Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 241

Crib guide: in search of the first Christmas-card nativity

We stick them in the post without a thought – but who painted the first Nativity?

Great art comes tumbling through your letterbox at this time of year. Here are the kings from the east laden with gifts, gathering at a stable where an ox and an ass look lovingly at a baby child. Mary sits demurely. Shepherds hearken to an angel. You pop it on the mantelpiece with all the other cards.

Paintings of the nativity, in many styles and by some of the greatest artists ever, aren't just Christmas-card gold – they're frankincense and myrrh, too. The likes of Botticelli and Dürer have turned their imaginations to the scene and its theme, either concentrating just on Mary, Joseph and Jesus in rapt stillness, or gathering crowds of wise kings and servants and camels to create a great human panorama like Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi. Christmas would not be Christmas without a couple of these masterpieces half-hidden among the tinsel.

Recently, I started wondering: when was the first Noel in art? Botticelli's Mystic Nativity, a popular choice for Christmas cards that hangs in London's National Gallery, was painted half a millennium ago. But what is the world's oldest nativity scene? Where can you find the grandfather of all Christmas cards?

The first clue is at one of the world's most revered churches: Santa Maria Maggiore, squatting in the middle of a massive crossroads in Rome. In its souvenir shop, the grinning face of Pope Francis is on every mug and calendar. But step inside its long straight hall and you travel back in time: this is a building that dates from the 5th century AD. Some of its art is more than 1,500 years old. High up in the half-light are mosaics of the infancy of Jesus. Is there a nativity up there? I can't see one – but wait, aren't those the Magi, the three Persian astronomer-kings who followed a star to Bethlehem to see the newborn son of God? In this mosaic, bizarrely, they're tarted up in jewels and pointy hats. As for baby Jesus, he greets them sitting on a throne.

When we think of the nativity in art, it is not this. We picture a warm, intimate, human moment. In The Nativity at Night, painted by Geertgen tot Sint Jans in about 1490, a light shining in the darkness illuminates the gentle face of Mary as she contemplates her wondrous child. Is the humble drama we see in this little painting an invention of the Renaissance era when it was created? It seems a long leap from the primitive Magi and godlike Christchild of Santa Maria Maggiore to the delicate humanity of Geertgen tot Sint Jans.

So the simplest answer to my question is disappointing: aspects of the nativity have been depicted ever since there were Christians. But where's the cuteness in these ancient images? Where's that atmosphere of carols being sung in the snow? Stille nacht, heilige nacht ...

A wondrous work of art from dark-ages Germany provides my next crucial clue. The Lorsch Gospels date from the court of Charlemagne at Aachen in about 810AD. The carved ivory cover of this book, now in the V&A, is a masterpiece. It includes a nativity scene that is exactly what I'm looking for. A deeply anthropomorphic, sensitive ox and ass watch over Christ in the stable while Mary rests and an angel calls the shepherds from their flocks. It's a lovely telling of the Christmas story and – although it's by no means the grandfather of all Christmas cards – it leads me east.

The age of Charlemagne saw Europe's first "renaissance", with barbarian warlords trying to imitate the lost grandeur of Rome. They deliberately copied earlier art, and this nativity is based on a similar one found on a bishop's ivory throne in Ravenna, Italy. And that throne was made in the 6th century AD in Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman empire that lived on after the empire fell.

So it was in Byzantium that sensitive, warm, human images of the nativity first appeared. Like the Magi following that star, this beautiful artistic tradition came from the east and was gratefully received by Europeans who have loved these winter pictures ever since. What a gift.

ArtJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Damien Hirst and Derren Brown – the week in art

An art heist that turned out not to be an illusion, plus the selfies of the year and the pinhole camera comeback – in your weekly despatch

Exhibition of the week

Georgians Revealed
When did the modern world start? The 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt famously credited the Italian Renaissance with giving birth to a modern outlook, but more recent historians, like Roy Porter, have seen 18th-century Britain under the rule of kings George I, II and III as the true nursery of the way we live now. This was a commercial, scientific age that created such modern things as the pre-Tarmac modern road and ultimately, the piston steam engine. If all that sounds like heavy history, consider the fun of Georgian houses, gardens and tea parties ... this exhibition is a festive treat.
• British Library, London NW1 until 11 March

Other exhibitions this week

Stonehenge Visitor Centre
A new exhibition in a new visitor centre aims to enrich the experience of visitors to Britain's most celebrated ancient monument.
• Stonehenge, Wiltshire SP4 from 18 December

Xu Bing
The pool in the V&A courtyard has been transformed into a miniature landscape in a lovely installation that recreates the magic of Chinese paintings.
• V&A, London SW7 until 2 March

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting
If you see one exhibition over Christmas make it this one, to encounter some of the world's most poetic art.
• V&A, London SW7 until 19 January

Paul Klee
... Or this one, if you want to meet one of modern art's true masters.
• Tate Modern, London SE1 until 9 March

Masterpiece of the week

Many things can be said about this iconic Georgian painting. Is it an image of property and power – and if so, does Gainsborough love or loathe these people who pose showing off their land? But there's another way of seeing it. The bench on which Mrs Andrews sits is there to give her a view over the landscape. The silvery green beauty of nature that Gainsborough captures is a pleasure we share with the landed couple. They are not just posh landowners after all, but enlightened lovers (and shooters) of the natural world.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That two Damien Hirstspot paintings were stolen from a London gallery

And police thought they might have to investigate Derren Brown for the crime

That the pinhole camera is making a comeback

That one photographer wants to show how sexy redheaded men are

What the best and worst selfies of the year have been

The photographer who's revealed the truth about Russia's Winter Olympics city (which is subtropical)

That the new Jameel Prize show is a five-star affair

How JeeYoung Lee has created a tiny room that can be anything you want it to be

That there might be a massive Artangel pyramid on the Heygate estate in London – and ex-residents are not at all happy about it

And finally...

Follow us on Twitter

Come to the Guardian's inaugural Reader's Art Exhibition at Boxpark in Bethnal Green, London E1, on Thursday 19 December, 8am-8pm

ArtStonehengeHeritageDamien HirstDerren BrownV&ATate ModernPaintingSocial historyPaul KleeJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Jameel Prize: a sexy, scintillating vision of modern Islamic art

With eye-fooling carpets made of concrete, spices arranged to look like ornate tiles and opulent frocks, the twists on classical Islamic arts here are exuberant and brilliantly of our time

This year's Jameel Prize exhibition at the V&A is a thorough revelation in its hugely sensual and convincing reinventions of Islamic art.

A prize that rewards something so specific as contemporary art and design "inspired by Islamic tradition" might seem to be inherently limiting its own field – who defines Islamic tradition anyway? – and yet the terrific art here proves the Jameel prize is really on to something. The twists these artists and designers are perpetrating on classical Islamic arts are exuberant, unforced and brilliantly of our time.

The tone is set by Faig Ahmed's carpets for the digital age. If you want to remind yourself of the beauty of traditional carpets woven in abstract patterns in the Islamic world, check out the wonderful examples in the V&A permanent collection. Ahmed makes carpets that have all the detail, colour and elegance of the classics yet with a difference – their patterns break up into a field of pixels or are sucked into a cosmic vortex.

Everyone else here is similarly bold in remaking the past. Nada Debs's concrete carpet is a showstopper: the Arabic lettering inscribed in its vast surface is in a font devised by Pascal Zoghbi, who also shows other examples of his research into reinventing Arabic fonts for the 21st century. Meanwhile, Turkish fashion house Dice Kayek, which has won this year's prize, exhibits dresses whose bulbous lines recreate the world of the Ottoman empire in contemporary couture.

The wearable historicism of these frocks leads me to the most striking thing about this show – it is full of pleasure for the eye. The arts of Islamic courts in the past were rich and sexy: that opulence returns here with a vengeance. In India, Rahul Jain creates glittering golden silks. These are real recreations of former glory – not witty remakes – yet the project is modern in the same way William Morris is modern. With less reverence but similar dedication and love of beauty, Laurent Mareschal shows an eye-fooling installation of floor tiles that are actually made of spices.

Video calligraphy, Arabic abstraction – this prize has got it all, and yet my favourite work finds a source of modern art in ascetic spirituality. Waqas Khan, who lives and works in Lahore, makes ethereal drawings inspired by Sufism – and minimalism. Using techniques that go back to the minitiaturists of the Persian and Mughal courts, Khan draws fields of tiny dots that expand into dreamlike clouds of ambiguity. He is a truly powerful artist, who in my opinion deserved the prize. That's my one quibble – otherwise, this is a scintillating vision of how art can be made new with the irreplaceable resources of cultural memory.

Rating: 5/5

ArtAwards and prizesV&AMuseumsJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Do Damien Hirst's dots really matter?

The theft of two of Hirst's spot paintings is being treated like an art heist of the highest order. But will history miss these pieces?

Is a Damien Hirst spot painting worth the fuss, planning and bother of stealing it from an art gallery?

The taking of two of these dotty works from a Notting Hill gallery is being treated as a big national news story, almost like the theft of a Rembrandt or a Picasso. But even if you find Hirst's series of paintings with grids of multicoloured circles on a white background attractive, they occupy a very small place in the history of art. In the great adventure that was 20th-century abstraction, the arrival of these coolly planned and professionally executed paintings near the century's end was a cynical epilogue that replaced the tragic visions of a Rothkowith self-mocking sitcom farce.

Art theft has a way of elevating what it steals, because we miss what is not there. The Mona Lisa became even more famous after it was stolen and then recovered in the early 20th century. But surely we're not going to decide that because Hirst's art is earmarked for a heist, he must be a great artist.

Abstract art is one of the greatest achievements of the modern world. It is a mighty paradox, the mind-bending artistic equivalent of quantum physics. Rationally, a coloured daub with no figures or landscape, nothing to identify and interpret, ought to be meaningless: a decoration at best. This was the Victorian critic John Ruskin's nightmare when he denounced Whistler's Falling Rocket with its abstract wisps of colour as a pot of paint flung in the face of the public.

Yet in the 20th century, abstraction became the most serious and profound realm of modern art. It is not easy to put into words what Mondrian does when he slides together black lines and coloured rectangles in his cosmic game of shapes. It is however impossible to ignore the sense of order and conviction and significance his paintings hold. The same goes for Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist or Rothko's Tate Modern murals.

No art is more meaningful and passionate than abstraction at its best – but, by the end of the 20th century, it had become a cliche. The modernist claim of sublime authority for the likes of Barnett Newman was mocked by postmodernists. Hirst enlivened an exhausted art world with parodic "modern paintings" that beg to be enjoyed ironically. They are paintings to show off at cocktail parties; paintings to decorate PR company offices: paintings to snort coke in front of.

There is, or was, an exhilaration to their brittle mood of ecstasy and hysteria. But it leads nowhere: not to insight, not to imagination, not the mysterious power of true abstract art.

In the Danish television series Borgen, a political conference is held at a venue decorated with Hirst's paintings. We are clearly meant to deduce the party holding the conference has sold out. That's what Hirst has become – the international symbol for all that is heartless and pretentious.

Hirst's spot paintings are icons of superficiality for a superficial age. In that sense, they are contemporary classics. But I wouldn't cross the road to nick one.

Damien HirstMark RothkoPaintingArtJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Obama shakes hands with Raúl Castro, in perfect homage to his hero Mandela | Jonathan Jones

The handshake is an apt gesture of rapprochement between old foes who may still not trust each other as far as a springbok can jump

Barack Obama was truly eloquent at the rainswept memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Soweto. He spoke words of power and depth and passion – and he spoke with a gesture, too.

This sodden picture has a rough ungainliness that makes it feel far from contrived, yet surely Obama must have considered his action carefully. After decades of chill that once brought the world close to war, an American president shakes hands in this already-historic photograph with Raúl Castro, president of Cuba.

Shaking hands is the modern world's most potent public gesture, a symbolic acknowledgement of mutural respect. It is democratic because it is a linking of individuals on equal terms. Bowing to monarchs and doffing caps belong to earlier ages that believed in hierarchies. The handshake is the visual language of a world that at least aspires to be egalitarian. It also has the advantage that it retains the formality of yesteryear. It's not like kissing someone in public, or embracing. No close bodily contact is made. It is just two hands briefly joined – which makes the handshake a perfect visual expression of rapprochement between old foes who may still not trust each other as far as a springbok can jump.

Obama showed in his speech how deeply he admires and how much he has thought about Mandela (even if his posing for a selfie later with David Cameron and the Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt somewhat undermined the gravitas). So it is not fanciful to wonder if his unexpected handshake across history's dividing lines is a very precise homage to his hero. Mandela's life has come to stand for the kind of imaginative, generous defiance of apparent bitter destinies so beautifully summed up by that public handshake between the American and Cuban leaders. Yet there is more to it – for handshakes were one of Nelson Mandela's simplest ways of breaking down divisions.

In May 1990, just three months after he was released from his 27-year prison sentence for fighting apartheid, Mandela was photographed shaking hands with apartheid's last president, FW de Klerk. They'd just signed the agreement that would lead to apartheid's end. Mandela – as Obama pointed out in his speech – was no inhuman saint, no spiritual ascetic, and yet this fighter preached peace better than all the world's religions. Again and again, he crossed planets with a handshake. Such an easy natural gesture. Picture after picture shows him shaking hands with his former jailers.

Obama may have been deliberately recreating one of Mandela's own most useful gestures in his moment of human contact with the president of Cuba. In the picture, as he leans down towards an apparently surprised Castro, he comes across as he did in his speech as the only world leader capable of stepping up to an occassion whose historic weight he himself eruditely assessed - comparing Mandela rightly not only with Gandhi and Martin Luther King but also with Abraham Lincoln and America's Founding Fathers.

The America civil war in which Lincoln upheld the union and human rights ended when the two opposing generals, Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee, shook hands in Appomattox court house, Virginia on Palm Sunday 1865. Can the handshake at the FNB stadium end the freeze between America and Cuba that is one of the last legacies of the Cold War?

It would be a fitting memorial for Nelson Mandela – or at least the start of one. His legacy has to be more than words. Piety is not enough. Nor is it good enough for old veterans of the anti-apartheid movement to endlessly prod at the injustice of rightwingers joining in adulation of Mandela. He really was the kind of leader who only comes once in a millennium and in former ages, a religion would probably have been built around him. A world worthy of Mandela is something to hope for. A handshake is a good place to start.

Barack ObamaRaúl CastroNelson MandelaNews photographyPhotographyUS foreign policyUnited StatesCubaAmericasJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The big reveal: why Derren Brown is trying to rob the Chapman brothers

I wonder who is the greater illusionist: Brown and his troupe of pensioners trying to steal a Chapmans' work in The Great Art Robbery – or the art world itself

Is the art world all smoke and mirrors? There are lots of layers of deception in the world of dealers, galleries, collectors and contemporary artists, making this a perfect setting for master of illusion Derren Brown to play his mind games in his new Channel 4 TV special, to be shown on Friday.

I got a preview and was sworn to secrecy on the show's finer points, but it seems that I can tell you it involves Brown schooling a group of pensioners to steal a painting, without my balls being made to magically disappear.

To be absolutely honest, I find magic (or illusion) incredibly dull to watch, usually, and I had never seen a Derren Brown show until this one. I had fun, however, trying to see who was conning who.

The premise of The Great Art Robbery is that Brown is pulling a fast one on the world of contemporary art. He tells a collector that he plans to steal a specific painting at a particular place and time. The only trouble is, the collector is not exactly Charles Saatchi, and the gallery is not exactly White Cube. Brown's intended victim is, in fact, Ivan Massow, whose most famous moment in the art world was being sacked as chairman of the ICA in 2002. Since then he has fallen and risen again in business and accumulated a collection that includes works by Jake and Dinos Chapman. It is one of the Chapmans' vandalised Victorian portraits that Derren Brown set out to steal from Massow. (To be fair, the collector comes across as very nice on telly.)

As for the venue, it is a pop-up gallery hired by Massow for a charity event. So, while Brown creates one illusion after another – and yes, he cured my aversion to this kind of entertainment – there's one trick he never comes clean about. Or is he the victim of this con?

This is that we never see the hardcore power brokers of the "art world" at all – it's just the outer circle of that gilded realm which Brown lays bare. Really, what he shows the audience is a pastiche of the London art scene.

True magicians never give away their secrets. Elite galleries such as Hauser & Wirth are never going to allow themselves to be exposed by a TV illusionist. They have to preserve their mystique.

The same is true of the Chapman brothers, who never participate in the show, except when they are glimpsed once, from a distance, at a private view.

The value of their art is a talking point in the show. The trashed antique picture Brown tries to nick is worth many thousands of pounds.

Well might its "creators" keep in the shadows. Brown is entertaining. But when it comes to real illusions, he is not in the same league as the masters of the art world.

ArtDerren BrownTelevisionJake and Dinos ChapmanJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why smashing statues can be the sweetest revenge

The protesters who toppled Lenin in Kiev joined the ancient tradition of angry crowds attacking figures of rulers. Beyond rage, what is behind this fatal attraction?

The best thing about statues is smashing them. This is true at least for crowds desperate to get some revenge on a figurehead of authority. All over the world and throughout recorded time, attacking statues has proved an eloquent political gesture.

In the 21st century, this ancient anti-art is alive and well. This weekend, crowds in Kiev who want closer links between Ukraine and the EU pulled down a statue of Lenin and attacked it with mallets. They could scarcely have picked a better symbol of the Russian overlords they fear – not least because so many statues of Lenin, Stalin and Marx across central and eastern Europe were demolished when Communism fell. The very survival of Lenin's public statue in Kiev, up to now, seems a bit of a tell about the Ukraine government's desire to keep Russia happy at all costs.

Now this Lenin has belatedly joined all the other fallen Communist statues, not to mention statues of the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi that all came crashing down when the power they symbolised fell away.

There is a fatal attraction that draws angry crowds to bronze and marble figures of rulers. Most of the time, in the modern world, such statues go not only unmolested but unnoticed – no one pays much attention, destructive or otherwise, to the Queen Victorias that can be found in most British cities. Yet the moment authority starts to crumble, statues offer themselves to be attacked. They are so symbolic, and yet so still and passive. They are sitting ducks.

This goes to the very heart of what a statue is. No other kind of art is directly associated with power in quite the same way. The first public statues were set up in early towns in the prehistoric Levant and represented ancestors. Maybe even then they were more feared than loved. By the time of the first great civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt there was an unequivocal connection between statues and power. Colossal statues of rulers including Rameses the Great and, later, Constantine were put up to awe the people. To be a king was to be sculpted.

Because statues are power, they cry out for acts of lèse-majesté. Even ancient Egyptian statues got vandalised, while Roman emperors often had their marble faces broken by Christians. Artistic excellence is no defence. In 16th-century Bologna a crowd pulled down a statue of the hated Pope Julius II and melted it down to make a cannon – no one cared that it happened to be a masterpiece by Michelangelo.

Kiev's Lenin has joined a great tradition of statues that became icons of misrule. The only problem is that future protests may not be so lucky in their targets. In democratic societies and in an age of conceptual art, monumental figures of rulers are erected less and less. What will the revolutions of the future be able to trash that matches the eloquence of a tumbling Lenin?

ProtestUkraineEuropeJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A Turner prize surprise and the world's biggest snow globe – the week in art

Laure Prouvost believes her Turner win is down to teacups with buttocks. Plus, the statue of Eros gets a festive makeover and Banksy's Flower Girl heads to auction – in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

The Scottish Colourists Series: JD Fergusson
Some of this Scottish painter's works might be mistaken for unknown pictures by Matisse. Even at his worst (his art deco-ish daubs of the 1930s) Fergusson is an eye-catching artist, and in the fiercely coloured paintings he made before the first world war he shows exceptional character and vitality. Like such fellow northern Europeans as Emil Nolde and (classically) Van Gogh he has a way of exulting in colour without ever seeming too relaxed about it. His edgiest, most expressive paintings such as Torse de Femme (c1911) mix the seriousness of Scotland with the sensuality of France.
• Modern Two (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), Edinburgh EH4 from 7 December until 15 June

Other exhibitions this week

Jameel prize
Islam created one of the world's great visual traditions from the late 7th century onwards; this prize celebrates it as an inspiration in contemporary art and design.
• Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 from 11 December until 21 April

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman
A contemporary of David Hockney, Boty made waves in the early 1960s but has been unjustly marginalised since her early death in 1966.
• Pallant House gallery, Chichester PO19 until 9 February

Future City
The history of Milton Keynes, town of the future, is at the heart of an exhibition about urbanism, science fiction and nostalgia.
• MK gallery, Milton Keynes MK9 from 6 December until 5 January

Alison Turnbull
In her new show, some of Turnbull's abstract paintings and drawings respond to designs by Erich Mendelsohn, the brilliant architect of the De La Warr Pavilion.
• De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea TN40 until 23 February

Masterpiece of the week

Purge your soul before Christmas with a pilgrimage to see this 14th-century painting by Piero della Francesca. Piero dedicated a lifetime's study of mathematics. A student of Archimedes and Euclid, he was an exceptionally learned authority on the geometry of the ancient Greeks and his manuscripts on maths are great documents of the Renaissance. This harmonious painting (c1450s) is their passionate, profound fruit.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the week
What we learned this week

That the Turner prize winner, Laure Provoust, was an absolute turn-up for the books …

… and why teacups with comedy bums are the key to her success

That the statue of Eros has become the world's biggest snow globe

That an artist has turned into an archaeologist of all things 90s – Casio keyboards, payphones, you name it

How beautiful Cuban propoganda posters are

Which celebrities stripped off for the photographer Fishlove

Why Walter Sickert was Count Dracula

Why loads of Victorian mums disguised themselves as chairs or curtains in portraits

That a petrol station owner has put Banksy's Flower Girl up for sale

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

Share your art about celebrations

Laure ProuvostDesignBanksyPaintingTurner prize 2013ArtJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why Steve McQueen is proof of video art's cultural irrelevance

Although the latest Turner prize went to a video artist, the 12 Years a Slave director shows that the art form is just a finishing school for serious film-making

The rise of video and film art appears irresistible. The Turner prize has just been given to a video for the second year in a row.

Yet in spite of the successes of Laure Prouvost and Elizabeth Price, the triumph of video art is an illusion. It is not a stable, enduring art form; it may not even be an art form at all. It is in reality an experimental space at the margins of a much bigger culture of the moving image – a place for talented film-makers to mess around with a freedom they could never enjoy in commercial cinema or mainstream television, but which the true artists among them hunger to apply in those bigger, more important arenas.

For it turns out that video art is just a training ground that can prepare you to make proper films.

The proof can be seen in the achievements of a previous Turner prize winner: Steve McQueen. In the 1990s McQueen was making bold and powerful films for galleries; in 1999, he was awarded the Turner prize; ever since, he has continued to show acclaimed art.

Reading on mobile? Watch a clip from Steve McQueen's Deadpan (1997) here

And yet all this seems irrelevant compared with his emergence as a "real" film director. His first feature, Hunger, was an extraordinary portrait of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. He went on to portray sex addiction . Now he is in the running for the Oscars with 12 Years a Slave. This film is a phenomenon. "It was the most powerful movie I've ever seen in my life," is a typical response to it in New York.

Plainly, the art world has merely been a kind of postgraduate film college for McQueen – and as such it is the best place a serious film-maker can experiment in the 21st century. But that is all video art is: a bit of messing about. The important films are the ones with scripts, actors, and stories.

The moving image has gripped the human imagination for more than a century. It was always inevitable that one day art galleries would embrace it, too. Video art however has gone through so many changes in its brief history that it does not have much aesthetic coherence at all: does an installation by Gary Hill from the early 1990s belong in the same category as a more recent work by Cory Arcangel? Are they doing the same thing? In the end, moving-image art is just a catchall term for the many ways artists have fun with cameras, screens and software.

What all such arty activities have in common is that they exist in the shadow of the much bigger phenomena that are cinema and television. Artists may like to think they are in opposition to the movie mainstream, but the facts show how keen they are to cross over into real film-making.

McQueen is not alone. Sam Taylor-Wood, now Taylor-Johnson, has moved from the gallery world to commercial cinema. She's making the film of Fifty Shades of Grey. Douglas Gordon too leapt over the wall when he collaborated on the (admittedly very arty) football film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

There is no doubt the art world is breeding some skilled film-makers – and equally no doubt they are eager to prove themselves among the big girls and boys over in the hills of Hollywood.

12 Years a Slave is both the greatest triumph of video art – and proof of its cultural irrelevance. Who'd trade an Oscar for the Turner prize?

Reading on mobile? Watch the trailer for 12 Years a Slave here

Video artSteve McQueenArtTurner prize 2013Turner prizeAwards and prizesJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Don't hate the woman behind the 'world's worst selfie' | Jonathan Jones

By taking a photo of herself in front of a suicidal figure on the Brooklyn bridge she has become a scapegoat for our worst fears about the modern age

It's the most selfish "selfie" ever! While police officers tried to talk down a man who was preparing to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, a woman in the park below took out her phone and posed for the type of photograph that recently gave the Oxford English Dictionary its word of the year.

She made the cover of the New York Post, which apparently had a reporter or stringer or citizen journalist or busybody in the park at the time. "Selfie-ish!" declares its headline, over a picture of the woman taking her outrageous picture. Wrapped up against the cold and in sunglasses, she wields the phone with a certain practised lightness that suggests an affectless, unengaged and deeply ephemeral exercise – as if she's taking her portrait literally without thought, let alone any feelings one way or the other about the human crisis in the background.

Our culture has plainly got something wrong with it. The selfie craze has got out of hand. It started as a bit of fun but now turns out to be a descent into heartless self-obsession and inane photophilia that turns a perfectly normal-looking individual into a cold Warholian observer of death and disaster, whose only reaction to another's pain is to take a picture of herself in front of the scene she chanced on. And is that a smile she's cracking?

The rogue self-portraitist has been described as a "tourist" in reports. Taking a picture of yourself in front of a suicide drama on the Brooklyn bridge is in fact a perfectly logical extension of modern tourism's obsession with the selfie. People take pictures of themselves wherever they go, from cathedrals to airports to funerals, always the same face grinning at the camera. If you are travelling alone, it's a way to share the experience and report moment by moment on your trip – in this case, look what happened to me in crazy New York! I saw a guy trying to jump off the city's most famous bridge …

And got on to the front of a New York tabloid. Here is the strange twist in this tale of cameras and ethical depravity. The picture that has made the news is not the selfie, but the shot of the selfie being taken: and it's such a crisp, well set-up image, you might almost wonder if the whole thing was a set-up. I am sure it is a genuine record of contemporary mores. However, the choice to make this a story says something in itself about our time. Is the Post's amazement and disgust and the internet's agreement that this is "the worst selfie ever" a simple reaction to a misguided snapshot? It's more than that – for here is the proof of the emotionless, shallow nature of this solipsistic cameraphone craze that everyone was waiting for. The selfie had it coming.

This woman has been held up as a villain of our times when all she did was follow convention. She is, in fact, doing what the culture told her was the right thing. The selfie has been celebrated as a popular artform: it is the socially proper thing to do. Sharing every aspect of your life with your cameraphone is cool, intimate, social and … Oh, wait a minute, it's idiotic, navel-gazing, dehumanising …

Both descriptions are arguably true. Life in the 21st century is inherently ambiguous: not for nothing is Heisenberg a popular name for babies (yeah, Heisenberg was a physicist fascinated by uncertainty before a chemistry teacher turned drugs supplier took the name in the TV programme Breaking Bad). So many contemporary phenomena into which millions throw themselves can be seen as on the one hand modern, democratic, liberating instruments of progress and yet on the other hand, with equal validity, as time-eating cybermats of the apocalypse.

People like the hapless Brooklyn bridge selfie-taker are unlucky enough to be made scapegoats for our deep, perhaps irresolvable confusions about the way we live now. Are we heading for a golden age of instant communication or a digital wasteland? Most of the time we embrace the future with glee, heading for the shops this Christmas to get more gadgets that will create more cultural tropes. But there's this nagging doubt that maybe we're all turning into Andy Warhol's sterile clones. The world's worst selfie is ammunition for everybody's worst fears about the modern age.

PhotographyPhotographySmartphonesMobile phonesJonathan Jones
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds