William Cook

Even the most down-to-earth people get emotional about Bill Viola’s videos. Clare Lilley of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seems close to tears as she takes me round his new show. Lilley is the show’s curator. She’s usually so matter-of-fact, but when she talks about Viola her eyes light up. When she took her two teenage daughters to his studio in Los Angeles, she tells me, they both cried when they saw his films. I like to think I’m made of sterner stuff, but when she leaves me in the Sculpture Park’s Underground Gallery, where Viola is on show, after a few minutes in there on my own I’m blubbing like a baby. What is it about Bill Viola that makes grown men (and women) weep?

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach is a one-off, a unique painter with a unique vision.

On the green edge of Clifton Downs, high above the city, there is a sculpture that encapsulates the strange magic of Richard Long. ‘Boyhood Line’ is a long line of rough white stones, placed along the route of a faint, narrow footpath. When Long was a boy, this was where he used to play. There are children playing here today. They pay no attention to Long’s new artwork. Already ‘Boyhood Line’ has melted into the scenery. Half a century since he rolled a snowball across these Downs, and photographed the wobbly line it left behind, it feels as though Long has come home. Richard Long was born here, in Bristol, 70 years ago.

On 1 July, at a swanky party at Tate Modern, one of Britain’s museums will bank a cheque for £100,000, as the Art Fund announces this year’s Museum of the Year. Sure, the money will come in handy. Sure, the publicity will be useful. But this posh bunfight can’t disguise a growing sense that museums face an existential crisis. Cuts are one problem — some say the present round will take museums ‘back to the 1960s’. But they also face a more profound dilemma. In the age of Wikipedia and Google Images, what are modern museums actually for? When I was a child museums were my adventure playgrounds, but was my enthusiasm merely relative? After all, in the 1970s there really was very little else to do. Shops were shut on Sundays.

In 1977 a journeyman actor called Brian Kelly optioned a science-fiction novel called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The book’s author, Philip K. Dick, had been writing science fiction since the early 1950s. He was 49 years old, with 30 novels behind him. He had a cult reputation, but he barely scraped a living. Kelly only paid him $2,500, but Dick was happy with this windfall. He’d written this book for half as much, back in 1968. After five more years, and many rewrites, Dick’s book finally became a film. Directed by Ridley Scott and renamed Blade Runner, it’s now commonly — and quite rightly — regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction movies ever made.

Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team behind Fluck and Law’s puppetry satire show, will be broadcast on ITV this spring. Called Newzoids, it promises to provide a ‘biting look at the world of politics and celebrity’. Cue ecstatic reports in all the papers about how hilarious the original was, and how much we’ve all missed it. There’s only one problem with this analysis. Whisper it on Wardour Street, but Spitting Image wasn’t actually all that funny.

In December 1878 Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the Borinage, a bleak coal- mining district near Mons. He was 25 years old. He’d failed to become an art dealer. He’d failed to become a schoolteacher. Drawing was just a hobby — an artistic career was the last thing on his mind. He’d come here as a preacher, full of evangelical fervour, yet he proved a failure at that too. The problem was, he was far too pious. He gave away everything he owned. These miners didn’t know what to make of him. They called him ‘the Christ of the coal mines’. After six months, he was fired. With nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, during the next 18 months Vincent taught himself the rudiments of draughtsmanship, anatomy and perspective.

Normally, few things in life are quite so tedious as listening to a bunch of academics discussing pop music. However this week’s Kraftwerk Konferenz at Aston University may be the chinwag that refutes this rule. Why so? Well, speakers includes former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flur, plus Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire and Rusty Egan of Visage - remember them? OK, so these real-life pop stars are still outnumbered by a host of earnest academics, delivering lectures with mind-numbing titles like ‘Kraftwerk and the Issue of Post-Human Authenticity’ and ‘Kraftwerk and the Cultural Studies of Cycling’. However if any band can withstand two days of pointy-headed discourse, it must be Kraftwerk.

In 1933, two new students met on their first day at Glasgow School of Art. From then on they were inseparable. They lived and worked together. They became lovers. They stayed together throughout their lives. They shone at art school, then came to London, where their robust paintings soon became very fashionable. Yet a few years later, just as quickly, their work fell out of favour. They became increasingly impoverished, dependent on friends for bed and board, but they never stopped painting — or loving one another. They were both prolific drinkers. By 1966, they were both dead.