Jonathan Jones's Blog

Tate Modern, London
The Sámi artist may use reindeer skulls and bones, but her spiralling wooden fences are so slight they fail to impose themselves on the venue’s vast space – or the imagination

The Tate Turbine Hall, in case you didn’t know, is quite big. It gives an artist a unique opportunity to work on an epic scale and animate this colossal post-industrial space all the way from piazza floor to girdered roof. Artists have put the sun in here, built slides, opened a crack from one end of the floor to another. Yet Máret Ánne Sara seems either scared, repelled or just uninspired by it. She has built a little fort of sticks to hide away from the vastness. That’s the best I can say about her installation – that a small child might enjoy it as a pretend stockade. This easy-to-escape maze of trees actually reminds me of an upmarket adventure playground.

It’s hard to understand why Tate Modern didn’t ask Sara for a bit more, well, art. She must have submitted drawings. Did these not suggest it was all going to be rather slight? You do know, they might have gently said, this is the space Ai Weiwei carpeted with sunflower seeds, and Rachel Whiteread filled with a simulacrum of Arctic ice?

Estorick Collection, London
If you find the fields of colour that Scully has been painting for four decades tranquil, then you haven’t been looking closely enough

A square painting called Blue Wall hangs in the gallery, its surface streaked with intercrossing rectangles in different shades of blue, richly brushed, thick and riverine. But there are gaps showing warm woody red beneath calming waters. It’s an abstract painting, a minimalist one even, yet there’s a rawness suggesting heartfelt narratives, barely contained feelings, kept just about in check behind the blue facade.

In this little essayistic exhibition, Blue Wall’s creator, the abstract artist Sean Scully, lets you into his life with unguarded passion. At the other end of the room, he exposes what his abstract art sublimates and transfigures in a recent self-portrait. It’s an innocent, honest attempt to look in the mirror and see himself, sitting at home in front of one of his big striped canvases, the colours of his clothes bouncing against it. Scully seems to be in a state of artistic flux and a mood of self-scrutiny, not just “mirroring” himself, as the exhibition title has it, in that self-portrait, but imagining a counterlife in which an artist famous for a very recognisable style of abstract painting is a drawer of cups and a portraitist of family life.

They may not have called themselves artists but, as a new exhibition explores, the mostly anonymous painters, sculptors and craftspeople working under the pharaohs still made their mark in distinctive style

The earliest creator in world history whose name is known to us today was Egyptian. The priest Imhotep is credited with designing the step pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara about 4,700 years ago, and so starting the sublime aesthetic achievements of the ancient state that straddled the Nile.

Yet ancient Egyptians did not imagine creativity as an individual achievement or see artists as celebrities – unless they were literally gods. Imhotep was believed to be the son of the creator god Ptah and was deified as a god of wisdom and knowledge, patron of scribes. Most Egyptian artists were no more likely to be remembered by name than Stonehenge’s builders. “Art” was not an idea. Golden mummy masks and statues of spear-wielding pharaohs were not made to be admired but to help dead people on their journeys through the afterlife. As for individual creativity, there wasn’t much place for it in art that conserved the same style, with only superficial changes, for 3,000 years.

Peter Doig soundtracks his new show, the latest Turbine Hall commission is unveiled and Frieze opens for super-rich shoppers – all in your weekly dispatch

Máret Ánne Sara
Expect an earthy, and earth-conscious, installation on a grand immersive scale from the latest commission in the Tate Turbine Hall.

• Tate Modern, London, 14 October-6 April

Serpentine Gallery, London
Pairing his fantastic landscapes with a soundtrack blasted on vintage sound systems, the painter blurs the lines between club and gallery to seismic effect

A giant sound system towers against green mountains in Peter Doig’s painting Maracas, while a tiny man stands on a speaker-stack to reveal the monstrous scale. It’s a utopian – or dystopian – daydream of what sound can be. Could the speakers broadcast enough sonic power, enough soul and love, to blast away reality? They are silent, of course; the mystery, the dread, lies in the expectancy.

Not any longer. House of Music, Peter Doig’s new exhibition, or club, or festival, turns this painting hanging in the Serpentine’s vestibule-like introductory space into a manifesto, and turns up the volume.

British Museum, London
While some prints are suitably nasty, these mostly so-so drawings feel more like something you’d see in Ikea. Who thought they were worthy of purchase for the nation?

Nordic noir. Wasn’t that a genre that had people abuzz back in the 00s? Its revival by the British Museum’s prints and drawings department as a title for an exhibition of modern and contemporary Scandinavian graphic art seems desperate. Forget our oldies like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci – we’re all about new stuff by hot young Scandi artists! Maybe it’s understandable; after all the National Gallery is also moving in on modern art. But Nordic Noir shows just how far overeager neophilia can go wrong. A museum that specialises in history has gone fishing in contemporary waters and, like a lonely angler on an Arctic lake, has come up with absolutely nothing.

The big surprise is that most of the works here are not on loan. The British Museum owns them. It has “acquired” 400 examples of Nordic graphics with the support of the AKO Foundation. What’s that? It’s the cultural arm of AKO Capital, “one of Europe’s leading investment partnerships” managing “approximately $20.3bn across long-only and long-short equity funds”.

Hayward Gallery, London
From the calling cards of male sex workers to shocking headlines about murder, the octogenarian pair see and incorporate everything, resulting in a show that seethes with life

The first picture in Gilbert & George’s retrospective of their art of this century is a portrait of them sitting in a cemetery amid floating drug baggies, their suits bright purple (George) and green (Gilbert) against the grey gravestones. It sums up a stillness, a sadness and a romantic passion that breathes in this show – but you won’t notice it straight away. Instead you’ll be carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image: a joyous embrace of modern life or even, pardon my French, a jouissance.

The pictures tower and expand in this perfect brutalist setting as if you’re walking through a city of art – a dirty, disreputable city. Ages (2001) is a yellow and red slab almost the scale of a cinema screen on which their blandly smiling faces are surrounded by male sex workers’ adverts: “27 YEARS OLD Latin, and very good looking,” “BLACK GUY 24 Marco. Sexy, horny and waiting,” “SKINHEAD JOE, 26. East End/10 mins Liverpool St. Administers firm service.”

Britain’s favourite contrarian duo depict the past 25 years, ancient Egypt showcases its incredible artists and the great performance artist stages skeleton orgies – all in your weekly dispatch

Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures

The couple who have made art together since the 1960s depict life in 21st-century Britain, as they see it.

• Hayward Gallery, London, from 7 October until 11 January

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Revealing tantalising new details about the real lives of artists and craftspeople, this show takes you beyond the death mythology and into the realm of magic

Who knew there were famous artists in ancient Egypt with unique styles, depicting what they saw and felt? Well, most of the time there weren’t, although this exhibition does introduce you to one. From the Old Kingdom to the time of Cleopatra, the ancient Egyptians expected very much the same things of their artists, in a style that barely changed. An extraordinary limestone stela, or engraved slab, that was lent to the Fitzwilliam by the Louvre shows how young Egyptian artists were taught to see in the “correct” way, to make nature conform to the official style. A square grid demonstrates how to calculate proportions to render, for instance, a cat in a perfectly still profile, like a little feline god, an abstraction that was to be repeated for millennia.

Yet Made in Ancient Egypt strives to take you beyond the sublime formal facade to glimpse the artists or, as it calls them more cautiously, “makers” behind the golden coffin portraits and pharaohs’ statues. “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” asked Bertolt Brecht in his poem A Worker Reads History. Here they are, the metalworkers, woodworkers, weavers. In a wooden model made about 4,000 years ago, female workers seated on the ground weave on a loom while others stand spinning thread. You can see a fine example of such women’s handiwork, a white dress made 4,500 years ago. It hangs up, spooky as hell.

Serpentine North Gallery, London
The artist wants to tackle polarisation by strong-arming her audience into stilted debate in a show that seems to mistake social media for real life

This haunted fairground of an exhibition has its heart in the right place. But that is not enough. Called The Delusion, it is a woolly mess of platitudes and phoney dialogue. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is worried about the polarisation of online discourse and 21st-century politics. Aren’t we all? But the remedies offered are confused, and the attempt to create a free, open discussion is stymied by its coercive tactics.

You can’t say you weren’t warned. A huge text at the beginning explains the artist’s “Terms and Conditions”, including the instructions to “Join others, experience this together”, and to “talk, share, listen and question out loud”. Do I have to? Yes. As I look at an arcade-like machine in a cabinet behind a glass door, someone asks me firmly, “Did you open the door? Well, you should open it.” So I open it, answer some questions in the negative and am told off again, this time by the machine, for holding back.