Serpentine galleries

More than seven centuries ago, the medieval cartographer Richard of Haldingham created Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi; I say ‘created’ because when he drew his map it was largely a work of the imagination. Its terra incognita is populated with bizarre creatures born of the fever dreams of early travel writers: his Africa is inhabited by Monocules, one-eyed, one-legged men who use their single foot as a parasol, and his Asia is roamed by the Bonnacon, a bull-like creature with inward-curling horns whose only defence is his projectile faeces. As a Londoner who grew up in Lagos he felt kinship with the hybrid creatures of the Mappa Mundi Five years ago,

Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine, and provided moral exemplars of how to behave – in the case of sacred paintings – or how not to in the case of profane ones. When modernism threw all that into doubt, the picture frame remained. The question for modern artists was, what to put in it? Fifteen years of non-representational painting prompted Guston to question its usefulness For the first decade of his career, Philip Guston had an old-fashioned answer: the murals he painted in the style of Italian Renaissance frescoes in the US and Mexico during the

As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a perverse negotiation as the invigilator struggled with the theoretical parameters of his orders; apparently the watercolour may stain the furniture but dry media like pencils aren’t allowed either; actually, all art-making is not allowed in any of the exhibitions, ‘but photography is OK’. The timber structure has been stained in a shade of brown that

The second most interesting thing about this digital exhibition is that it is not for art critics like me. I first had to download Fortnite, before bumbling through the introductions and menus for roughly half an hour, accidentally playing a match for a few minutes before figuring out how to access the ‘island’ in the game where one sees the exhibition. Once inside, Kaws’s usual character statues and cartoonish abstractions looked much worse than the photos online because my utilitarian laptop doesn’t have the processing power to run the game at high resolution. Needless to say, the recreation of the gallery space in the game is nothing like being in

We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits on a yellow chair that might have been borrowed from Van Gogh’s bedroom. He’s wearing excellent odd socks, one pink to rhyme with his shoes, the other yellow matching his trousers and chair. But it’s Eric’s face that’s most compelling. Like the ‘Mona Lisa’, Eric’s expression is inscrutable. He might be thinking about what’s for tea, the crisis in pictorial representation or, quite likely, nodding off. This enigmatic quality is intentional. ‘When I painted Eric, I wanted accuracy, but I also wanted to privilege his subjectivity and privacy,’ says Packer.