Visual Archive

It's not often you come across an artwork that makes you shudder.

A FIGURE sits on a bench, so calmly still that you're almost tricked into believing that Helka Kaski is a sculptural part of the Every Day exhibition in GoMA's ground-floor gallery.

Interviewer: "Looking back at your life, what would you say had satisfied you most?" Man Ray: "I think...

The 175th birthday this year of the Scots-born environmentalist and pioneering ecologist John Muir may have been one of the reasons for the designation of 2013 as The Year of Natural Scotland, but it is unlikely that the fact has impinged on the consciousness of all but those whose lives already include a familiarity with the Dunbar man's work.

Fittingly coincident with the celebrations of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II 60 years ago, the National Portrait Gallery in London has announced that three important pictures of her predecessors are to benefit from restoration work funded by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Art Conservation Project.

The 30th anniversay of the ZTT label, founded in 1983 by producer Trevor Horn and journalist Paul Morley, is being marked by the issue of an album compiled of some of the rarer mixes of tunes that were big hits in their day.

The creative clatter engendered by hundreds of art students is palpable the minute you walk into a degree show – even if the artists in question are not in the building.

Magic and the occult, myths and the imagined: many of the shows at this year's Venice Biennale of Art, the 55th, focus on hidden worlds, real or imaginary, or the netherworlds inbetween.

Outside the elegant neoclassical building that the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) has inhabited in Edinburgh city centre since the early 19th century, hundreds of people were dancing in the sunshine to I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers.

CHRIS Bushe's new exhibition of evocative Scottish landscape paintings was a substantial hit at its launch at Panter & Hall in London earlier this week.

Anyone who has studied for a degree will vividly remember the build-up to the moment the grades were announced.

A painting by Scottish Colourist Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, entitled Reflections and described as a work of refined elegance, is expected to fetch up to £500,000 when it goes on sale at Sotheby's in London next Thursday.

Niagara Falls, From The American Side, painted in 1867 by American landscape artist Frederic Church, is a real showstopper.

Dark grey is the new white.