Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

Why do artists make stuff if the familiar criteria of success or failure in the domain of manufacture are not dispositive when it comes to art? Why are artists so bent on making stuff? To what end?

To begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins of a Meal (1978) by turning the camera on himself.

Wes Craven’s movies were about movies, even when they weren’t. And in this sense they helped bring cinema back to its self-reflective origins.

Patwardhan both captures and manifests this wavering time of modern India: history exists in his films not as a static object for reflection, nostalgia or mourning, but as something which constantly returns, flashing up, animating politics and inflecting horizons of possibility in the present.

Museums and galleries weren’t always the grand institutions we experience today. Formerly private collections, visible only to the ruling classes, were projected into the lower echelons of society in grand acts of philanthropy.

Even back in 1994, the Final Fantasy series was settling into the sort of routine for which it later became well known – and was often scorned for.

On 21 December, 2012, I had the privilege of introducing J.M. Coetzee to an expectant audience at the University of Cape Town; he was about to read from his new, as yet unpublished work, The Childhood of Jesus.

And what clouds! Xu’s slow, tender pan renders them scarlet-tinged, streaked across the sky in Turneresque smears. These static frames, brushed with merely ambient sound, are composed in radiant ignition.

The cross-dressing Qiu Jin was emblematic of a revolutionary feminist current at the end of the Qing era, writing urgently on women’s emancipation: “While the men of China are entering a civilized new world, China’s women still remain in the dark.”

Some minutes into the UK premiere of Wim Wenders and Juliano Riberdo Salgado's The Salt of the Earth at the benefit opening of the 2015 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, someone whispers in my ear: “So what does this have to do with human rights?”

We are getting close to the 100 year anniversary of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and I dedicate my post to Tzara while reading the recent biography about him.

In 1998, Isa Genzken produced some two dozen paint-slashed and spray-painted garments – shirts and jackets, mainly, but also a lone dress.