Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 233

Criminals, courtrooms and how rave never died – the week in art

Famous artists' crimes and misdemeanours, from Caravaggio to Shepard Fairey, courtroom artists share tricks of the trade, 90s traveller photographs and more – all in your weekly art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Vikings: Life and Legend
Being a Viking was not an ethnic or a national identity, it was a vocation. This exhibition shows how young men from a settled agricultural society in Scandinavia would file down their teeth, tattoo their bodies and set off in long ships to scare the bejesus out of monks. Or as they sing stadium rock style in Horrible Histories: "We're gonna to paint the whole town red – Literally …"
• British Museum, London WC1B from 6 March until 22nd June

Other exhibitions this week

Ruin Lust
British culture has long been in love with ruins, from Romantic poets to Tacita Dean, and this exhibition surveys that thrilling history.
• Tate Britain, London SW1 from 4 March until 18 May

Haim Steinbach
This conceptual analyst of found objects continues a readymade odyssey that started in the 1970s.
• Serpentine Gallery, London W2 from 5 March until 21 April

Martino Gamper
Cool contemporary design, the perfect accompaniment to Zaha Hadid's architecture at the new Serpentine, but is it art? Probably.
• Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London W2 from 5 March until 21 April

Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story
If the Vikings are too modern for you, here is a journey to the very origins of our species – and our land.
• Natural History Museum, London SW7 until 28 September

Masterpiece of the week

The Sutton Hoo Helmet
The martial ways and rich mythologies of the Vikings were shared by Saxons, as can be seen in this eerie helmet of a Dark Age king from the Sutton Hoo burial.
• British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

Who are the 10 most criminal artists ever

That these traveller photos can let us relive 90s rave culture – and show how that heady world never died

The intimate secrets Picasso and Mondrian's studios revealed about them

How to get your hands on the secrets of the Viking hoard (including their hallucinogens)

The tricks of the trade for courtroom artists

How the board game Twister, AKA "sex in a box", was dreamed up

Why a man is being shot at by movie billboards

That photographer Robert Adams spent 45 years roving the prairies in search of the perfect shot

How surprising the new Great War in Portraits exhibition is

What Michael Jackson cuckoo clocks and migraines have in common

How sound artist Susan Philipsz is taking on the FBI

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

It's your last chance to share your art about holidays

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A shocking image of Syria's brutal war – a war that will continue regardless | Jonathan Jones

Even the most horrific photos are not able to prevent wars happening, they remain decoration for our conscience

This week the Guardian published the kind of picture that deserves to change the world. The front page of Thursday's print edition was dominated by an epic scene of human suffering, reproduced above. In a canyon between grey shattered precipices of bomb-ravaged buildings, an uncountable number of people wait for food. The faces in the front of the vast desperate crowd are anxious, stoical, subdued; beyond is a sea of heads whose expressions are unreadable but guessably similar.

This is a great photograph – and it wants the world to act. It was released by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and shows what happened when aid workers tried to give out food parcels at Yarmouk refugee camp on the edge of Damascus. The picture illuminates the mind-boggling devastation of the war in Syria: tottering jumbles of concrete and plaster gaping with voids and caverns, are all that is left of this cityscape. Above all, it captures the sheer scale of human suffering with this horribly mesmerising sea of faces.

But will it make a difference? It is intended as a campaigning picture, not a work of art. Here are the facts from one small part of Syria; here is the fate of part of the Palestinian people.

When I look at photographs that try to move the world to compassionate action I am haunted by Jurgen Stroop. In the 1940s, Stroop, the SS General who led the final attack on the Warsaw ghetto, collected some singularly devastating images of human suffering. They show the final defeat of the Jewish uprising in the ghetto in 1943. In one picture, soldiers, who happen to be Ukrainian, stand over the bodies of Jews killed in the fighting. In another, a factory burns. In another, people are being marched to a checkpoint to be taken to the camps. These images are harrowing, easily as harrowing as this week's picture from Damascus – for the victims here are all going to be murdered, not fed – and yet they were not taken to save lives, to move the world to action.

Stroop was accompanied by a photographer whose pictures illustrated an elegantly produced report that Stroop sent to Himmler, entitled The Jewish Quarter No Longer Exists, and the album shows why photographs don't stop wars or end suffering. The images he preserved are today part of the testimony of the Holocaust: few could look at them, surely, without feeling gut instincts of anger and compassion. Yet we know that their first onlookers contemplated them with satisfaction at a job well done – the extermination of race enemies.

The problem with photography that tries to wake up the world to conflict and suffering is that cruel and violent human situations come about precisely because ideologies – from nationalism to religion to liberal imperialism – ignore reality and blind themselves to others' pain. If the first casualty of war is truth, what is the use of pictures that appeal to a universal human court of justice and righteousness? We aspire to that common humanity, but war in its vicious modern forms comes about precisely because it is so easy to deny it even to your neighbours.

The impotence of images to shake the world to its senses was demonstrated in the first war that became a modern "issue", an international cause of debate and handwringing and taking sides. Robert Capa's photographs from the Spanish Civil War are unequivocally compassionate and empathetic with the people of Madrid enduring fascist air raids – but they were not enough to turn the tide and save the Republican cause. They surely helped to recruit idealists to fight for Spain – but Franco won anyway.

Capa was later one of the founders of Magnum Photos and died in Indochina, forming a human bridge between the age of the world wars and the post-1945 era in which humane photojournalism has become part of the fabric of modern conflict. Where there are wars there are heroes with cameras, seeing the horror on behalf of humanity. Larry Burrows in Vietnam, Don McCullin in Cyprus and Biafra – these are among the great witnesses of the modern age.

But wars and war crimes go on. And photography just seems to be a decoration for our conscience. We don't act because of photographs. There is no need to go far back in history to illustrate this depressing truth. Only last year, photographs on the front pages of newspapers around the world showed the bodies of children killed in a poison gas attack in Syria. The global debate provoked by these pictures ended in a considered decision not to intervene militarily. The House of Commons was widely congratulated by liberals for its refusal to take aggressive action. So why fool ourselves? We look at the terrors of our time and are shocked, but it's just fine feelings. Because this is not a well-governed world, there is no will to make it one, and as things stand, no curb on human cruelty.

PhotographyWar reportingSyriaMiddle East and North AfricaJonathan Jones
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Secrets of the Viking hoard – interactive

Plunder the British Museum’s Viking hoard, drink in hallucinogenic visions from middle earth and see a 1000-year-old magician’s box. As the new exhibition opens, our interactive gives you 360-degree close-ups of six of the best treasures on show, with Jonathan Jones as your guide

Jonathan Jones

The 10 most criminal artists ever

From murdering goldsmiths to patricide, sex with teenage girls and receiving stolen goods, the history of art is littered with crimes and misdemeanours

• The 10 most shocking performance artworks ever
• The 10 sexiest artworks ever
• The 10 most subversive women artists

1. Caravaggio

You can't make a top 10 of criminal artists without putting Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio after his hometown, up top. There is a cutting quality to Caravaggio's art, a tough cinematic realism that puts you right in the mean streets of early 17th-century Rome. And on those mean streets, he was a dangerous man. Aggressive, ill-tempered and given to carrying a sword, Caravaggio was constantly in trouble for everything from hitting waiters to slandering rivals. Eventually, inevitably, he killed a man in a fight on a piazza and had to flee Rome. On the run he painted works that seem full of guilt, including his dark self-portrait as the severed head of Goliath in which his eyes despair of his sins.

2. Benvenuto Cellini

But Caravaggio's reputation as a criminal is arguably exaggerated. Street fights were not rare in his time and he shows penitence in his art. Not so Benvenuto Cellini, who in the 16th century killed repeatedly without remorse and without being punished. He stabbed his brother's murderer to death with a long twisted dagger that he drove downward through the man's shoulder. He also killed a rival goldsmith and shot an innkeeper dead – and recounts all these crimes in his autobiography. He escaped being executed because he was so admired as an artist. In those days, geniuses really could get away with murder.

3. Banksy

Graffiti art is by definition a defiance of the law, and Britain's Banksy has made a brilliant career of painting and stencilling in places you are not supposed to. Part of his sucess is his ability to evade capture – a trial would presumably blow his famed anonymity. Yet the works that were once erased by angry councils and property owners are now regarded as precious treasures to be preserved, or broken off the building and sold.

4. Egon Schiele

In 1912 this dangerously erotic Austrian artist was arrested for supposedly having sex with a teenage girl. Schiele was 22 at the time – and the real motive for the arrest was a small town's horror that he was drawing his models in their underwear.

5. Picasso

The greatest modern artist received stolen goods in the early 20th century when a criminal friend of a friend – the connection between them was the avant garde poet Apollinaire – stole some ancient Iberian statues from the Louvre. They ended up in Picasso's studio where he made good use of them, studying their primitive forms to use in his raw revolutionary art.

6. Fra Filippo Lippi

The Carmelite friar and Renaissance genius Filippo Lippi seduced a young nun called Lucrezia Buti. They had a son and daughter. Was 15th-century Florence scandalised by this outrageous defiance of ecclesiastical law? Not really. Lippi was a favourite artist of Cosimo de' Medici, the most powerful man in the city, and as a result he was never prosecuted for his crime. His illegitimate son Filippino grew up to become a great artist in his own right.

7. Olive Wharry

This early 20th-century British artist was sent to prison after she burned down the tea house at Kew Gardens. Wharry was a suffragette and is remembered more for her defiance of the law than for her art. Her gentle watercolours make a surprising contrast with her deeds of arson and self-starvation.

8. Shepard Fairey

America's most famous contemporary steet artist and the creator of the Hope poster that helped elect Obama had a nasty run-in with the Boston police who refused to see his art as ... Well, as art. Instead they prosecuted him for damaging property, resulting in a court case and a probationary sentence.

9. Carlo Crivelli

This 15th-century artist is famous for his altarpieces bulging with fancy architecture, sinuous female saints and hyperrealistic images of fruit. His art was made for churches in eastern Italy and yet it seems more worldly than pious. In fact, the only reason Crivelli was in all these small cities decorating altarpieces for a living was that he was persona non grata in Venice after being convicted of a sex crime for sleeping with another man's wife.

10. Richard Dadd

This brilliantly gifted young Victorian artist was tragically struck by mental illness while touring Europe. Was his collapse the result of tensions between Victorian England and the sensuality of foreign climates? When he came home, he stabbed his father to death and spent the rest of his life in prisons and mental institutions where he painted fantastic fairy scenes of bizarre intensity. He died in Broadmoor.

ArtBanksyJonathan Jones
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The union jack: how can a redesign do it justice?

If Scottish independence comes about, the union jack will need a new look. But how can anything compare with this pop-iconic flag?
• Poll: what should the British flag look like if Scotland goes independent?

Nothing better reveals the depth of the psychological change to modern Britain (sorry – the British and Scottish Isles) if Scotland secedes than the bizarre and shocking thought that we would have to change one of the world's most pop-iconic flags.

These designs have been released by the Flag Institute to start a debate on how this heraldic totem of national identity might be reinvented. A Welsh dragon and an English cross? A starburst postmodern union jack? A funky tricolour? None of these designs look very reassuring when you set them alongside the pride and sentiment the union jack symbolises.

Britain's flag as it looks now, with its merging of English and Scottish crosses, was adopted in 1801 in time for the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo that gave Britain unquestioned world overlordship for the next 100 years. Yet this date is misleading, as is the myth that the name "union jack" only applies at sea – the Flag Institute says it is correct on sea and land. The union jack evolved from a design commissioned by James VI of Scotland when he became James I of England and many paintings from the 18th century show our flag looking recognisably similar to that of today.

The good old flag flies big and bold in about 1700 in a painting by Willem van der Velde of British and Dutch ships pounding each other with all guns blasting. It is kept proudly aloft in John Singleton Copley's painting The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January 1781, as heroic redcoats defend Jersey from the pesky French.

Perhaps more awkwardly for the current debate, William Hogarth's painting The March to Finchley, 1749, depicts the flag being carried by soldiers on their way to defend London from Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The flag of Britain in its earlier incarnation, as well as the design adopted in 1801, has therefore been part of every famous battle and victory parade that marked the rise of an archipelago off the coast of Europe to global power – and also our descent in the 20th century. Does that make it a hated imperial symbol to be gladly got rid of? People just don't seem to see it that way. In modern times the union jack has clad the Spice Girls and been recreated as a giant Olympic spin painting by Damien Hirst. It's really quite popular. While Jasper Johns did his best to make the American flag into pop art, the truth is that British pop culture is uniquely bound up with our breezy banner.

And why not? In the time the union jack was their symbol, the British did more than build, rule and give up an empire. They were not the world's worst baddies, and in some ways not baddies at all. They became a democracy without the bloodshed it cost in most other countries. They established a welfare state. They stole rock and pop from America and sold it back and ... Oh, it's all getting a bit David Bowie. So look, how about making the dragon a bit bigger? You need to keep the Welsh happy now.

• This article was corrected to say James VI, not James IV, became James I of England.

Scottish independenceScottish politicsScotlandArtJonathan Jones
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The Great War in Portraits review: 'They were people, not statistics'

From stiff portraits of the ruling elite who sparked the conflict to disfigured soldiers, the National Portrait Gallery's first world war exhibition interrogates history by making troubling contrasts
• The Great War in Portraits – in pictures

The eerie power of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition about the first world war is encapsulated in two contrasting faces.

The first belongs to Kaiser Wilhelm II, posing in full pomp to be painted in 1917 while soldiers of all sides were dying in a war he did his fair share to create. He looks disengaged from it all, dreamy and florid in his coiffeured moustache.

The second face is less assured. It belongs to 2nd Lieutenant RR Lumley, who in photographs taken at a pioneering centre for facial reconstruction in 1917 exhibits a mask of seared flesh. Lumley's burns are shown alongside an image of the same man before he was wounded – a smiling, pipe-smoking, optimistic officer.

The Great War introduced the world to carnage so vast and industrialised that bodies disintegrated in explosions or were lost in fields of mud. It was the war of the "unknown soldier". Looking at it through portraits is therefore very poignant. It redeems the dead from the miasma of horror that has engulfed this war in modern memory. They were people, not statistics, and each has a story to tell.

Some of those stories are almost unimaginable. Henry Tonks, though he does not name the disfigured soldiers he portrayed in pastels in 1916-17, does give them an undying sense of self. His drawings were made as medical records, but endure as Britain's greatest art of the war.

Although cruelly mutilated with eyes and cheeks shot away, the men in his portraits are not just ruined flesh. Each is powerfully expressive, bearing his wound with frankness and dignity. These damaged men are so much more alive, so much more engaging than the crowned heads of Europe who appear at the start of the show in their stiff uniforms of hereditary authority.

Yet even the crowned heads include victims, for this war was extreme enough to hit the emperor as well as the squaddie: Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination precipated the war in 1914, and Tsar Nicholas II, whom it would kill by revolution, gaze remotely out of their frozen portraits.

The centenary of 1914 has opened with historical debate, rather than complacent myth-making. It's right to ask awkward questions about the first world war – otherwise how can we learn from its horror? – and this exhibition is ultimately more of a question than a monument. It's not vast (but it has excellent loans and is free), and instead of browbeating the visitor with a year-by-year visual epic it offers a series of troubling contrasts.

In the spirit of revisionists who accuse leftwing historians of writing out the war's noble side, it includes portraits of the heroes who made the war seem like a chivalric spectacle after all. Flying ace Gilbert Insall stands in leather coat with slicked hair: he fought off an enemy attack and repaired his downed plane under German artillery fire, getting home safely to win the VC.

And yet in the greatest work of art here, the German modern artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reveals the effect of the noise, filth and gore of this savage war on so many soldiers. Portraying himself at a convalescent hospital in 1915, Kirchner is a haggard, emaciated yellow figure in a blue uniform, holding up an arm that has no hand. Kirchner did not lose his arm – he was discharged for a nervous collapse, not a physical injury – but he uses this brutal image to reveal his shattered state of mind.

The reasons the European powers abandoned an age of peace and prosperity to enter the hell of war in 1914 will always be controversial. The suffering they caused by doing so is beyond any reasonable doubt. Just look into Kirchner's haunted eyes.

Rating: 4/5

ArtFirst world warExhibitionsJonathan Jones
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When posters attack: the artist being shot at by Hollywood stars

Head Shots, Jon Burgerman's photographs of himself being 'shot' by actors on film posters, seem wide of the mark. It's not the movies that kill people: guns do

• The man being shot by movie billboards – in pictures

As the film industry prepares to celebrate its achievements at the Oscars, an artist is offering an alternative take on Hollywoodland in a series of interventions at New York subway stations.

Jon Burgerman poses for photographs in front of the gun-toting stars on violent film posters. With generous dollops of red goo, he looks as if he has been shot in the head by the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Daniel Craig. In one picture he's even been hit by an elvish arrow fired from a Hobbit poster.

Burgerman says his "Head Shots" are a protest against the violent imagery put out by Hollywood: "There are quite regular occurrences of gun violence and tragedy around the country, yet we have these celebrated members of society on giant billboards holding weapons". The photographs are not anything like as gory as they would be in real life – Burgerman's surreal demonstrations of what it might look like if a movie star shot you from a poster are comic provocations rather than tragic extrapolations. But is his message about the dangerous power of the movies actually true?

America has a catastrophic problem with gun violence. Obama's failure to get the gun law reform he wanted is the tragedy of his second term. Nor is Burgerman the first to blame Hollywood for helping to shape a lethal gun culture. Jim Carrey refused to publicise Kick-Ass 2 because he found its violence unacceptable after the Sandy Hook murders.

But this is all hopelessly beside the point. America's gun fans are, I believe, fond of saying that guns don't kill people, people do. But guns do kill people. They were invented for that purpose. Obviously murder can happen without them but a gun just makes it infinitely easier. Two people arguing without a gun are much less likely to kill each other than if there's a gun in the house. And it's obvious that a troubled individual can do far more harm with a gun than without.

It is obscene that such a large and powerful lobby in America refuses to accept these basic logical premises. To blame the film industry is a feeble distraction from the reality that Americans just have too many guns.

Movie posters don't kill people: guns do. The fear that films promote violence is misconceived because it ignores the nature of art – a representation of the world is not a set of instructions for acting in the world. We are not robots and art cannot programme us.

Art has always dwelt on violence. The first great European poem is Homer's Iliad, a gory account of the Trojan war: Homer glorifies heroic battle far more explicitly than any film ever would.

Do Homer's images cause violence? I haven't heard of any massacres in classics libraries.

Violence in real life comes of anger, alienation, isolation, greed and a whole host of other miseries – not from watching films or reading epic poems.

America doesn't have to end human misery, abolish the appetite for violence or create Jerusalem on Earth to reduce gun deaths. It simply has to make it harder to get guns. Until this simple common sense wins through, what does it matter how many orcs are killed by Orlando Bloom, who shoots an arrow into Jon Burgerman's heart in one of his teasing artworks?

ArtPhotographyUS gun controlFilm industryPostersJonathan Jones
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The great $1m Ai Weiwei protest – the week in art

A man in Miami smashed an Ai Weiwei vase thinking it was a fake. Plus mafia murders, spot the sniper and Henri Cartier-Bresson the communist – all in your favourite weekly art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

The Great War in Portraits
This promises to be one of the most moving cultural commemorations of the first world war that broke out a century ago, a war often imagined in black-and-white pictures of anonymous suffering and horror. On the cover of AJP Taylor's classic though outdated book The First World War, a skeleton in uniform occupies a muddy trench. Who was that skeleton? And who were those soldiers who advance en masse in old battlefield photographs?

The nature of the war led to anonymity in death. It was Europe's first industrialised war, as artillery technology pinned down massive armies. The loss of individuality was part of the anguish for those who faced being blown up or rotting in a crater. As the war poet Wilfred Owen asked: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"

When the war ended, fields were filled with unnamed human remains and monuments to the "unknown warrior". The dehumanising nature of mass conflict is one of the terrifying things the the first world war added to the world.

So this exhibition does something truly valuable. It looks at the people of 1914-18 as individuals, not statistics. It does that through paintings and photographs, modernist art and official portraiture. Here we can meet the first world war's heroes and villains and look into their haunted eyes.
• National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H from 27 February until 15 June

Other exhibitions this week

Richard Hawkins: Hijikata Twist
Los Angeles artist and curator Richard Hawkins investigates cross-currents of east and west by exploring the work of Japanese artist Tatsumi Hijikata and its influence on his own work.
• Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 from 28 February until 11 May

Ryan Mosley
A talented and promising painter shows his latest gallery of weird and wonderful fantasy figures.
• Alison Jacques Gallery, London WT1 until 15 March

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain
This exhibition explores the art of the 1980s through the ideas of the cultural theorist Raymond Williams. To paraphrase the 1980s TV hit Soap, "Confused? You will be".
• Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 from 28 February until 11 May

Rachel Howard: Northern Echo
The material pleasures of oil paint are the theme of Howard's exhibition that exults in melancholic art.
• Blain/Southern, London W1S until 22 March

Masterpiece of the week

Paolo Uccello – The Battle of San Romano (c 1438-40)
The lost world of medieval chivalry shines forth in this brilliantly experimental painting. As Uccello delights in the new art of perspective, he gives armoured bodies roundness and relishes the colours and heraldry of a battle that looks more like a tournament than an actual fight. This is the old innocent myth of war that ended forever in August 1914.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That the man who smashed an Ai Weiwei vase worth $1m as a protest assumed it was from Home Depot

That the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was a communist

How much time you can spend playing Spot the Sniper

How one photographer managed to shoot a mafia murder

That Obama has had to apologise to an art historian for saying that her subject is not a lucrative career choice

How much of a daredevil Lucinda Grange is for her mile-high photography

Which artist lets their cat do their work for them

The National Gallery has put many artworks on show that it once had to sell off as ugly

And finally...

Follow us on Twitter

Let the sunshine in and share your art about holidays

ArtNational Portrait GalleryTate LiverpoolPaintingExhibitionsDrawingAi WeiweiHenri Cartier-BressonPhotographyInstallationJonathan Jones
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Is Wikipedia the best place to promote women in art?

ArtAndFeminism Edit-a-Thons want to increase the number of Wikipedia entries about notable women in art. But is Wikipedia worthy of their efforts?

Scores of artists have recently got Wikipedia entries for the first time – all of them women. The surge has been as a result of ArtAndFeminism Edit-a-Thons, in which activists and experts get together for simultaneous mass edits of the popular, user-created online encyclopedia.

Reportedly there is a huge male bias on Wikipedia, with a preponderance of entries by men about men. And beyond this, women have been excluded and denigrated in art for centuries. Only in recent times has art even begun to be more equal. So the Edit-a-Thon is a Good Thing.

Seriously – who could object?

I'm sitting here at my keyboard, asking myself again – what's not to like?

Well …

The principle of staging an Edit-a-Thon epitomises why Wikipedia is a corrupting force and why it is eroding the world's intellect.

Getting together to edit the truth – to shape it in what you see as the right direction – is to take Wikipedia at its word. Its word is that all knowledge is democratic, not just in how it is spread, but how it is made. There are no absolute facts and no absolute experts: there are just lots of editors who add what they assert is information, correct what they claim are mistakes, and so on. The theory of the hive mind is that through this relativist process, a deeper collective knowledge must emerge.

But this is a sloppy postmodern cliche of what constitutes knowledge. Imagine if science were governed by Wikipedia. The results of an experiment would be posted, then "edited" by people whose expertise might be totally dubious, then it would become part of a democratic mass of information without at any stage being rigorously debated, disproved or proved. Science would melt into a relativist sludge.

True knowledge acknowledges facts in nature that have to be discovered, but that are objectively real. Historical events are objectively real – they happened. Works of art are objectively real, too. The cave paintings of Lascaux were no less real for being hidden away for tens of millennia.

Since the Renaissance, people have been trying to discover objective facts about the universe, nature and humanity. The university disciplines are the result. They are taught and researched in ways potentially accessible to all (there's no law that says only some people can become theoretical physicists). But they are disciplines, and if I want to know something worth knowing about black holes, I will try to read a book by a leading physicist, not absorb some third-hand factoids from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is nibbling away at the great project of human discovery that is the true source of all democracy, enlightenment and progress. It merely borrows information, recycles it and plays with it. Entries are written in what amounts to a parody of a traditional encyclopedia entry, all bland and pseudo-authoritative, even if the subject is totally trivial. Yet they are not objective – they are often wilful, until someone corrects them and they become dull. The result is a big Borgesian joke, and yet it is taken seriously, consulted continually, and a feminist group thinks the best way to spread the word about women artists is to get more of them in Wikipedia. They are probably right … but this is a grim reflection on the way we are headed.

Look at these times from a distant, objective viewpoint, and you have to see that Wikipedia resembles the epitomists and compilers who, as the Roman Empire fell, replaced creative thinking with dead anthologising. We may have technology they never dreamt of, but some of our mental habits increasingly resemble those of the Dark Ages.

WikipediaInternetWomenJonathan Jones
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Delight in the wonder of sinkholes, the Grand Canyons of suburbia | Jonathan Jones

These geological phenomena are a reminder that we build our lives on a thin crust floating over an immense cauldron of molten minerals

This picture of one of the sinkholes that have recently opened in Britain captures their mystery. These geological phenomena provide shafts of insight into the magic of our planet. Instead of terror, they should inspire delight.

Of course, it's easy to see here why fear blots out the wonder we should be feeling. In front of a perfectly ordinary house that could be yours or mine, a void suddenly appeared; it was big enough to swallow a car. Other holes this month have forced the closure of streets and made houses uninhabitable. But to gaze at this primordial pit in the drive of a home near High Wycombe is to see that, beyond the damage to property and fear for lives, this strange geological phenomenon conjures up dark caverns of the human mind.

In mythology, demons and devils live underground in deep pits and caverns. Sandro Botticelli's illustrations for Dante's Inferno, drawn in the late 15th century, include a precise map of hell, which Botticelli portrays as the world's biggest sinkhole. His design accurately reproduces the infernal pit described by Dante, who was following the ancients towards the centre of the Earth. According to the Roman poet Virgil, the entrance to the underworld can be found near Lake Avernus, outside Naples.

The most awful fear sinkholes inspire is that of being swallowed up alive. Could your bed fall into a hole in the middle of the night? It's the stuff of horror stories. In Edgar Allan Poe's tale The Fall of the House of Usher, a house is swallowed up so that nothing is left, not because of poor foundations but mental sickness: the madness that afflicts the Usher family finally consumes the very fabric of their ancient home.

Poe's eerie tale captures what is supposedly scary about sinkholes – their revelation that we build our lives on shaky foundations. The Usher family is ancient and its house is venerable, but a poison at the root ruins it all in a moment, leaving nothing but a deep dark tarn.

And yet, the fact that we build our houses on ever-changing ground is actually a glimpse of the magnificent power of nature.

To build or buy a house, to simply drive to work and expect home to be there when you get back, is actually to take a massive gamble on a turbulent hidden planet. Sinkholes are no surprise - just a sudden revelation of the massive forces that are constantly changing the ground beneath our feet. Catastrophic change and unimaginable metamorphosis are the rule, not the exception, in geology. Sinkholes merely make visible what we choose to ignore.

Sinkholes are produced by erosion in sedimentary terrain. Chalk and limestone landscapes are very susceptible to such changes. Sedimentary rock interacts with rainwater. It dissolves naturally – that's what causes caves in limestone hills. Comparable processes create sinkholes. All we are seeing is the endless change that shapes and reshapes the world. When sinkholes open, geology is giving the modern world a nudge.

We like to ignore the fact that we're sitting on top of a thin crust floating over an immense cauldron of molten minerals. The Earth is not solid; it's a fiery ball of magma. In Britain we can forget this more easily than in many places because we don't have any live volcanoes to spew out the world's lethal innards, or gaps between tectonic plates that could cause a catastrophic earthquake.

Sinkholes are a small but impressive clue to the awe-inspiring reality that we are standing all the time atop a raging geological underworld. We should not fear them or moan on about the tiny dangers they pose. We should delight in these natural marvels, the Grand Canyons of suburbia.

SinkholesNatural disasters and extreme weatherGeologyNews photographyJonathan Jones
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