Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 236

A porn star Disney princess? Why renegade artists are breaking the mould

Disney has become the world's most pervasive propagandist for oppressive myths of gender – so fair play to web artists for challenging the norm

Artists on the web are reimagining Disney princesses – those surreal creatures of so-called human perfection – from casting them as porn stars to portraying them with disabilities.

As satires on the global power of Disney go, these efforts are some way behind South Park's characterisation of Mickey Mouse as a violent corporate crime lord. However, the compulsion some people feel to alter Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the rest is only natural. Disney has become the world's most pervasive propagandist for oppressive myths of gender. Its "princesses" are brainless slender-waisted mannequins that little girls all over the world are being offered as an ideal. Disney's promotion of cliched femininity is one of the most regressive aspects of today's popular culture.

How did this happen? The first Disney "princess" was Snow White, who appeared in cinemas in 1937, to be followed by Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). But, as the staggered dates of these films reveal, they were not conceived as a series of princess movies. Walt Disney had the much more creative idea of translating the folktales of old Europe into feature-length cartoons. The most vivid images in these films are not the princesses as much as eerie fairytale villains and magic – such as the stunning final confrontation of good and evil in the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty.

But then I am of the masculine gender. Do girls relate differently to princesses? That is the logic of modern Disney, which has turned its leading female cartoon characters into a marketing phenomenon. Princess dolls and accessories and picture books and costumes are an unavoidable part of modern childhood if you're a girl. Parents can't really choose to shield their children – even if they discourage the princess stuff, someone is bound to give it as a gift.

To be fair to modern Disney, its princesses are not totally homogenous. Pocahontas provides a good way to discuss the history of western colonialism with a seven-year-old.

But they all do conform to a perniciously repetitive model of what girls are supposed to admire. There is nothing better, apparently, than being a princess. Forget architecture or astrophysics.

Disney should be ashamed of itself, but there is one consolation. Whatever transformations adult artists may perpetrate on princess dolls are nothing compared with what a child can do to one in 10 minutes. That really is surreal.

ArtWalt Disney CompanyGenderEqualityWomenJonathan Jones
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DIY Vermeer documentary utterly misses the point about old masters

Tim Jenison tried for a whole year to recreate a Vermeer painting – and all he got was a pedantic imitation

Tim's Vermeer is a film about a man who totally fails to paint a Vermeer.

That's right – fails. This is not how the acclaimed cinema documentary by American TV magicians Penn and Teller bills itself or how it has been received by reviewers. Inventor Tim Jenison, we're told, set out to discover how the 17th-century artist used optics, hoping to prove his theory by painting his own version of Vermeer's The Music Lesson. The result, we are told, is almost uncannily convincing – Tim uses simple technology to create a perfect Vermeer.

At the risk of offending the education secretary, I have to quote Blackadder here. It's a brilliant theory, with just one tiny flaw: it's bollocks.

Tim's painting does not look anything like a real Vermeer. It looks like what it is: a pedantic and laborious imitation.

To make his pastiche Vermeer, the Texan tech pioneer goes to unusual lengths in this cutesy film. He builds a room of the same dimensions as the one depicted in The Music Lesson. He creates identical windows and makes period furniture. He gets the right musical instruments. He dresses up his daughter as the girl at the keyboards.

All this to test the picture-making machine he's invented – or rather, if he is right, re-invented. For Jenison believes Vermeer himself used a mirror and camera obscura to get his "photographic" views. Working with such a set-up, very slowly, Jenison produces a painting that both he and the film-makers see as a convincing Vermeer.

"My friend Tim painted a Vermeer! He painted a Vermeer!" enthuses Penn.

But this is nonsense. Tim's Vermeer is not a Vermeer, any more than an Airfix model is a flying Spitfire.

The film performs a crude sleight of hand by never showing us a closeup of the real Vermeer painting. The masterpiece belongs to the Royal Collection in London. There's a scene outside Buckingham Palace, where Penn and Teller tell of Tim's quest to see it. But the only thing the film's audience get to see is a poster.

So it's a film about a man attempting to replicate a poster.

The original painting is not kept hidden away in some royal vault. Last summer it was in an exhibition at the National Gallery. It's a painting of hypnotic intrigue and psychological fascination – a painting to get obsessed with. But Tim Jenison never speaks with any passion about it, or any reverence for Vermeer. Neither he nor the filmmakers show any sense of the greatness of great art. The film is a depressing attempt to reduce genius to a trick. On the commentary, Penn keeps crassly saying Vermeer looks "photographic" and "cinematic", and the film purportedly proves that all the artist's magic lay in the use of an optical machine.

Yet the failure of Jenison's device to create any of the power of a real painting by Vermeer puts all these theories about painting and the camera obscura and "secret knowledge" in their place.

Did Vermeer use some kind of camera obscura in his workshop? It seems highly possible. Philip Steadman's book Vermeer's Camera – cited in the film – offers very strong circumstantial evidence. Vermeer has to be a prime candidate for the experiments with optics that David Hockney thinks pre-modern artists engaged in.

Was the instrument hypothesised by Jenison the actual device Vermeer constructed for himself? Again, perfectly possible. Got no problem with the science at all.

But how much does that actually tell us about Vermeer? Not much, it turns out. With his art machine, Jenison reproduces many aspects of The Music Lesson – but misses something crucial. At one point he admits feeling repulsed by a detail he's working on. As well he might.

It's like the horror film The Fly. The technology Jenison relies on can replicate art, but it does so synthetically, with no understanding of art's inner life. The "Vermeer" it spits out is a stillborn simulacrum.

So what does it lack? The film implies anyone can make a beautiful work of art with the right application of science. There is no need for mystical ideas like genius.

But the mysterious genius of Vermeer is exactly what's missing from Tim's Vermeer. It is arrogant to deny the enigmatic nature of Vermeer's art. If this art looks "optical", it can also look abstract. It is an act of seeing nature, not a work of copying it. Whether or not he made use of optical instruments, Vermeer looked at the world with a uniquely penetrating eye. He was able to paint what he saw with a delicate hand. If you can't see the astonishing nature of his talent when you are standing in front of his paintings you should walk away from them – not make a film about how easy they are to replicate.

Tim's Vermeer is the equivalent of someone hanging a painting-by-numbers version of a masterpiece over the mantelpiece and claiming it's as good as the real thing. At last, an art film for philistines.

Johannes VermeerArtDocumentaryDocumentaryJonathan Jones
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Come on, museums: stump up £14m to save Poussin's masterpiece

Ed Vaizey is wrong: there is no rich patron waiting to buy this work by the French great. It belongs in a British museum

So is this bye-bye, Poussin?

The culture secretary Ed Vaizey has put an export ban on a picture by the great 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin. He says that a private collector with £14m to spare needs to step forward and save it for the nation.

It sounds as unlikely as the nation suddenly deciding the 'big society' (remember that?) is a great idea after all. No one stepped up to buy Picasso's Child with a Dove for Britain. I'll be surprised if this story has a happy ending – if it is left to market forces.

Works of art only get saved for the nation, these days, if a museum decides to campaign for them. This is now a well-established and effective strategy. Museums have resources including publicity departments, communities of visitors, and curators who can act as spokespeople. When this organisation is combined with the energy of the Art Fund, the results are often excellent. From the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to the National Gallery, museums have been able to buy paintings they wanted and the nation needed.

For the government to call for a rich art lover to magically step in and buy a painting out of patriotism is a meaningless gesture. The age of heroic collectors like Sir Dennis Mahon is over. The upper class is hip to contemporary art, it doesn't want to fork out for French classicism.

Only museums can safeguard our heritage. So come on. A great museum needs to step up and save this painting for the nation.

The Infant Moses trampling Pharaoh's Crown (c1645-6) is a masterpiece of storytelling. It portrays a moment when the baby Moses, rescued from a basket on the riverbank, playfully trampled Pharaoh's headgear in a way that foreshadowed his later humiliation of Egypt when he led the Israelites to freedom.

But it's the way Poussin tells them. The energy of the boy Moses is a flare of electrical tension in a painting that stresses the gravitas of the Egyptian court: seated figures react sombrely as he sports. The scene is further weighted down by monumental architecture.

Poussin is the opposite of Caravaggio, who painted moments of agonising drama. In a Caravaggio painting, everything is compressed in a terrible visible fact. Poussin, by contrast, suggests the immense chains of events that precede and succeed his scenes. His paintings are not frozen moments but intimations of history.

In the weight and sobriety of this painting we absorb the deeper meaning of an apparently childish act. It foretells the serious stuff to come when Moses grows into a man.

This is a great work of art, that came to Britain at the end of the 18th century and belongs not just in this country but in one of our public collections. It's time for a museum to gear up its publicity machine, call the Art Fund, and launch a campaign.

Nicolas PoussinMuseumsPaintingArtJonathan Jones
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Martin Creed: Lights, love and loss – the artist whose gift grabs the audience

Contrast is between illusion and truth, and for Creed, whose first major retrospective opens next week, it seems, the truth is dark

One of Martin Creed's works of art is not a sculpture or an installation but a little essay about the tiny Italian island of Alicudi, where he bought a house in 2002. The thing about living on an island that is only reachable by boat, he writes, is that every time you leave you have to watch it "get smaller and smaller in the distance until it is gone".

The image is both beautiful and sad. As the island recedes, it takes on the perfect form of a rock sticking out of the sea: but to appreciate this you have to leave. Getting away from Alicudi "takes hours", observes Creed, "and hours later you can still see it there in the distance".

Perhaps, in the last moments, it resembles one of Creed's earliest creations, a blob of Blu-Tack that he stuck to a wall in 1993. Everything in Creed's art is on the brink of disappearing. From tiny sculptures made of Blu-Tack or square pieces of tape laboriously built up into cubes, to an entire nation ringing all the bells it can find for three minutes, his art is fragile and fleeting. The bells rang out and then they stopped.

Creed is a man who wears his passion on his sleeve. His art is a self-portrait, which may seem an unlikely way to describe works that are often either dismissed as empty gestures or praised with big cold words like Minimalism. In fact autobiography is what connects all Martin Creed's efforts. This is inherent in one of his most hifalutin gimmicks, the fact that all his Works are numbered in an ongoing series. His article for Italian Vogue about Alicudi for instance is Work No 577, while All The Bells, the public artwork that opened the 2012 Olympics, is Work No 1197. Is this numbering some quest for order, some attempt to give his art the qualities of a musical score? Perhaps, but what it really does is absolve him from defining his art or even calling it "art": what he has created is a special category of things in the world created by Martin Creed. What connects them is him, and that makes his entire output an epic act of slow, subtle confession.

When Creed opens a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery on Wednesday it will be the latest chapter in one of contemporary art's most glittering careers. It's hard to believe he was once such a nobody that when this unknown artist sent Work No 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, to Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, Serota's secretary sent it back flattened out – at least that's what Creed used to say.

He had his first public gallery show at Southampton Art Gallery, then he was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner prize and chose to exhibit Work No 227: The lights going on and off. He won. The rest is history written in white neon, as galleries and public buildings around the world can't resist putting up his reassuring sign, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT – art's equivalent of a Keep Calm and Carry On mug.

He has risen without being widely hated – quite an achievement in the competitive and divisive world of art. Ask about Creed and you find his art elicits a huge fund of admiration and affection from critics and curators. "He's a sweet, charming act", says critic Julian Bell, author of the art history book Mirror of the World, whose demand for art to reflect life is very much a description of Creed. "His work is all done in this light banter with the audience. It's deliciously irritating at times in the way conceptual art is supposed to be."

The warm feelings are shared by Stephen Deuchar, head of the Art Fund, who as director of Tate Britain commissioned one of Creed's most powerful pieces. Work No 850 sent athletes running a relay along the museum's stately Duveen Galleries, galloping past Turner, right through the summer and autumn of 2008. "It had the most incredible impact on the daily life of Tate Britain", remembers Deuchar. "One of the staff said to me when it ended that it was as if the soul had gone out of the building. There was that sense of it being the heartbeat of the gallery. It was such a visceral experience." Deuchar puts his finger on the universal simplicity of Creed at his best: "I always feel with Martin's work that he brings you close to the essence of things."

Every few years since the 1990s, Creed has used that knack for the essential to create a public work of art so lucid and human that it is irresistible. Along with the Tate Britain runners these include his installation of a room half-filled with balloons – it makes the world seem so light and loving – and his drop-dead gorgeous permanent inlaying of the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh with coloured marbles as rich and various as the floor of a Venetian palace.

Yet in recent years his art has become more wayward. His personal life has directly spilled into his work. On his website, the only works currently exhibited for the whole of 2013 – as other pieces wait to be unveiled in his South Bank extravaganza – are naive portraits including one of Anouchka Grose, a psychoanalyst who became his girlfriend after other relationships, including the one with Paola Pivi that led him to buy the house on Alicudi, broke up.

That same emotional outpouring can be heard in his songs. He has always made music as well as art. Creed's music is essential if you want to get the sense of his art. It's raw retro-punk. But while his early songs are arty sequences of numbers and words, his 2012 album Love to You is much more passionate. The feelings roar out. While the title track and a song called I Can't Stop Thinking About You express his need for love, Creed lashes out in Fuck Off, which goes "Fuck off, Fuck off, Fuck off …"

Creed was born into a Quaker family in Wakefield in 1968, then moved to Scotland when he was three. His Quaker inheritance rings out like a very loud bell as a clue to his art.

The restraint and "minimalism" of his Works echo the moral inheritance of Puritanism, its preference for the plain and honest. In the eloquent statement of his beliefs that is Work No 232, Creed declares in white neon that "The whole world + the work = the whole world." There's a moral imperative to this, a desire to make art that takes its place modestly and usefully in the world.

And yet, a savage rage and wild lusts have pushed more and more openly against the calm Quaker discipline of his series. He's made videos of people defecating and vomiting.

His exhibitions sometimes have a quality bordering on the obsessional, including a show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2010 that was full of repeated images of steps and numbers. This ordered mathematical side of his work can feel like an artistic compulsion. It can be headache inducing. His paintings and drawings, which have become a more prominent part of his work, can seem astonishingly empty in their simpistic slashes or ziggurat-like repetitions.

When they say things like this it's no wonder critics annoy him. The angriest song on his recent album has the same title as his new exhibition – "What's the point of it?" In the song, a vicious, reedy voice – a hostile critic's voice? – asks over and over again, "What's the point of it? What's the point of it?"

He certainly got asked this when he won the Turner prize. Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszcak has called Creed "the worst winner of all time of the Turner Prize". The lights go on; the lights go off. What's the point of it?

It's certainly funny. Work No 227 is currently installed at Tate Britain, after Tate purchased it last year. Standing in a grand empty room in this refurbished museum, appreciating it as art, is an inescapably ambivalent experience. On a sunny afternoon, the skylit room is not plunged into darkness when the overhead lights switch off. Instead it is blue and shadowy, a valley of natural light. Then the lights go on again and everything is bright. Falsely bright? The contrast is between illusion and truth – and for Creed, it seems, truth is dark.

The experience is both moving and self-conscious: thought-provoking and boring. You can't help feeling a bit like a caricature of a modern art lover, standing there appreciating … nothing. Other visitors poke their heads round the door, decide it's an empty room and head off for the Rossettis.

Yet it's a simple universal metaphor. The secret of Creed's art is that it speaks of ordinary things like love and loss. When someone dies the lights go off. That's what it's like. Or like seeing an island slowly vanish in the distance. What's the point of it? What's the point of lit?

A minimalist biography

Born 1968, in Wakefield

Education Slade School of Fine Art, London 1986-1990

Career MartinCreedWorks, 2000 Winner, 2001 Turner prize I Like Things, Milan, 2006 Solo show, London, 2007 Work No 850, Tate Britain, 2008 Scotsman Steps, Edinburgh 2011 All the Bells, 2012

High Point When an entire nation participated in All the Bells.

Low Point When then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's bell flew off on TV as he joined in All the Bells

He says "You have to hang on to being a loser, because every moment is lost. Every work is a desperate attempt to stem the flow of loss, to grab on to a floater amongst the dross."

They say "The deliberately irritating Fuck Off is like being harangued by a drunk, and will surely be responsible for one or two scratched heads and grumblings of 'Is this art?'"

Dave Simpson reviewing Creed's 2012 album in the Guardian.

"He has an amazing ability to find tension in things such as putting the smallest dog in the room next to the biggest dog."

Ralph Rugoff, Hayward Gallery.

"The tedious Martin Creed."

Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times.

Martin CreedJonathan Jones
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Vandals, scandals and a 'racist chair' – the week in art

A new take on an old design causes uproar online, as an AP photographer gets the sack for doctoring a photo of Syria – all in your weekly art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany
The Romantic age was one of the great revolutionary epochs in art. It set all the arts free from the craftsmanlike work of serving a patron or community and released the tortured artist to follow the mountain paths of genius – to put it Romantically. This drove painters (as well as musicians and poets) out into nature to find correlatives for a tumultuous inner world amid lonely ruins, wild seas and mountains. This exhibition brings together drawings by some of the great visionaries of Romanticism including JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. It should be a blast of Alpine glory.
• Courtauld Gallery, London WC2R, from 30 January until 27 April

Other exhibitions this week

Martin Creed
The clown prince of minimalism, fluxus and any other avant garde tradition you want to chuck in brings his uneasy wit to the South Bank.
• Hayward Gallery, London SE1, from 29 January until 27 April

Tom Wood
Epic landscape photographs taken in Ireland, Merseyside and Wales.
• Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno LL30, until 6 April

Elizabeth Price
An eerily beautiful film from the winner of the 2012 Turner prize.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, until 13 April

Sensing Spaces
The artfulness of architecture is to the fore in this celebration of contemporary space.
• Royal Academy, London W1J, from 25 January until 6 April

Masterpiece of the week

JMW Turner – Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway, 1844
A steam train rushes through the lashing rain as human genius contends with nature's powers and both seem ready to burst. Everything that is exhilarating and modern about Romanticism explodes from the canvas and into the onlooker's leaping heart.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That a photographer has been sacked for doctoring a shot in Syria

That Hockney has a 60-year obsession with poetry – and here are his favourites

About the dark side of zoo animals

That there's been a vandal scandal at Le Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel

… And a 'racist chair' scandal

A history of the Space Hopper

Stars of HBO's Girls want to know why women are so absent from art history

What the first ever Earthrise looks like – thanks to Nasa

Why Tracey Emin has run out of things to say

And finally ...

Follow us on Twitter

Share your art on the theme of movement now

JMW TurnerMartin CreedElizabeth PriceExhibitionsVideo artPaintingDrawingInstallationArtJonathan Jones
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Dalí: the first celebrity modernist

Call him a hack, call him a fascist but, on the 25th anniverary of Salvador Dalí's death, it's time to admit the Spanish surrealist made modern art popular and accessible

• Test your knowledge on the godfather of surrealism – quiz

It is 25 years to the day since Salvador Dalí died, in 1989. Is it an anniversary to celebrate, or commiserate, or forget?

No one can say Dalí was a negligible 20th-century artist. He was the first celebrity modernist. Picasso and Matisse were famous – very famous – but the work came first, celebrity second. By contrast, when Dalí made a speech in a diving suit or collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock, he was turning self-promotion into an art form – setting the stage for all artists since who have become pop culture icons.

It's striking that he died just as a new generation of media-savvy artists were taking the stage. In 1989, Jeff Koons was turning soft porn into art and Damien Hirst was soon to hire a shark fisherman. Dalí was there first. High art lite? He invented it.

Yet I cannot pretend to be immune to his charms. I had a Salvador Dalí poster in my bedroom as a teenager, and I thought it was really profound. I thought his work was the definition of modern art.

I still do partly think that. There's a big problem with seeing the surrealist movement as a pure, serious artistic phenomenon and Dalí as a hack who betrayed it. First, his best paintings are genuinely creepy and beautiful, and Un Chien Andalou, his 1929 cinematic collaboration with Luis Buñuel, is a masterpiece. But second, in taking modern art to the shops and turning it into telly, he recognised a reality. The avant garde in the modern age has two choices: either it is for a wealthy elite or it is for the masses. Dalí is accused, with some justice, of everything from snobbery to fascism, but the paradox is that he made modern art popular and accessible.

He also poisoned it with the past. As George Orwell once pointed out, Dalí was a gifted traditional draughtsman. His paintings echo the Renaissance and infect modern culture with art's wicked past. He's a corrupt old uncle who incites artistic perversity.

So we are unlikely ever to forget Dalí. What a Pandora's box The Great Masturbator opened.

Salvador DalíModernismPaintingJonathan Jones
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Is it really OK for adults to superhero-worship Alan Moore's comics?

Alan Moore says it's a 'cultural catastrophe' for the last century's ephemera to be taking over our own era. But should adults even be reading comics to begin with?

The comics writer Alan Moore has been denouncing superheroes. Moore, whose imaginative, witty, provocative creations include the superhero series Watchmen, says now that it's a "cultural catastrophe" for adults to embrace superheroes as serious art. They were created for children. But if it's a cultural catastrophe that adults invest energy in Batman, what about the fact that adults read comics at all?

At some point in the late 20th century it became respectable for grownups to read comics. As late as the 1970s, this was considered a mark of illiteracy and mental regression. I know because in one of the Dr Who novelisations I was reading avidly in those days, a villain's henchman is characterised as an idiot because he reads comics rather than proper books.

Then on a variety of fronts – from the ambitious graphic novel or history Maus, which uses the language of comics to speak of no less grave a theme than the Holocaust, to the scabrous reinvention of the Beano that is Viz – comics suddenly became OK for adults.

Why did this happen? And is it really OK? Perhaps it was inevitable that people like me, who grew up with visual images hitting us all the time from TV screens, would find picture stories a rich literary form. And yet the case against is weighty. Suppose for a moment we try to see it through the eyes of the late Kenneth Clark. I doubt if the author of Civilisation would accept comics into the western canon. An obsession with picture books might even be the mark of a barbaric time: monks in the dark ages who spent their lives illuminating the gospels were quite likely to be illiterate, and their crazed visual enrichment of texts can be seen as a substitute for actually reading or understanding.

In the Enlightenment, books were much plainer and people sat down to read long volumes with no pictures at all. That's civilisation. So does the rise of the adult comic mean we are returning to the dark ages?

If so, give me a mud hut and pile of comics. They really do make excellent adult reading. Comics have become good at everything from personal confession to scientific theory. At Christmas I read a graphic biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. It allows Feynman to speak in his own words. After an entertaining series of anecdotes about this great polymath, the comic "restages" some of his most important public lectures so we can encounter his ideas directly. I've been thinking about Feynman all month and it made me want to read his own works. What's not to like?

But Moore is right to question some aspects of today's comics culture. The banal Hollywood industry of turning piquant comics (including his) into mediocre blockbuster films is boring, and there is potentially something absurd about a civilisation that thinks graphic novels are way cooler than actual novels. There's a smug complacency about, say, the New York Times giving comics masses of review space. Are graphic novels just cultural capital for the university-educated who dig the postmodernity of the medium?

This is why I fell in love with Moore's comics. Unlike cool graphic novels about urban angst, his comics really are comics with a restless unrespectability. His dark ideas and savage humour make his works less cosy and more dangerous than any rival. He puts the shame back into the grownup comic, and that is as it should be.

Every kid knows comics are a guilty pleasure. That's the point of them.

Alan MooreComics and graphic novelsArtJonathan Jones
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Sulky chimps and skeletal Victorians: images from the margins of history | Jonathan Jones

The Wellcome Collection has put more than 100,000 images online. Here are five with the power to haunt

Visual images are tiny islands of history, in an ocean of forgetting. They are windows on vanished worlds and clues to the making of our own world. Some of these islands are connected to entire continents of knowledge. They make sense. Others just float in the middle of empty water, bizarre and lonely remnants of a drowned way of life.

The Wellcome Collection has just made over 100,000 historical images available online for free use that encompass both kinds of mysterious island. There are works of art by Goya and Van Gogh – masterpieces with a fixed place in the story of art. It is a real advance in freely available images to offer authored works like these without charge. Yet perhaps the most haunting images in this collection are pictures of people and animals at the margins of history, of "monsters", clinical case studies and ethnographic portraits. Those are the islands I want to visit.

Histoires prodigieuses, 1560

This picture of conjoined twins was created during a time when unusual births could not be explained scientifically. Instead they were seen through religious and magical eyes as portentous signs to be decoded. What did such "prodigies" reveal about coming events? These twins appear in a Renaissance book by Pierre Boaistuau that is entirely devoted to tales of prodigies. Yet although it inhabits the realm of the fantastic, this image has a sense of accuracy. Conjoined twins are not mythic monsters but a real human phenomenon. So this may in some sense be a portrait of sisters who lived in 16th century France. It was a strange life, sentenced to be gawped at as a "monster" and a sign from God.

Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872

In his caption to this drawing Charles Darwin says it portrays a "Chimpanzee disappointed and sulky". It is an illustration from an entertaining (but serious) study of facial expressions in the natural world that he published a year after his most controversial work, The Descent of Man. Darwin's theory of evolution provoked his enemies to make crude jokes about the absurdity of human beings being supposedly related to monkeys. He himself was caricatured as an ape. In publishing this sympathetic portrait of a chimp he turns the tables. It is not that humans are bestial. It is that beasts are capable of many "human" skills. Darwin's writings are full of love for the natural world whose law he discovered: in this chimpanzee's sulkiness we recognise both communication and emotion in a "lesser" creature.

Manchu Bride, 1871

The Scottish traveller and photographer John Thompson took this moving portrait in Beijing at a time when most western images of China were pejorative and contemptuous. The young woman dressed for her wedding in a fantastic regalia of flowers and silks is grave and shy, looking away from the camera lens. Who is she? What was her story? Only her luminous image survives, on a glass negative, to make us wonder at her silent world.

Miss C Before and After Treatment, 1873

This illustration comes from a Victorian book entitled Anorexia Nervosa, by William Withey Gull. In the upper picture Miss C is wasted and skeletal, an image of living death. In the lower portrait she is a full-cheeked picture of healthy Victorian womanhood. It's eerie to realise that anorexia, which we think of as a quintessentially contemporary illness, was diagnosed and treated in Victorian times. This drawing makes it seem all too typical of the age of Victorian patriarchy and repression, like the "hysterical" patients who were treated by Charcot and Freud. It is easy to see the contrast between illness and health here as socially constructed, with the male doctor's task to shape his patient into a "proper" woman. Where does that leave our understanding of anorexia today?

Silver King, a polar bear, being taken by ship away from his homeland, early 1900s

"The Most Beautiful Moving Pictures Ever Taken", says this poster for the nature documentaries of Paul J Rainey. Yet like the filmmaker who captured King Kong, it appears that Rainey did not just bring back amazing pictures – he also brought back the animals themselves. To 21st century sensibilities this scene of a gigantic polar bear being dragged from the Arctic, cruelly hoisted on the deck of Rainey's ship, is grotesque. A century ago it symbolised adventure. The bear ended up in the Bronx Zoo, whose Paul J Rainey gates still remember its captor, as does a marshland preserve named after him in Louisiana. Yet this picture is a testament to the unthinking violence towards the natural world that scarred "modern" times.

ArtJonathan Jones
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Why there's nothing racist about the 'racist chair'

Bjarne Melgaard's black woman in the shape of a chair – as seen in the now-notorious photoshoot of Roman Abramovich's girlfriend Dasha Zhukova – has been totally misunderstood

The contemporary art world likes to think it has a common touch. While classical music is for the elite and the literary novel a minority taste, the art of today speaks the demotic and gets its message heard, from Jeff Koons to Grayson Perry, from Damien Hirst to Bjarne Melgaard.

Bjarne who?

I mean the Norwegian-born, New York-based artist who has just blundered, or been led by a blundering fan, into the baleful glare of the outraged internet.

Melgaard is the creator of a chair on which Russian art promoter Dasha Zhukova has been photographed, to international horror. The chair is shaped like a woman tied up, lying on her back with her boots as a backrest. Oh, and she's black.

Cue accusations of racism, attempts to apologise/explain and articles about the whole sorry saga. But in reality, it is not about racism as such. It is about the clumsy exposure of a strange work of art to popular culture in a way that begs to be misunderstood.

The New York Times has described Melgaard as a "projectile vomiter" of an artist. Excess is his thing. One of his other sculptures shows the Pink Panther smoking crystal meth.

His art may be in bad taste, but I am fairly sure that in making this chair he was not intending to denigrate black women. Rather it is a comment on the controversial works of the 1960s British artist Allen Jones.

It's a pastiche of the pop art sculptures Jones made in the late 60s, which use women – literally – as furniture. Jones's art reflects the attitudes of its time. Its hyperbolic sci-fi look inspired the furniture of the Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange.

Today it is an accepted part of modern art history and in fact Jones has had a revival lately.

So what was Melgaard's point? Surely, in making this woman black he means to retoxify the art of Allen Jones, to offend people with an image long since accepted. The intention is therefore the opposite of racist: it is to question power and representation. Are you offended by this black woman's abuse? Then why is it OK for white women to be similarly humiliated in a respected pop art icon in the Tate collection?

Offensiveness in art is often a way to satirise injustice. But this provocative sculpture has been naively injected into a popular culture whose default mode, in the Twitter age, is to catch out celebrities and call them names – racist!

There's a lot of idiocy in this tale, but none of it necessarily comes from the work of art now crassly labelled a "racist chair".

SculptureDasha ZhukovaRace issuesArtJonathan Jones
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A rabbit in Nelson Mandela's ear and other artistic insults

Sculptors hid the rabbit after being rushed and forbidden to sign their statue. But similar jokes played by some of the greatest artists who ever lived were vicious in comparison

Never piss off an artist – you may find yourself ridiculed for all eternity by a hidden message in one of their works. Under pressure from South African authorities to finish a statue of Nelson Mandela quickly, and forbidden to sign it, sculptors Andre Prinsloo and Ruhan Janse van Vuuren hid a bronze rabbit in Mandela's ear. They admit it was a pointed joke – the Afrikaans word for rabbit means haste.

Maybe they are alluding to similar jokes played by some of the greatest artists who ever lived. Michelangelo is the godfather of artistic insults. His statue of Lorenzo de' Medici at San Lorenzo in Florence discreetly rests its arm on a money box: this easily ignored detail, half concealed by a monster mask that is itself troubling, is Michelangelo's dig at the obscene wealth of the Medici family.

He also claimed that the figure of Night in the same tomb complex expresses his desire to sleep until the fall of Medici tyranny. With similar scorn he portrayed a Vatican official who criticised him as a snake-tailed demon in his fresco The Last Judgement. More enigmatically, his statue The Dying Slave, created for the Tomb of Pope Julius II, has an ape hidden behind it. Apes symbolise sin. Is Michelangelo confessing to the sexual nature of this swooning, ecstatic male nude? Or hinting that Pope Julius was a man of base passions?

Michelangelo's contemporary Titian also knew how to slip a silent stiletto between the shoulderblades of an unsuspecting victim. The greed of art dealer Jacopo Strada was notorious. Titian makes it visible for all time in a portrait of Strada – yet in ways the client could not pin down. He holds a nude statue just a little too tightly; there are too many coins on view. Nothing overt, but enough to tell us what a scumbag he was in Titian's eyes.

Sometimes, the most vicious truth is hidden in plain sight. Napoleon Bonaparte wanted artists to show him as an emperor in quasi-royal regalia. He certainly could not complain about the portrait that Ingres painted of him in 1806. After all, it shows him as he wished to be seen, as a world commander on the imperial throne, swaddled in pomp and finery. Ingres does not need to hide any symbols. Instead he uses a glassy, waxen style, deprived of warmth, to convey the icy inhumanity of power. It is a monstrous painting.

A rabbit? That's getting off lightly.

SculptureArtNelson MandelaSouth AfricaAfricaJonathan Jones
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