Alec Kronacker, Hotel Miasma, 2011

Bloomberg New Contemporaries Opens at the ICA on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011.

Last year the work that had me swooning and coming over all faint was Alec Kronacker's work. I love this one pictured and Not Ironing. But I think my favourite is Man Pacing Apartment (all 2011). They evoke for me an impersonal cultural nostalgia that you want to get personal with, like a wished for nostalgia, a shot at a subliminal memory of yourself in that scene. They make me yearn for the fresh, new modernist feeling of the 1950s, sitcoms and telephones, clunky analogue and Ektachrome colour. I really want one of these paintings.

George Condo, Couple on Blue Striped Chair, 2005

Mental States opened at the Hayward last night. Condo’s art is what I consider to be the Real Deal when it comes to fine art. A genius really. Painterly talent, painful ideas and a acidic humour that come together to create incredible effect. On till 8th January 2012, don’t miss it.

Goshka Macuga, Untitled, 2008 

Frieze opened last night. Grayson said to me "visiting Frieze feels a bit like slowing down on the motorway as you pass a car crash." Ha!  People who are too beautiful or too cool, or God help us a combination of the two can be just as fascinating and chilling for us regular folk as viewing a metallic and flesh bust up. For me then, the opening night of Frieze is a fantastic spectacle of people and their obsession with the Image, both their own and what they might then claim for themselves.

Rebecca Baumann, Improvised Smoke Device, 2010

Possibly, finally, a reason to go to Australia?

Primavera 2 at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (September 8 – November 13). Love the piece shown here by Rebecca Baumann. A little explosion followed by plumes of pretty coloured smoke. Joyful, transient and for some reason makes me think of the decadence of Louis XIV…

Rene Magritte, The Listening Room (La Chambre d'Écoute), 1952

I really, really, really want to get into that room. Crawl around the other side of the apple, lean up against its voluptuous, yet solid form and be quiet. I want to press my ear against it and hear its matter, feel its smooth cool flesh against my skin. It is not going anywhere is it, it wouldn’t rush you in any way and it wouldn’t ask anything of you. I could stay there all day hidden behind that apple listening to it and having it listen to me. A lost day with René Magritte’s apple is what I want today. Magritte at the Tate Liverpool till 16 October 2011.

Jake or Dinos Chapman are now my favourite. Last month it was Tracey’s paintings at the Hayward so I am having a bit of an YBA moment.

The private views for the brothers, who worked separately for this show, were held at both White Cube Hoxton and Mason’s yard. Black Mercs shuttled the art elite and a few celebs back and forth, I noted Jay’s date in Prada and had an envious, spring / summer 2011, banana moment.

But it was the work I coveted the most. Seriously fucked up, excellently executed and crawled right under my skin. The paintings, grant me just one please. That slightly insidious dirty palate I love, mushrooms, pigs in shit, discarded kids shoes, outlines of noses, of ears, hints of an underworld of half child / half pixie; something about them tossed me into the compost heap at the bottom of Grandpa’s garden where imaginations run wild and nature and plastic uncover themselves before virginal eyes.

Upstairs Catholic paintings and statues where flesh had been placed under duress cornered me. The paintings presented something of an illness of skin, whilst the statues were rather more vicious with flesh peeled away from the eyes and from the mouth revealing bloody emerald sparkly tissue. And with Swastikas placed on their forehead, animated cold toy eyes and forked tongues suggestive of Hindu deities, I felt we were witness to a mutation of faith, or possibly even a dissolution of it. I’m off to see Mason’s Yard today. I don’t know which brother did what and I don’t care, I LOVE IT.

This show in New York, just ended. Anyone who sees like this needs to be seen some more. When London please…?

I think it’s always best to wander into an art gallery or exhibition without any preconceptions of what you’re about to see, I think it’s important to be completely open, or even a little disinterested (as Kant might say). The British Art show where the coolest of the cool are selected as what’s hot in contemporary British art presented some interesting works, some I liked, some bored me and one really took my breath away; A Grammar for Listening by Luke Fowler.

A sound and film work which seems to heighten the senses to the point of empathy, where machines and nature get along, each offering their own little luminous poetry. Never did I think that junction 17 on the M60 Preston could elude to such a freedom found in art. It closes tomorrow, 17th April, catch it if you can.

I went to the opening of Susan Hiller’s show at Tate Britain last night. It’s funny how sometimes art can level you. Yesterday was an odd day. I felt strangely absent, and was itching for the sun to go down. So with some sense of unrest I wanted to see some work that would take me out of my head, or further in, one or the other. I wasn’t disappointed. The first work I encountered was called Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–1976) and is composed of more than 300 black-and-white and colour postcards each illustrating a great English seaside scene where rough seas meet the built borders of our little island. Violent yet liberating, it was like the work recognised something in me, let me play with it for a while, then returned me to terra firma. Read Susan’s Q&A she gave me back in 2008.

Mike Nelson, Coral Reef, 2000

Whilst at the Tate Britain I went to see Mike Nelson’s Coral Reef, a work made in 2000 and originally seen at Matt’s Gallery now re-commissioned for the Tate Britain. I knew nothing about the work, but was intrigued because I like Nelson’s art (not to mention he’s hot – we met once at a wedding and I’ve been charmed since!). Anyway, I digress...

You enter an unassuming door, just right off Fiona Banner’s planes, and within seconds I’d forgotten that I was in an art gallery on a Tuesday, mid afternoon. Rather, I was alone investigating a post apocalyptic Lynchian world. My heart quickened and as I tentatively passed from one vacant antechamber to another I was immersed in a foggy environment heavy with the suggestion of narcotics, religion and porn; where night watchmen, cab drivers and junkies had all vanished just before sun rise. Nature didn't know this place, even any trace of humanity was most certainly ill at ease. So convincing was his composition of objects, workmanship, lighting and use of space, the affect of the work left the air singed with a mix of anxiety and anaesthesia and clung to my skin long after I left this impious space.

Interview with Nelson about the work: