
There’s a new Share your art theme. Get sending your works now
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
