meta reviews

Serpentine Gallery
until 13th Sept

Guardian

"The Serpentine is filled with an elegant display of blow-up beach toys, recast with trompe-l'oeil accuracy in aluminium, and mixed with rubbish baskets, stacks of patio chairs, stepladders, industrial chains and mesh fences. It's all entirely painless. A raft of cooking utensils dangles beneath a dolphin's belly. It's as if the later work of Ashley Bickerton had collided with Cady Noland. A daft dirigible lobster pays homage to Salvador Dalí, and plays with topless models, Popeye and layers of abstract nonsense in Koons's computer assisted paintings. I think Koons wants to give us lots of innocent pleasure, with an art-savvy twist. Maybe he wants to save us from ourselves. This is art for a world with deep pockets and a short attention span."

Telegraph

"On a superficial level... everyone loves to be fooled. You engage with this work with all your senses because when the brain tells us not to trust what the eye sees, we instinctively try to resolve the conflict through our sense of touch. You’ll have to restrain yourself from reaching out to stroke the soft folds of a “vinyl” puppy or the braided “rope” attached to a silly pool toy." "These toys are empty, those breasts fake, those smiles painted. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. Appearances are good enough. Happiness is contagious. They make you smile, that makes you feel happy, and that’s what counts."

Financial Times

"Now, in this most recent work, Koons has begun to detain the viewer just a little longer than he used to. There are enough hints in this latest show of real emotion, and perhaps a few stains in the wall-to-wall carpet of happiness, to suggest that a new post-kitsch Koons may be emerging."

Independent

"I'd say as a result that, while Koons remains a fine artist, his new works lack the dumb majesty of the old. He has always been fascinated by the art market, and maybe it is market forces that have pushed him to change. Or perhaps, at 54, he has decided to court art history by buying it wholesale."

Londonist

"This is clearly one of the Serpentine’s most popular shows ever, and the gallery staff have never had to work so hard - there’s even a special “no touching” briefing at the door. Whether it’s Koons’ express wishes or simply fears for the popularity of the pieces, the rule does add an extra dimension to the show. The works become an exercise in faith - can they really be made from metal when they seem ready to burst? The littlest isn’t bothered by musings on faith and deception, she just loves the colours, and soon little fingers are groping for a sea lion’s flipper. A gallery assistant circles warily as we execute a swift turn straight into a bright blue dolphin hanging from a tow hook."

Wallpaper

"The paintings are complex and layered compositions that combine disparate images both found and created by Koons, including most prominently the recognisable figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl. Apart from perhaps the fact that Popeye is a character conceived during the Great Depression and therefore a fitting character to rediscover and explore now, this show doesn’t break any current taboos or step on new ground, but when it comes to Koons, we wouldn't have it any other way."

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Whitechapel Gallery
until 20th Sept

Evening Standard

"All highly clever and pretty to look at, too. And yet after the euphoria of the first 15 pictures, this exhibition starts to pall. Why? Peyton, like so many other artists of the art boom years, falls victim to the success of her own project. She thought she could make significant work by depicting a superficial world in a superficial style, but even if these pictures are about vapidness, they are also ultimately vapid in themselves. The mood is too monotone."

Guardian

"Peyton is better than her paintings sometimes look, with their winsome art-school ways, pallid cheeks and vampire lips. She's more direct than the dreadful Karen Kilimnik, to whom she might be compared, though she isn't Lucian Freud. And Peyton can draw beautifully: you can imagine coming across her sketch of Napoleon in a dim recess in a provincial French museum, and wondering who did it."

Financial Times

"Does Peyton critique or merely comply with the virtual realities of our image-overload, celebrity-drenched times? Perhaps it doesn’t matter: though she is maddeningly self-absorbed, sickeningly ingratiating, her decadence is our decadence, and in her convalescent subjects lie her theme and her battle – the disappearing of a tradition."

Independent

"Peyton's paintings have become extremely cool and expensive, the must- have artworks for the kind of people she depicts. You can see why they want them: her pictures are pretty as can be, their subjects always stylised to look more beautiful than they really are. No doubt some people see them as a kind of clever meta-art; hand-painted reproductions of iconic photos made in the digital age. But surely the reality is as shallow as the picture surface she paints."

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National Gallery
until 20th Sept

Telegraph

"This free summer show charts the development of 19th century French landscape painting with examples drawn almost entirely from the permanent collection. It is filled with wonderful pictures, many not on normally on display. But for all its pleasures, even an in-house show needs to be shaped to give it focus and purpose." "As it is, the show meanders aimlessly through the downstairs galleries in the Sainsbury Wing before becoming repetitive and finally petering out. Why are Corot’s paintings from the 1820s shown alongside works painted forty years earlier? What is Turner oil or a figure painting by Francois Millet doing in this show? Why is there hardly a word – in the catalogue, labels, or the short film – about how these pictures were painted and why? By the end of the exhibition you’ve seen some amazing pictures, but you haven’t learned a thing."

Guardian

"A sensual eye for light and atmosphere shines in Corot's silvery scenes and illumines the wild stormy days of the Barbizon school. Almost every painting here is worth looking at for a long time – and coming back to. Out of the open-air painting tradition and the Romantic desire to experience nature comes at last the fragmented light of Monet. But I don't want to simplify something so thought-provoking. Here is an exhibition to mull over and learn from. Go. And go again."

Independent

"As you walk through this clever show, you're struck by the dates on its labels: 1789-93 (Simon Denis' Torrent at Tivoli), 1848 (Millet's The Winnower), 1871 (Monet's The Thames below Westminster). You don't have to be a Marxist historian to feel that painting and politics went hand in hand in the years of France's great revolutions. If the work of Corot and Daubigny is implicitly subversive, then that of Millet and Courbet gets close to being explicitly so – certainly explicit enough for the authorities."

Evening Standard

"The pity of it is that there would have been some point in mounting an exhibition devoted to the landscape sketch in oils — it would have stretched from the Urals to Oregon, from Shchedrin to Bierstadt, and would quite reasonably have included Bonington and Pitloo, Blechen and Bürkel, Fearnley and all the other interlopers in this essentially French exhibition. Was it frustrated by the curators having to draw only on the National Gallery’s resources, avoiding the costs of borrowing but disastrously restrictive?"

LRB

"It is not just the weather that gets surly in the paintings. You are also taken into darker places: the forest of Fontainebleau in pictures by Diaz and Rousseau can seem heavy with shadows even below blue skies. And then one gets out of the wood and arrives at the seaside. The white umbrellas and coloured skirts in Boudin’s beach scenes, friezes of holidaymakers so far off that you feel Boudin must have been hiding in the dunes, point the way to Impressionism. With his friend Monet’s The Beach at Trouville of 1870 the path comes full circle, for here once again is a transcription as direct as Thomas Jones’s laundry and crumbling plaster, but done more broadly and confidently. When Impressionism too lost its drive, landscape painting from life took a new turn and Poussin-like clarity of structure reasserted itself. But that lies beyond the end of this exhibition – to carry on you must go upstairs again and search out the Seurats and Cézannes."

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National Portrait Gallery
until 20th Sept

Telegraph

"Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has created an installation which consists of 300 images of Saint Fabiola in what must be the most unexpected, original, and thoughtful exhibition of contemporary art this year." "What fascinated Alÿs about these pictures is that they show us in microcosm why works of art come to be made, how art is seen and received (not by critics and museum curators but by ordinary people), and how a single work of art lives on, constantly evolving in a never-ending, open-ended process. Nothing stands still."

Guardian

"The first of the many tantalising questions raised by this show is just how Henner's portrait came to dominate all future images of the saint for the original disappeared long ago. It survives only in black-and-white reproductions based, one must suppose, either on a primitive photograph or an etching; and yet almost every artist here has painted the hair brown and the veil decisively red. It is as if Henner's painting, even at several removes, was unanimously upheld as the right version of Fabiola, quite a tribute to his imagination for he had no idea how she looked."

CLR

"Perhaps what fascinated him about these portraits was that they show this urge to create and to communicate through art. More though, Alÿs’ display highlights the ways in which art inhabits a space of its own – outside of museums and critical appraisal. The works he has collected pay homage to the fact that it can be made anywhere, by anyone. The art changes and becomes personalized as it is interpreted and lived by individuals." "What endures in the exhibition is the very potential and contingency of the creative act, as seen through the guise of repetition. Going against the usual modes of display in the museum, with unnamed artists and the exhibition of a series of salvaged paintings, Alÿs’ investigation of the creative act makes it necessary to hold back on certain institutional assumptions. The viewer’s assessment of creativity and originality must include the act of copying as well as a work’s relation to authorship, here unidentified."

Culture24

"All of which casts the exhibition as another thought-provoking Francis Alÿs prank, especially given its context at the NPG – this is the same artist who sent a live peacock to an opening of the Venice Biennale. But the latest show does more than poke fun. At the request of Alÿs, the walls have been painted a rich, ecclesiastical shade of green and by sheer volume the many kitsch pieces on display achieve a cumulative gravity."

WMMNA

"Many of the paintings are pretty bad and that's what makes the show all the more fascinating. Who would have thought that a work in which quantity prevails over quality could be so spectacularly enthralling? I've used the word "artwork" perhaps inappropriately. Fabiola feels like artwork by Alÿs rather than an exhibition of a collection made of over 300 artworks that he has spent 15 years gathering. But i suspect many would disagree with me."

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De La Warr (Bexhill)
until 27th Sept

Art Review

"Beuys, however, isn’t here, much as the exhibition’s title would like him to be, and this is always felt when it comes to performances, actions and lectures, of which there are only remnants, blackboards and Rose for Direct Democracy (1973) – a red rose in a chemist’s cylinder on an office desk. At Documenta V, Beuys conducted 100 days of discussion with this talisman always at his side. It’s the energy of this discussion which makes its importance felt, but is still missing in this context. It’s a lack and a loss which continually asserts itself. Concretising this sentiment is Scala Napoletana (1985), one of Beuys’s final works, which is shown here in the UK for the first time, a thin rickety ladder reaching for the sky, held in place by two lead spheres and wire: precarious, impossible, a little depressed."

Independent

"I don't know if the curators set out to show this, but their emphasis on Beuys's two- dimensional work does make you look at his much more famous sculptures with a newly formalist eye. To the question, is Table With Accumulator anything more than what it says it is? The unexpected answer is yes – not just a relic of St Joseph, but an object which, suitably enough, exudes its own power. Leaving aside any Beuysian interest, the juxtaposition of copper and wood in the piece works like lead and acid in a battery: which is to say, it sets off a reaction that generates energy."

Culture24

"Far from advocating a prescriptive vision of art, Beuys' work encourages intellectual participation. There is something refreshingly altruistic about this show, reminding us of the importance of reflection and the validity of our own personal questions, choices and creative outcomes."

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Peckham Multistorey
until 30th Sept

Guardian

"Coming so soon after the success of Barry's Peckham Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, if anything can substantiate claims of an influential youthful art "scene" in Peckham, this is it." "With a sunset gilding an already spectacular view of the capital, the impression from the 10th floor is that Peckham has the whole of London at its feet. As a metaphor, it doesn't seem that far-fetched."

BBC

"It is the third such exhibition in the car park, but the first since the success of the Peckham Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which heralded this suburb's attempt to carve out a place for itself on the contemporary art scene. The exhibition has some terrific pieces in it, from Hannah Barton and Xavier Poultney's huge black blocks - one with a central hole, and the other containing a fibre optic prism - which face each other and channel the setting sun to create a striking effect."

murmurART

"The advantage of outdoor sculptures over indoor ones is that they, like us, are constantly interacting with the fundamentals of nature. Today was rain, which heightened several of the more monolithic pieces, such as Bayley Shelton's 'Rock of Ages, Sands of Time' and James Balmforth's 'Failed Obelisk', but was less good for Hannah Barton and Xavier Poulton's sunset-related headliner." "It's tempting to concentrate solely on the unexpected venue, which has the potential to surpass a weaker show than 'Bold Tendencies III'. However, the strong multimedia arrangement manipulates the luxury of the extensive space afforded each piece, while resisting the impression of isolated contributions."

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Tate Britain
until 4th Oct

Telegraph

"The display at Tate Britain, William Blake's 1809 Exhibition, is a failure – but such a strange, touching, interesting failure that I can't help but admire the gallery for mounting it. Restaging the 1809 exhibition was a bright but perverse idea. The original exhibition can never be fully recreated because six of the 16 works in the show no longer exist or are untraced." "His paintings have darkened and cracked to a degree that has rendered many more or less unexhibitable. The visionary paintings – Satan Calling up His Legions or The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth – are total wrecks, of interest to Blake specialists for their iconography, but for the rest of us are sad ghosts of what they must once have been." "The display has been padded with pictures painted in the year 1809 by Blake's contemporaries (J M W Turner, William Mulready), but for all its good intentions I'm afraid there just isn't enough meat in this show to make it worth a separate visit to Millbank."

Independent

"So various questions spring to mind, the first being why Tate Britain has chosen to restage one of the greatest duds in the history of British art. The answer, of course, is that modern viewers will, as one, take sides with Blake against Hunt. In the 200 years that separate the first and second outings of this show, the unfortunate lunatic has entered the canon as a national treasure, a poet and visionary on a par with Milton and Turner." "Nonetheless, the problem remains one of context. Tate Britain is the national pantheon of British art. For a painter to get a solo show there, he must, by definition, be great: Blake 1809 is, inevitably, a self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter how punctilious its curating, an exhibition held in Room 8 in 2009 can never replicate the sense of one held in a room over a shop in 1809."

Oxford Times

"What a lesson it is in how reputations can change. Once neglected and slated, Blake is now seen as the epitome of artistic creativity, a genius. It cost two shillings and sixpence to get into that 1809 exhibition. For that you got Blake’s catalogue and an odd experience looking at strange artworks in a too-dark room. Tate’s recreation is brighter, fresher — and free as part of their BP British Art Displays. And as a result, far more viewers will see William Blake’s 1809 exhibition than ever did in Soho."

Guardian

"Perhaps it will feel poignant to visit this show, two centuries too late for William Blake. But his loss may be our advantage. For we have lived through the whole of modern art and understand far better than his contemporaries could the power of images decoupled from didactic meanings, having learned to look without expecting easy explanations. As Blake wrote, ahead of his time as ever: "The eye sees more than the heart knows." "

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Design Museum
until 4th Oct

Building Design

"The results are more a swirling of the brackish waters of Cool Britannia than an incisive exposé of the design world. Asked what they would give back to London, the most interesting of the 15 proposals attempt to deal with its annoyances." "...not that the work is bad — a lot of these ideas address real problems in fun and poetic ways — but that the curators are stuck in the spirit of the late nineties." "This exhibition propagates the notion of the designer as a whirring ideas machine into which you simply drop a few coins and a handful of juicy ideas come out. Design is a much more intense, frustrating and drawn out process than it is portrayed here."

meta loca

"It starts are a great flick through the timeline of British/London Design from the 60s onwards. When you get to the 00s, it takes a turn. You realise that most of the things you thought were “modern” are from the 90s, or early 00s. After 2004, it tails off completely. Nothing feels iconic, different, revolutionary..." "Even though I know the exhibition doesn’t represent the state of design at the moment, I certainly came away with a bad case of nostalgia rather than being excited for the future."

Wallpaper

"At the very least the collection of 15 proposals, all on display at the Design Museum, show the strength and breadth of London’s home grown creative talent. At best the more practical designs provide realistic, commercially viable, improvements to everyday life in London. What you’re left with is a sense of the sheer number of creatives working to their own agenda and the only thing they all have in common is the identity of their urban umbrella."

Londonist

"Super Contemporary is the Design Museum's triumphant summer show, a look at the white-hot edge of British design while casting a nostalgic view through rose-tinted glasses at a half century of quality craftsmanship."

Time Out

"Commissioned to make a gift to London, 'the heart of contemporary design', 15 of the capital's finest from architecture, fashion and product design have made offerings that occasionally delight but often seem ill conceived or more focused on the giver than the receiver. The resulting exhibition 'Super Contemporary' gives itself an up-to-the-minute billing, but seems somewhat out of touch: only Tom Dixon's hybrid of an electric milk float engine and the chassis of a London cab shows any hardheaded engagement with environmental concerns for example."

Financial Times

"The brief for the Design Museum’s new show was to come up with interventions in London’s cityscape that would lighten or enhance the everyday experience of the streets." "There is much nonsense here, but also glimpses of real intelligence. A few of these designs genuinely address issues of life in London. But it would have been good to have seen more serious products, more utilitarian but not necessarily less beautiful or ambitious. In spite of London’s high opinion of itself as a design capital, this is still the city where a prince can stymie a modern intervention and where corporate blandness stalks the streets. Super contemporary?"

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British Museum
until 11th Oct

Times

"For the most part, you don’t have to read anything to be able to respond. These paintings work on a simple visual level. Here is an oasis for the imagination, a show to sweep you away on an intoxicating cosmological voyage." "Perhaps the most extraordinary pieces — certainly in the sense of being the least expected — are those that look almost like modern-day abstracts."

Time Out

"None of these can prepare you for the unadulterated fields of the cosmos, in a series of colour-saturated panels - gold, silver, magenta, orange - across which only one or two figures float divinely, or perhaps hitch a ride on an antelope. These painterly approximations of the Hindu 'Absolute', the eternal essence of the universe, are glorious and unapologetic precursors to all that nervous twentieth-century struggling with abstraction."

Guardian

"Indian court painting is justly famous - it's hard not to be awed by the beauty of the miniature worlds and precise portraiture produced for the earlier Moghul emperors."

mark haddon

"a small but wonderful exhibition at the british museum. breathtaking colours you don't see in western art until... well, i'm having trouble thinking of anything before the sixties. turner, singer sargent, gaugin... even in their most acid-trip moments they all seem a bit muted next to these pinks and greens. plus, these are all folio pictures, which were stored in large volumes away from sunlight so they look as if they were painted yesterday."

History Today

"It is the first time that any of the works have been on display outside Europe. The vibrancy and detail of the paintings are captivating. Beyond the scenes of lavish palace life and great Indian epics, however, also lays a deeper insight into the political climate and changing cultural influences in this north-western corner of India, in the 18th and 19th centuries. The paintings were created for the personal pleasure of the maharajas and reveal two different styles of court painting. The very title of the exhibition summarizes the two distinct cultural and aesthetic influences that are represented."

Independent

"To picture substance being made out of nothingness is an almost impossible feat, but Jodhpur's artist came as close as damn it to doing it."

Evening Standard

"With desperate effort, I looked at birds and animals, at racing elephants and conjugating ducks and, confronted by the exquisite unrealities of landscape and the artists’ total incomprehension of perspective, I thought of Italian painters in Florence and Siena seven centuries ago and judged their awareness of these things to have been infinitely more intellectual and enquiring."

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Barbican Art Gallery
until 18th Oct

Times

"Imagine a cross between summer solstice at Stonehenge and the Chelsea Flower Show. That’s what the latest exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery is like. Radical Nature offers a survey of the work of some 25 artists and architects who, over the course of 50 years, have been trying to forge closer, more sympathetic bonds between Man and the planet on which he lives." "It’s all very worthy and often delightful. But people have been exploring the possibilities for decades: you can see that from the Star-Trek style designs of the architectural collective who dream of creating a diplomatic embassy in the realm of the dolphins, a floating outpost to promote communication between the species."

Observer

"If Radical Nature shows the green ethic translated into an aesthetic, then we are all going to be very disappointed. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena has been responsible for more physical beauty than, say, Beuys and, with its contribution to space exploration, has contributed rather more to radical reinterpretations of natural possibilities than, say, Jonathon Porritt. In the catalogue introduction, Porritt tells us his hopes for the exhibition are "to advance creative proposals for alternative forms of life based on environmental justice and a global framework". If an endeavour may be judged by the beauty of its propaganda, then Porritt really must be stopped. Now."

Guardian

"The difficulty of staging any exhibition in which land art and activism figure highly, is that many canonical works can only be represented by second-hand material. Curiously, though, it's the sculptures and installations in the downstairs gallery – which forms the first half of the show – that feel like middle-class cliches: polite, well-meaning but ultimately unchallenging."

Building Design

"One has the impression that somebody in marketing fixed upon art and the environment as a subject guaranteed to appeal to some target audience; the hapless curatorial team sets out with a rickety supermarket trolley (and the budget for a family camping trip), taking down from the shelves any product of artistic or architectural practice that has the word “eco” on the packaging. When this exercise begins to seem as silly as it sounds, somebody suggests that it might be dignified by the addition of random works by a few equally random great names from the sixties and seventies."

WMMNA

"There is sincere commitment in artists' efforts to raises consciences about the eco-drama our planet is going through... even if sometimes, while visiting artshows on a similar topic, i've found myself in front of art works or events that smelled a bit too pungently of opportunism. But if those artworks help us change the world that's a good thing, right? My answer is "yes of course but how can i avoid being cynical?" As long as these artworks do not step out of museums and galleries most people hardly ever visit... i fear that the impact of their work might be somewhat limited. Besides, setting up a contemporary art exhibition, whether its theme is eco-awareness or Bronze Age jewellery, is everything but a 'sustainable' activity."

Time Out

"The exhibition plots a nebulous path through various miscellaneous or often rather whimsical concepts - taxonomy, botanical cultivation, a floating 'embassy' for communicating with dolphins - while spuriously trying to tie them together into some kind of history of nature-related art. As a result, and despite some occasionally interesting works, 'Radical Nature' is ultimately rather disappointing, a curious mix of the didactic and the directionless."

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Serpentine Gallery
until 18th Oct

Times

"The pavilion may be ethereal, but it’s not unreal like a computer graphic. It’s chunkily riveted together like an aircraft or a 1950s Airstream caravan, so the mirrored “pool of water” shimmers with dimples as if someone has thrown in a stone. It’s mesmerising, and fun. Undulating from waist to tree height, it might tempt the naughty to transform it into London’s biggest slide. The building is only really finished when the public take it over, popping in for a cuppa or a lecture, jogging through on the morning run. The intent always is to make contemporary architecture unintimidating, but not dumbed down. You can touch it. It won’t bite."

Guardian

"Evidently, though, the Serpentine Pavilion has been the perfect commission for Sejima and Nishizawa. The structure is as light as any covered space this side of a tent. "We are interested in relaxing the boundaries between inside and out," says Sejima. The pavilion should feel as gentle and contemplative as a magical woodland grove – although its inevitable popularity, coupled with the fact that it boasts a cafe, might make it hard to grab much more than a few quiet moments there. Of all the Serpentine pavilions, Sanaa's ranks as one of the best not just because it is rather beautiful, but because it attempts to be no more and no less than a canopy set between trees, albeit one made of aluminium."

RIBA Journal

"Free to reflect the landscape beyond, the roof of the pavilion at times dissolves into it, defining itself only by the perceived ‘warp’ in the conventional view. Wandering between the stainless steel columns, events- a cyclist riding by, a jogger, a car, register themselves on its surface and to the viewer despite being out of eyeshot. The smooth concrete floor beneath denotes the boundary of the pavilion and forms the second surface between which SANAA sandwich their electrostatic space. Standing here, even raindrops, dripping from the roof’s sides to the gravel below are reversed in reflection, defy gravity and appear to drip with equal and opposite force, back to the sky."

Building Design

"Draw closer, however, and what emerges is an extraordinary swarm of reflections, constantly shifting before our eyes. Like spilled mercury, the highly polished roof positively floods across the site, covering a much larger extent than any pavilion has previously commanded. Its profile freely adjusts to the presence of trees — some existing, others planted for the duration of the pavilion’s stay — stretching out between them to establish distinct territories."

Independent

"how does SANAA's architecture stack up against the pavilions that preceded it? Well, it doesn't have the lusciously overstated grace of Niemeyer's, even if it does recall the Brazilian's 1943 dance hall canopy at Pampulha; it doesn't present such an obviously brilliant essay in geometry as the Ito-Balmond pavilion; it is not as brusquely strange as the pavilions by Siza or Gehry; and it is not a literally inflated idea, like Koolhaas's. SANAA's design is about something else: edges that shy away from defining volumes of space, and surfaces that are equally vague about what is up and what is down, in or out"

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V&A
until 18th Oct

Evening Standard

"His well-presented outing looks at what is now called “design-art”. Designers make short-edition, fantasy-imbued items that are “self-motivated rather than commissioned”. Or, as the entrance board says, “personal statements or manifestos” — which translates into very, very expensive design." "Fantasy? Yes. Fear? No. But it’s the best show of surrealism so far this century."

Building Design

"In the context of the world’s largest collection of the decorative arts this exhibition presents a small group of contemporary designers’ aspirations to overcome a century of modernist functionalist rhetoric and continue the tradition of telling stories through designed objects. Revisiting the V&A’s 4.5 million objects suggests that this tradition has always been integral to the act of design, contradicting Judd’s polarised distinctions between art and function."

David Byrne

"The show is called “Telling Tales”, as if there was some Grimms’ Fairy Tale theme running through the work — death and incest and dark mothers and fathers and forests… though to me that all seems like a stretch. Pretty much all the work, except for two pieces (one British — Julian Mayor — and one by Boym, the Russian-American designer), is Dutch. Leave those out and the show could have been called a survey of recent extreme Dutch furniture design — though there is a lot more going on there design-wise as well. The Eindhoven-based Droog Design crew, which spawned Hella Jongerius and quite a few others, don’t strictly make furniture — they are also pushing design boundaries."

Guardian

"By "design art" they mean products that transcend the boundaries between function and art. Or, as I found myself scribbling in my notebook, "sculpture you can use". Designers featured here are as keen to probe the dark side of fairytales as well the light: while most people will think of designer objects as things to covet – even love – plenty of the pieces in this show will give you nightmares instead of happy endings."

Times

"This exhibition will give you disturbing nightmares — those gold maggots in the ear of the fox — but the most beautiful dreams, too. Like any good dream, you can analyse each art piece for meta-meanings, but hugging the image close without conclusion is the better medicine. To drift through the hologram deck of this fairytale exhibit is my idea of good sex."

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Wellcome Collection
until 18th Oct

BMJ

"Beckoning visitors once more to peep behind the fairground curtain at these strange and macabre figures, and to meet the artists, entrepreneurs, and doctors behind them, the Wellcome Collection has recreated a fabulous fantasy world—although more historical detail, especially on the scientific context, would have been useful. And with only 50 exhibits in two rooms the display is small but, like its anatomical Venus, perfectly formed."

Evening Standard

"The Wellcome does what only it can do without a blush. It is a scientific institution, not a gallery, and as with medicine itself, it has a duty to deal with the history of medicine. This waxwork business is part of that history, and if the current exhibition seems a thing of freaks, dwarfs, conjoined twins and the consequences of syphilis, so be it, for in these it embodies historic truths about our slippery and hypocritical attitudes to such misfortunes, pleading instruction on the one hand while enjoying smutty titillation on the other." "Those who saw the Petherbridge and Arts Council exhibitions will recognise the virtue of the Wellcome’s completion of the tale they told, and in that sense this exhibition is important. On the other hand, it can be argued that this is an exhibition for the adolescent with a taste for the gruesome and macabre. Had I still godsons of that age, I’d take them to see the Rasputin-like peasant with a single Cyclops eye, the bearded lady, “the ravages inflicted on the unwary in the red-light district of Barcelona” and the “parade of Nature’s monstrous deformities” — and then widen their perceptions by whisking them off to look at real sculpture in the V&A."

Independent

"Exquisite Bodies may be the name of a surrealist game of figure drawing, but stark, staring realism confronts us in this show of anatomical models. The subject is now a theme of art (Damien Hirst) and family fun (Gunther von Hagens), but the Wellcome Collection is still treading warily – for the first time, it bars admission to those under 18." "This is a work which stimulates pity for its object, as well as wonder at the skill of its human maker. I am sorry though that the admission policy prevents so many from seeing these fascinating things."

Londonist

"The narrative takes us from the late 18th century to the early 20th, a journey that begins with the anatomical surrogates put to serious scientific and pedagogical use, and ends in a smutty freakshow for prurient Victorians. It's an utterly successful exhibition. If you just want to turn up and gawp at the macabre, you'll find plenty of twisted eye candy. If you want to take time and read all the panels, you'll find an absorbing history filled with curious characters such as Joseph Towne, anatomical model maker to Guy's Hospital for over 50 years. Gruesomely glorious stuff and a must-see for anyone without syphilis."

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Design Museum
until 1st Nov

Blueprint

"The installation is intended to be like a ‘shower of images’: having digested extraneous mental imagery visitors are then free to look at Mariscal’s past projects. The show has created a new buzz around an artist-designer who has the ability to catapult the viewer into a world of angular, yet friendly characters and intense colours." "In many ways, his work is the equivalent in design to Italo Calvino’s short novel Invisible Cities, carving a space for the imagination and the dream where everything is possible."

Creative Review

"The walls are filled with Mariscalia. You enter the show via a tunnel of drawings on paper – some 640 in all, apparently – hung from the ceiling. It's a lovely introduction to his style of his illustration, where cityscapes, objects and caricatures are rendered in thick black marker pen. It's a thoughtful display, too, as it also reaffirms the enviable position that Mariscal is in: His personal vision – as exemplified by this succession of quickfire sketches – merges seamlessly with his commercial work at every turn." "With all this fun and laughter, you could be forgiven for thinking that Mariscal doesn't take his work that seriously. But the museum has cleverly addressed that by covering one wall near the entrance to the exhibition with examples of 30 years of his best work."

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Serpentine Gallery
until 8th Nov

Time Out

"As the London art world's perennial outsider, Metzger has long been a hard sell, so hard in fact that he's struggled to make a career out of his life's work. His reticence to engage with the value structures of the art market has been matched only by his dogged refusal to compromise his radically oppositionist practice (giving up art altogether from 1977-80 was one such ideological stand). He became known in 1960 for his 'Auto-Destructive Art' manifesto urging the use of 'Ballistics, Explosives, Glass, Mass Production, Pressure, Stress', which was complemented by his acid-flinging, canvas-dissolving performances on the South Bank." "This is a frugal but richly deserved show, reacquainting the public with a living legend but also reflecting the man and his unfortunate hobo-like existence - the reams of newspapers he has collected over the past two decades litter the first gallery as a monument to the permanence of belongings as opposed to the transience of an existence in which we'll all eventually turn to mulch."

Stewart Home

"The rest of the exhibition highlights Metzger’s varied practices of the past 50 years, with many pieces realised in new ways. For instance, his series of Historic Photographs are now easier to view than in earlier incarnations, although in most cases there are still obstructions to prevent these works being gazed at from a comfortable and familiar distance. Moving on, Metzger’s trade mark displays of old newspapers and waste materials are too cleanly and neatly laid out. Although this highlights Metzger’s grunge aesthetic, I still found it surprising that a series of car scrappage adverts torn from recent newspapers should be evenly spaced along the walls as if they were somehow equivalent to a series of Jeff Koons pictures. Personally I’d have preferred less space around these and all the other works, anything but the white walls on which they were displayed (light grey would have seemed more appropriate), and considerably dimmer lighting."

Independent

"One of its difficulties is that it gets off to a rather poor – if not lame – start. We walk in the door to be confronted by heaps of newspapers, great bundles of them, tumbling out of their shrink-wrapping. What's all this about? There is white shelving around the walls, chairs to sit at. A couple of people are there already, idly leafing through a newspaper. The instructions on the walls tell us to choose articles or images on one or another of three themes: the credit crunch; extinction; or the way we live now. "Select the relevant articles and images", it reads. Visitors may "edit, share and discuss". Then what though? Are we supposed to be making something that will add up to a collective protest of some kind or not? (There are already some articles pinned up.) It seems unclear. We drift away." "We pass through the curtains again and we almost collide with a beaten up Vauxhall Astra, its windows smashed out. Nearby there's an image of some kids in Camden Town in 1996, dancing on a wrecked car just like this one. And some distant chanting too: "Kill the car, Kill the car!" Just then, the early October sun beams in on us from Kensington Gardens. This is a very comfortable space in which to be feeling resolutely anti-capitalist."

Guardian

"Of course, auto-destructive art doesn't always mean destroying a car; rather, it means a work of art that contains the seeds of its own destruction, or that is destroyed by its creator. It is also pointedly political: Metzger's new exhibition Decades, a survey of a life's work, will seethe with passionate denunciations of nuclear weapons, climate change and capitalism. A poster calling for an end to flights to international art biennales will be one of the uneasier works for the cognoscenti to view; this really is biting the hand that feeds him. It betrays the same mischief that makes Metzger tell me, as people labour in the gallery behind him to recreate his work, that "auto-destructive art doesn't exist except in the mind"." "Violent art is Metzger's response to a violent world. In his exhibition, that same Warsaw photograph will be shown concealed behind a barrier, like the other images in his series Historic Photographs. These are his most enduring and remarkable works: you crawl on your hands and knees across the images as a way of remembering what happened."

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