Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 246

Man up: European art and the male nude

Backs, biceps and buttocks – the naked male form in art has been adored, lusted after and then copied for centuries

Looking at naked men is what the European art tradition is all about. The male body was the most fascinating fact in the universe for ancient Greek sculptors like Polykleitos, who strove to depict perfectly proportioned young athletes. Male beauty was a bit of heaven on earth, to be apprehended by a truly philosophical love, as Plato explained and as Greek statues assert.

Two exhibitions this autumn show how that ancient Greek ideal has goaded, and permitted, later artists to dote on the male form. The Male Nude at London's Wallace Collection explores how French artists in the 18th-century studied backs, biceps and buttocks. Masculine/Masculine: The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day, at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, brings the story up to modern times.

Yet one of the most fascinating insights into the nude can actually be seen in a third exhibition, Tate Britain's Art Under Attack. It includes a stained glass window from Canterbury Cathedral that portrays Christ leading people away from a pagan idol. The idol has devilish horns and is naked: as they are led away, some of the men can't help looking back at this masculine nude.

In this medieval Christian image, their gaze is plainly sexual. Male nudes promote "sodomy", in the language of the time. When Italian artists revived the ancient Greek nude in the 15th century they relished that homoeroticism. When the Pollaiuolo brothers painted a spectacular altarpiece of Saint Sebastian, it was said they chose the most beautiful young man in Florence to be their model. In their painting, now in London's National Gallery, he gazes dreamily as arrows pierce his flesh.

The ideal of the male form inherited from ancient Greece was profoundly sexual, and yet it also became part of every artist's training. Michelangelo drew male nudes because he desired men. Later artists, like those in the Wallace Collection show, drew male nudes to emulate Michelangelo.

In 18th-century France, the period this exhibition covers, the Greek ideal was given a new intensity. In J-L David's painting Leonidas at Thermopylae, a nude warrior pauses at the heart of a vast battle. While Greeks and Persians clash all around him, the Spartan hero Leonidas contemplates the meaning of it all – and his philosophical moment is expressed physically. His body is a Greek statue come to life. You can see his pubic hair. He is free in mind and flesh.

David's powerful portrayal of male nakedness comes out of the tradition of academic drawing the Wallace show explores. Here, you can see male nudes drawn by the likes of his follower Gros. Today, art training recoils from disciplined drawing. But for thousands of years, the discipline of drawing the male nude entered artists into a rich, ambiguous territory between idealism and sex.

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Ten things you need to know about the Turner prize

Learn whose prices rose most after winning the Turner prize, who are the biggest protesters against it – and the one rule almost all juries break

1 King McQueen

It looks likely that Steve McQueen may will become the first person ever to win both the Turner prize (1999) and an Oscar (or several): McQueen's film 12 Years a Slave, hot favourite for this year's Academy Awards, includes a scene with a wood-framed building that's reminiscent of the film that won him a Turner in 1999.

2 Turnering it into cash

Damien Hirst's prices leaped by 27% immediately after he won the 1995 Turner, and have since escalated; Gilbert & George and Anish Kapoor saw prices rise by more than 50% after their victories. For some winners, success has more to do with commissions than money – Jeremy Deller does not really make commodifiable art, but has worked all over the world since winning in 2004.

3 Winning by losing

Tracy Emin has never won a Turner prize – but her bed at the 1999 exhibition made her a household name. Other losers who have "won" in terms of popular impact include Tacita Dean and the Chapman brothers.

4 Losing by winning

The Turner does not always guarantee fame. Keith Tyson won in 2002 but his recent work has caused little fuss; same for 2005 winner Simon Starling. And what about Grenville Davey, who won in 1992?

5 Pushing the limit

Since 1991 the Turner has only been open to artists under 50. The "Young British Art" generation are now approaching or crossing that barrier. In 2009 the Tate Trustees considered removing the age bar, but Tate director Nicholas Serota said it had to stay.

6 Coming back for more

In 1995 Mark Wallinger was shortlisted but lost out to Damien Hirst. In 2007, he was shortlisted again and won – beating Mike Nelson, who was also on the shortlist for a second time. However, juries are now discouraged from repeat nominations.

7 No nominations please

The Turner prize accepts no nominations from art galleries; there is no entry process. Jurors propose and debate candidates in a completely informal way. This contrasts with book prizes, for which publishers can officially nominate one or two authors.

8 Bending the rules

Almost all juries bend the golden rule of the Turner prize, which is that it is meant to be given for work done during the year. The exhibition (this year in Derry) is not supposed to decide the winner, but to give the public a chance to see all four artists. Of course, in reality the exhibition tends to decide the winner.

9 Naysayers

The Stuckists still protest every year against the Turner prize. Plus the satirical Turnip prize is presented by a west country pub. Worst, though, are Bow council: when Rachel Whiteread won with House in 1993, they knocked it down.

10 Women only

In 1997 there was an all-woman shortlist: Angela Bulloch, Gillian Wearing, Christine Borland and Cornelia Parker. Wearing won. Should this idea be repeated? Or did it just "use up" the Turner chances of three women?

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Made in China: how landscape painting was invented in the east

The history books say that western Renaissance artists invented landscape painting. Not if you believe a new V&A exhibition of Chinese art

On 5 August 1473, a young artist drew the first ever landscape. The date is known precisely because Leonardo da Vinci wrote it on the sheet of paper, as if aware of the revolutionary nature of what he was doing. To look at mountains and trees just for themselves was unprecedented.

Or was it? The invention of landscape painting is one of the great moments of European art. Painting nature is a way to get inside yourself. To this day, people enjoy doing watercolours in the outdoors as a form of meditation. Leonardo's discovery of the mystery of nature – which you see in all his paintings, with their dreamy rocks and pools – is the invention of a new kind of inner life.

Yet it is a lot less original than we might like to think. There is an uncanny likeness between Leonardo's rocks, trees and rivers and the rocks, trees and rivers that Chinese artists were painting centuries before he was born. It is bizarre: that 1473 drawing actually looks like a reworking of classic Chinese paintings such as Li Gongnian's Winter Evening Landscape. When was that painted? I look at the label in the V&A's new exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. It says 1120. That's 353 years before the very similar sketch by Leonardo.

It is conventional, nowadays, to pay lip service to the fact that many versions of art exist, that beautiful art comes from all over the world and every way of life. Yet the story of art that most of us absorb – as told in The Story of Art by EH Gombrich, first published in 1950 and still the definitive account of art's progress – puts European innovation at the centre of the action. All peoples make art, but the west takes it forward.

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting is the most devastating refutation of such assumptions I have ever seen. It shows that during the Song dynasty, at a time when Europeans were fighting barbaric crusades and had long forgotten the creativity that flourished in ancient Greece, artists in China were taking painting to heights of sensitivity and poetry that would not be attained elsewhere until the ages of Leonardo – or for that matter, when you look at the most radical Chinese touches, Van Gogh.

I'd go further. Looking at this show being installed and talking to its curator Zhang Hongxing, I can't resist airing the theory that Leonardo stole the idea of landscape painting from China. Could he somehow have seen Chinese paintings? Might something have reached the west along the Silk Road? Excitedly, I get Leonardo's 1473 drawing up on my iPad and hold it among the 12th-century Chinese landscapes for comparison. The shapes of the hills and trees in Leonardo's sketch perfectly mirror the sugar-loaf peaks and willowy trees in 900-year-old Chinese paintings.

Zhang's well aware of this idea: it was raised very seriously in the 1950s, he says, but there is no proof. It's a mystery. Nor is Leonardo the only European pioneer of landscape who looks "Chinese". Zhang points out that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is also very "Chinese" looking. This is true. Bruegel's much-loved Hunters in the Snow has all the elements that delighted medieval Chinese landscape painters, including all that snow.

But why did China invent landscape art in the first place? Why did artists begin to depict, not gods and battles as elsewhere, but the grandeur of nature? It has something to do with Buddhism, which spread to China before AD1,000 and inspired a culture of contemplation. It also has to do with the technical achievements of the Song era. The scientific mind that perfected porcelain also looked at nature with a new clarity.

One of the first things you see in the show was actually painted by a Song emperor – though it comes with a warning to rulers, for Emperor Huizong's dreamy fascination with art helped to lose him his throne. Indeed, as the curator explains, painting in China has always been associated with retreat and escapism. Not all the works in this exhibition are landscapes. There are pictures of courtesans and the tremendous Nine Dragons, a dazzling mythic vision painted by Chen Rong in 1244. Yet for me, the escapist pursuit of pastoral in China's pioneering landscapes is utterly beguiling. After the Mongols conquered China there was a clear association of art with the rejection of power. Turning their backs on the court, intellectuals created gardens, wrote poetry and painted expressive scenes of wintry trees. They rendered nature in a free, subjective style that anticipated – and of course, influenced – Van Gogh.

Personally, I am convinced that Leonardo must have got access to the art of China. He was fascinated by the east and once applied for a job in Istanbul, offering to serve the Ottoman empire and praising Allah in a letter that survives. Did all this interest in Asia lead him to some hushed library where he unrolled a silk scroll and saw mountains, cherry blossoms and water?

One thing is certain. Zhang's great exhibition turns the story of art upside down.

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Should the National Gallery seize a Klimt portrait stolen by the Nazis?

Criminally low prices and museum politics … the restitution of looted art isn't as clearcut as it seems

A lawyer who has been involved in the restitution of art stolen by the Nazis to its former owners has called on the National Gallery not to return a painting in its exhibition Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 to the Austrian gallery that loaned it.

Gustav Klimt's unfinished portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl was illegally seized from Jewish collector Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, says lawyer E Randol Schoenberg. It must not go back to Austria. Although the painting is now owned by the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, Britain's National Gallery should seize it and help initiate the restitution process.

This is clearly a daft request. If the National did any such thing it could never put on an exhibition again, because shows rely on loans. Museums have to indemnify foreign lenders and provide all manner of reassurance that works can be lent safely.

Still, the National Gallery has itself benefited from restitution. In 2002, it bought a beautiful Renaissance painting by Gentile Bellini that previously hung in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. The National bought it from its rightful owners, the heirs of Erich Lederer, after they won a restitution case.

Lederer's heirs have now filed a claim for one of the most famous works of art in Vienna – no less a glory than Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. I am shocked that this dreamlike mural has such a troubling history. It is one of Vienna's greatest treasures, a monument to the city's fin de siècle golden age. But although it was returned to its rightful owner Erich Lederer after the war, he was apparently only granted an export licence for other works on the condition that he sold the Beethoven Frieze to the Austrian government at a knockdown price.

It's sad to see Vienna stripped of the art that tells its story – a story that is profoundly Jewish. Where does the Beethoven Frieze belong but in the city it was made? I think restitution is a less clearcut case than it seems. It is hard to see how selling the Frieze at an eye-popping price on today's mad art market would serve history or understanding. But then I think about the horrorible history behind these art transactions.

I recently watched Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In the opening ceremony, the entire Austrian team gives a Nazi salute to Hitler – this was two years before the unification of Germany and Austria. The ambiguities of Hitler's Anschluss with Austria – was it conquest or consensual union? – allowed Austria to kid itself and others about its role in the war. (You might call it The Sound of Music delusion.)

The shocking story of how Erich Lederer seems to have been forced by the state to sell Klimt's masterpiece for a bargain price sounds like residual antisemitism in action. It really does look like the Beethoven Frieze should be restituted – and if it ends up in Los Angeles or New York, then Austria only has its own past to blame. As for the painting lent to the National Gallery, it has to go back to Vienna – for now.

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Banksy's fast food activism and a bigger, better Frieze – the week in art

The street artist takes a shine to Ronald McDonald and Frieze gets playful. Plus, the V&A takes a breath of fresh air with classic Chinese landscape paintings – in your art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, 700-1900
This exhibition at the V&A is a revelatory encounter with great art. Chinese artists were painting sensitive and sublime landscapes when Europeans were festering in the dark ages. See this – it's moving and hypnotic.
• V&A, London SW7 from 26 October until 19 January 2014

Other exhibitions this week

Turner prize
Derry hosts the world's most sensational art prize.
• Buildings 80-81, Derry/Londonderry BT47 from 23 October until 5 January 2014

Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris
This great French caricaturist and experimental painter portrays a world of cruelty and suffering. It's Les Misérables without the awful songs.
• Royal Academy of Arts, London W1J from 26 October until 26 January 2014

Zhang Enli: Space Painting
Head to the ICA for a chance to compare painting from contemporary China with the masterpieces on view at the V&A.
• ICA, London SW1 until 22 December

The Social: Encountering Photography
This festival of photography in northeast England includes commissions by Simon Roberts, Craig Ames and John Kippin.
• Various venues in Durham and Sunderland, until 16 November

Masterpiece of the week

Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape
This dreamlike landscape of blue rocks is a fantasy the mind can wander in; a miniature world not unlike those created by Chinese art.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That Banksy's served up a shoeshine for corporate clown Ronald McDonald

Why this year's Frieze is like a giant playground

How you can bag a Brueghel at Frieze Masters

Why Picasso's grandson is raffling off one of his grandfather's works for a mere £85

What beachgoers look like on the Bronx Riviera, known as "hood beach"

What Spitalfields nippers looked like in 1901

That it's the end for millionaire mega-basements

That North Korean propaganda artists have painted a rose-tinted China

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

Share your pictures of sunrise and sunset near you to take part in Ólafur Elíasson's worldwide project

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Banksy gives Ronald McDonald's clown shoes a shine

Banksy's latest New York stunt involves a statue of Ronald McDonald and a real-life shoeshine boy. The man's a genius of the obvious

That Banksy – what will he come up with next? He's the genius of the obvious. The Bristol-born artist is currently "in residence" in New York, and not a day passes without a story about his exploits in the Big Apple. The latest is that Banksy has carved a statue of Ronald McDonald, mascot of the renowned fast food chain, and is moving it from one McDonald's to another in the New York area together with a – living – boy giving the corporate clown a shoeshine.

Look, it's a bit pointless mocking American capitalism, Banksy. Congress has already done that for you. How the world laughed when Republican extremists brought the "world's most powerful nation" to the brink of debt default. How it shrugged when this lunatic crisis was resolved at the last minute. What's America going to do next to make itself a living joke?

By comparison, Banksy's stunts are light entertainment for complacent liberals and Leftists. Being a bit of both, I can totally get behind his tilt at McDonald's. I am pretty sure it stands for everything that is wrong with the world. I can't quite remember the details but yeah, McDonald's, it's got to be bad. Go for it.

This Englishman in New York is clearly generating impressive interest and a lot of headlines. He sold some of his work for cheap to tourists. He was possibly photographed. Fans have been racing around Manhattan and Brooklyn to see the latest Banksy before it gets vandalised – he dared the anonymous rivals who have been defacing his work by painting a homage to the World Trade Center. Vandalise that ...

Yet all this reporting of Banksy's art and its fate reveals the massive intellectual lacunae in our current understanding of art. On the one hand, Banksy is a street artist, having a laugh defying the authorities. On the other hand, his works are now regarded as financially valuable so when they get defaced it is seen as an attack on some kind of cultural monument. It's just street art! Lighten up! It does not need to survive and people who pay big money for it are silly.

To his credit, Mr Banksy seems to know that. Hence the cheap art sale to those lucky tourists. They could sell the works at a huge profit, and have the blowout of a lifetime at McDonald's.

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Bag a Brueghel: Frieze Masters 2013

Frieze Masters is less art show than mega-mall, a place that sells luxury goods to the super-rich. Jonathan Jones goes window-shopping

I'd been at the Frieze Masters art fair for about an hour when I started spotting fakes. Every museum, every big art collection has a few things of dubious authenticity skulking in shameful corners. An expert at one of our top galleries once told me: "We know what our fakes are." And that's at a deeply responsible museum.

Frieze Masters is not a museum, with a museum's caution – it's just an art and antiques fair, under the ultra-cool veneer. Dealers are pushing merchandise that ranges from Japanese erotica to David Hockney paintings. What are the chances that among all these beautiful things for sale there are no dodgy goods?

I can't review Frieze Masters as if it were an exhibition for the general public. It's not that. The public are allowed in (for £50, to see both this and its sister fair), but are essentially spectators of the fair's real business, which is serious art selling. This is a market. It's a shop. As a critic, have I really got any business being here? With its bijoux restaurants artfully breaking up the mega-malls (fancy a quick lunch at Locatelli, love, before we decide on that Picasso?), it's like reviewing Selfridges.

The only way I can really engage with it is by fantasising. What if I did have a few million in the bank, what would I be putting a "reserve" on? I pick up this lingo while eavesdropping on a salesman's patter in front of a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. The painting is a copy by this minor artist of a masterpiece by his much more gifted father. This is important, so pay attention: there is only one member of the Bruegel (or Brueghel) family from Antwerp who is a truly great artist. That is Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the father of the clan, who died in 1569. The Census at Bethlehem is one of his most powerful visions of peasant life.

The version of it on sale at Frieze Masters is, to my eyes, a loose, pale mockup of this great work. Still, it's interesting. "It's reserved at the moment," the dealer's telling the aristocratic pair. Chap came in this morning and ran over to the stand to say he wanted it – but what about this other Brueghel? The potential buyers are interested. They appear to have absolutely no idea that there were two Pieter Brueghels.

Wandering to the next stand I find … more Brueghels! These, too, are imitations of the great man's style by his less great son. One looks as if it has been botched by an incompetent restorer: not even Brueghel the Younger would give peasants such mad, staring eyes, surely.

When I say there are fakes at Frieze Masters, I don't mean there's a guy round the back of the tent knocking up Brueghels. For the record (and the lawyers) I do not believe a single gallery here is knowingly selling forgeries – though history shows anyone can be taken in, even art dealers. No. What I mean is that old paintings that lasted a long time in private collections have inevitably been through all kinds of restorations and remakes and dubious transformations to become the commodities on sale at Frieze. Looking at the old masters and wondering what I might buy if I had that ultraplutonium credit card, I start getting a queasy sense of caveat emptor. Buyer beware.

Why are there so many 16th- and 17th-century Dutch paintings by minor masters that look as though they are made of shiny plastic? Old paintings are often dirty and dark. These have all been cleaned to perfection, polished up like mahogany furniture. Presumably that's so they will go with the target clientele's mahogany furniture. Seriously: once you've seen 30 baroque paintings all buffed up to the same bright sheen, the stomach starts to churn.

Absurdly bright lighting adds to the growing sense of inauthenticity. Hey, this is Frieze. It is orgasmically glamorous. The art here can't look like it's old and dull. So every painting has a spotlight on it. Everything becomes shiny. That adds to the overcooked look of some of these expensive bits of history.

The light reveals some rubbish. There's a medieval painting (studio of Giotto, no less) with grossly painted hands. There's a sculpture by the Renaissance artist Andrea della Robbia with the face of a Victorian clergyman and an ugliness a million miles from the charm the Della Robbia clan usually brought to their painted ceramics. Well, I suppose he was having an off-day.

If I were buying art at Frieze Masters, I would give most of the older works a wide berth. Leave them for museums who can weed out the really worthwhile and repair the bad restorations. Go for the moderns. At the Dickinson stand, there's a fantastic Monet of a church beside a dazzling sea, and I believe every brushstroke is by Monet. I also believe Matisse drew every line in an exhibition of works by him at Thomas Gibson Fine Art. Annely Juda has beguiling sketches by the Russian abstract visionary Malevich – who'd have thought this severe artist had so much fun drawing?

Wait, isn't that a Toulouse-Lautrec? The truth is that, for all my suspicions, there is beauty in bucketloads at this art fair. And it's all for sale. Why can't I enjoy that more? I feel tantalised. I also feel stupid. I kid myself that art is some great universal human possession when in reality it is a luxury good for the super-rich. Frieze is the temple to what art has become in our age: a millionaire's toy.

I thought the first Frieze Masters last year was an improvement on the vacuity of the original fair – but now I realise it's far worse, because it takes the entire history of art and turns it into an elitist shopping mall. This place disgusts me. It makes art into congealed money. Old paintings have never before looked dead in my eyes; they have always lived and breathed for me, until now. Here they are mummified by the market. Just stuff to trade, basically.

It's like seeing your parents having sex: innocence is over. I leave through the darkened park, brooding on how an art fair has just taken everything I love and exposed it as shining trash sold by posh hucksters to rich idiots.

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Courtauld's pedantry clouds Albrecht Dürer's visionary genius

'One of the worst shows about a great artist I've ever seen', says our critic, where snobbishness obscures Renaissance beauty

This is one of the worst exhibitions about a great artist I have ever seen. Dürer will survive it, but people who come to the Courtauld hoping for an introduction to his genius are likely to go away unsatisfied, and fail to fall in love with one of art's most intense minds. That is a crying shame.

The general public doesn't seem to be the audience the curator has in mind. The Courtauld Gallery is attached to one of Britain's leading centres for the higher study of art history, and this show seems cursed by that connection. Its academic introspection combines with snobbish connoisseurship to smother a titan of the Renaissance.

You thought Albrecht Dürer was a visionary who gave the world the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, his Christ-like self-portrait and such eerie images as his knight riding side by side with Death and the Devil? Think again. Dürer's very artistic personality disintegrates under this pedantic scrutiny.

Only a specialist would be thrilled by an exhibition that focuses minutely on his four years as a young journeyman touring the art cities of Germany. The show reveals, ad nauseam, the works of every artist he learned from in these years. And it gets worse. Only the institution itself could be interested in an in-depth exegesis of the sources of Dürer's ink drawing of a Wise Virgin, whose main importance appears to be that the Courtauld owns it.

It's absurd to make Dürer's A Wise Virgin the focus of the show. It is not especially charismatic by his standards. Yet it is presented here as the summa of his early career, among a tedious proliferation of images that, it is claimed, influenced it. Why? How does this add to anyone's encounter with Dürer? In one room, I counted, there are five works by Dürer out of 15 on view – the other 10 being supposed influences on his sodding Wise Virgin. Who cares? Worse, the connoisseurship is not revelatory. We get a lot of prints by Martin Schongauer, as if it were a surprise that Dürer admired this gothic master. Their relationship is in fact bleedin' obvious.

A connected exhibition brings together pictures used as slides to illustrate a lecture about Dürer given in 1905 by the art historian Aby Warburg. What has that got to offer anyone not doing a PhD on Warburg? Something, it turns out. Warburg knew his stuff and Dürer's drawing of the poet Orpheus being beaten with tree branches is a sublime image. For a moment the Renaissance flickers to life through a fog of pedantry.

Rating: 1/5

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The Tony Blair 'selfie' Photo Op will have a place in history

Art could not stop the war in Iraq but this photomontage – now on show at the Imperial War Museum North – can influence how that war is remembered

Tony Blair grins for his photograph as he holds up his smartphone to take a selfie. He's delighted with himself and what he's done. Behind him, black smoke and hellish flames bloom over an arid landscape. To many people, this grotesquely comic moment says it all – only Blair would think that's a good photo opportunity.

He did not, of course. This is not a real scene. Such is the reputation of the former prime minister and winner of three general elections that it somehow needs saying that he did not actually pose for a selfie in front of a blazing oilfield in Iraq.

What he did do is pose with his phone, apparently taking his own picture, at a photo opportunity with a group of naval cadets during the 2005 general election campaign. Political artists Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps were combing through scores of pictures from the Guardian when they came across this slightly bonkers-looking portrait of a politician on campaign and realised it was just what they needed in their quest for a picture that told the truth about the Iraq war. "It was born out of two years of hard work to pull down the propaganda machine," say the artists. Using Photoshop they replaced the innocuous cadets with an apocalypse of fire. A satirical icon was born.

Photo Op, as their photomontage is called, has become the definitive work of art about the war that started with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ten years on from that war's beginning, this manic digital collage states succinctly what a large number people feel and believe about Blair's responsibility for the chaos that ensued. It says in a nutshell what protesters claimed at the time and what has become a generally accepted version of history – that Tony Blair was a monster charging into Iraq without scruples. Look, there he is, taking a selfie in front of his handiwork. Such is his notoriety that viewers really can take this as fact.

"Some people do," acknowledges Kennard. "He's maniacal enough for people to believe he actually would be happy photographing an oil explosion."

If an iconic picture is one that speaks to our feelings, this anti-war montage is an icon of our time. It was popularised with a little help from street artist Banksy when he included it in a Christmas grotto installation on Oxford Street, London. Campaign magazine praised it as an advert. Now it is on view at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester in an exhibition about contemporary art and war. Although the show includes conceptual responses to war by such art world luminaries as Steve McQueen and Jeremy Deller, it is "Tony Blair's crazed selfie", as a headline put it, that has grabbed media attention.

This is a startling success for an artist who has dedicated his imagination to opposing war since he was radicalised by Vietnam in the early 1970s. Kennard is a veteran of British radical politics and art who for four decades has been using photocollage to fight the powers that be. When he started, the only way to join different pictures together was with scissors and paste on the kitchen table. A famous political collage by the German artist Hannah Hoch is called "Cut with the kitchen knife". Kennard created many memorable images in support of CND using old-school cut-and-paste. In his 1980 version of John Constable's painting The Hay Wain, the cart crossing a placid East Anglian stream is loaded with cruise missiles.

That gem of satire is in the Tate – but the coming of Photoshop seemed to leave Kennard's cut-and-paste art behind until, in the runup to the Iraq war, he formed a partnership with Phillipps. They work under the name kennardphillipps and use digital collage to campaign against war and capitalism. Their work can be downloaded free of charge – they delight in people making their own versions of Photo Op, even what they claim was an uncredited adaptation by the National Theatre to promote a production of Brecht's war play Mother Courage. "It's available. It was used by Stop the War. It's been on book covers, it was even used by the British Medical Journal." In fact it's everywhere except on billboards owned by CBS in Manchester, which refused to carry this picture as an advert for the Imperial War Museum.

As Kennard explains, Photoshop is very different from the old tradition of kitchen-table photomontage that runs from Hoch and John Heartfield in Weimar Berlin to his CND collages of the 1980s. "With cut and paste the images are more disparate": they don't fuse into one image. The strange and devastatingly effective quality of the kennardphillipps portrait of Tony Blair is that it really does meld into a luridly believable scene.

The collective unconscious accepts this picture as true. This is very bad news for Blair. Any hope that history might vindicate him is fading fast. History is partly made by images. Ironically, kennardphillipps were not interested in making history when they created their digital image. They wanted to change the world, not record it: "We were trying to portray Iraq as it happened and not wait until afterwards and make a history painting."

In spite of their intentions, a history painting is what they've made. Art could not stop the war in Iraq. It can influence how that war is remembered. There's no use Alastair Campbell putting a grim-looking photo of Blair on the cover of his diaries and writing that it reflects Blair's seriousness and sincerity as he took Britain to war. The image that stands as popular history is the one of Blair taking his "maniacal selfie" in front of the flames of devastation.

Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War is at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester until 23 February. Tel: 0161 836 4000. iwm.org.uk.

ArtTony BlairPhotographyDigital mediaIraqJonathan Jones
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Is Damien Hirst the right person to mentor Britain's young?

The artist has been made a mentor for the Future Generation art prize – but is this overpaid shark-pickler a wise choice?

• Damien Hirst is a national disgrace
• Damien Hirst: 'I felt the power of art from a very young age'

Damien Hirst is offering his services as a mentor for young artists. He is an official mentor for the Future Generation art prize, which he is helping to launch this week at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

As if he has not done enough already to corrupt the young.

A devastating set of figures released last week by the OECD revealed that Britain is falling behind much of the developed world in basic literacy and numeracy. In England and Ireland, 16- to 24-year-olds come 19th in literacy and 21st in numeracy in this global comparison. It's a pretty rancid performance for the nation of Shakespeare and Newton.

Of course it would be unfair to blame Damien Hirst personally for this decline (older Britons did better in the tests). But he and the revolution he unleashed in British art have helped to define the cultural landscape in which 16- to 24-year-olds emerged from childhood. Alongside overpaid football players and reality television shows, modern British art has relentlessly pumped out a dispiriting message to the young: education is worthless. Books and sums are for losers. You can earn more money and respect by pickling a shark than by swotting.

Once, Hirst had real wit, imagination and originality. But that has been eclipsed by his incredible financial career, which has turned him into something genuinely dangerous. Britain has writers and scientists of world standing, but art has become our contemporary cultural signature and Hirst our most renowned creative figure. As such, he sends out a very clear message that art is about making money from nothing.

It may be coincidence that British education has toppled over an abyss in the age of Britart. But if you wanted to encourage the young to despise knowledge, the tireless Hirstian message that empty images mean more than words, and money means more than either, would be quite an effective virus to release in some hideous act of anti-intellectual warfare.

• Don't lose your head over Hirst, says Jonathan Jones
• Damien Hirst has brought public art to a new low

Damien HirstThe art marketArtModernismAwards and prizesJonathan Jones
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