Damien Hirst has made the Tate's Christmas by gifting them 4 of his art works. The infamous cow and calf bisected and suspended in formaldehyde, "Mother and Child Divided" is the Turner Prize winning crowning glory. This is a high profile donation, timed for maximum festivity and goodwill but Hirst's generosity is not spontaneous or even his own idea. He pledged works to the Tate back in 2004 as part of the Building the......

Every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings... For the friends and family members who seem to always be busy with art exhibitions, arthouse films, dance, theatre and music of a more......

Shlepp along past the Wapping Project in E1 and you can't fail to notice that something is afoot. Yellow umbrellas hang from a tree, as if a gaggle of Mary Poppins had become ensnared in the branches. Nearby a column of Dan Flavin-like yellow fluorescents hang in the disused accumulator tower, a pool at the bottom reflecting them into infinity. On the building's roof, a shipping forecast intones as a yellow dinghy and a......

Never knowingly underrated - his was the sole photographic contribution to a recent Phaidon book about art history - Canadian photographer Jeff Wall is best known for his imposingly large colour transparencies that evoke scenes from unmade films. For his first UK show since a 2005 Tate retrospective, Wall has filled the lower half of the White Cube in Mason's Yard, SW1 with a selection of his lesser-known black and white photos. Drained of......

You may remember that we're not exactly lukewarm about this place. We were even up for finding love here. I guess you could say we're fans. Nothing has changed with a change in exhibition: Sleeping and Dreaming is marvellous and you must go. For a start, it's free. Nought pee. You can just swan through the doors, turn left and there you are. But that's where it gets dark and you immediately start watching......

The Turner Prize may have been spirited away to Liverpool but Mark Wallinger's recreation of Brian Haw's protest camp outside the Houses of Parliament pre-SOPCA nailed the Turner Prize for him last night. Although he chose to exhibit himself dressed as a bear, wandering around a gallery in Germany for the prize exhibition it was clear that the judges awarded the annually controversial £25,000 gong to Wallinger on the merits of his "bold political......

The provocative title is not simply a cheap trick like putting "SEX!!!!1!" across the top of a flyer to catch people's attention for carpet cleaning equipment. The One Night Stand With... series is quite literally one night with a specially commissioned artist at VINEspace, an inquisitive East London gallery in Bethnal Green Each month, an artist is invited to present an exhibition for one night only. It is taken down in the morning so......

The brilliantly named artist Foster Spragge has finished her cylindrical artwork Ticket Cylinder made entirely of used railway tickets. With the Oyster card doing away with paper tickets (and even cash and mobile phones eventually...) there's something almost pre-emptively nostalgic about this 5' 2" tower of orange and yellow slips of card. Using no glue and only a pair of very steady hands, Spragge has been building this particular tower in Bethnal Green Library......

So, did you get up early and grab your Mark Titchner poster? We know some of you did. One of our lovely readers even let us know of an extra, added bonus thrill about this giveaway. A compo! Here's the deal: Each poster is individually numbered from 00001-25000. On Monday 3 December, TfL will pick a number in that range. The lucky person in possession of a poster with that number will win a......

Further to our earlier post and readers' comments we've been in touch with Art on the Underground to clarify about the poster giveaway next week. Each day a different poster will be available from 8am at the 5 Underground stations: Kings Cross, Victoria, Waterloo, Paddington and Liverpool Street. The schedule is as follows: Monday - Mark Titchner Tuesday- James Ireland Wednesday - Klega Thursday - Layla Curtis Friday - Katie Dove Happy grabbing! Image......

To celebrate the rebranding of the Platform for Art initiative as Art on the Underground, TfL are giving away specially commissioned posters at 5 Zone 1 tube stations all next week (bound to be a bunfight on Monday though, be prepared). Among the artists is Turner Prize nominated Mark Titchner and poster designs include a fictitious A-Z map and some snow capped mountains. 25,000 of each design have been produced and will be stacked......

Like books? Eyes knackered after a long week spent in front of the computer screen? Looking for a way to spend your money, Ms. City-lawyer-with-an-absurdly-high-starting-salary? Or to save your money, Mr. Devotee-of-London-on-the-Cheap? Wish we’d stop quizzing you? Then delve into the world of book art this weekend and satisfy all of the above criteria. The London Artists Book Fair asks you to take the idea of ‘book art’ literally: the book itself as a......

The Olympic Park has received a lot of attention lately, unveiling its flagship stadium, promising to start work on it early and suffering fiery blazes which fortuitously destroyed a warehouse due for demolition. This Saturday though, an audaciously different kind of attention will be focused on the Stratford site: imagining the Olympics weren't happening. WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD is an artistic collaboration exploring what the Olympic site means to people and endeavouring......

News of a film installation to be unveiled at Rayners Lane and Sudbury Town stations shortly alerted us to the fact that TfL's jolly and diverse Platform for Art programme had undergone a rebrand and will be relaunching as Art on the Underground at the end of this month. There's not much in a name, of course, but always fans of wordplay and puns we rather liked "Platform for Art". However, TfL has opted......

An exhibition of doodles from The Pavement - a free monthly magazine for homeless people - is on show at the Cartoon Museum. The Pavement contains news, information and humour to help make life on the streets a wee bit safer and more tolerable. It’s well known amongst its target audience - London’s rough sleepers - but is virtually unheard of in more affluent circles. Editor Richard Burdett, whom we interviewed earlier this year,......

We nearly always mention the monthly Late at Tate Friday nights because each month the events, ideas and people involved are more weird and wonderful than the last. It's all about winning this month in Late at Tate Britain: Jackpot. Winning and prize-giving is consuming the various Tate Galleries as the annual Turner Prize exhibition of shortlisted artists is relocated to Tate Liverpool. In Tate Britain, there's the Turner Prize: A Retrospective exhibition instead......

Antony Gormley continues his conquest of our town with this, his first piece of artwork in the City of London. 'Resolution' can be found on the corner of Shoe Lane and St Bride Street - an area surrounded by construction work. Gormley describes the piece: "Seen from afar it looks like a man, from close up it looks like a city. It is wonderful to be able to site a work that interacts with......

What do you do if you’ve got a gallery full of works by William Morris, one of Britain’s most famous artists, and you’re a cash-strapped borough council? (a) Publicise the gallery and get loads of tourists spending their money there. (b) Hitch a ride on green awareness — Morris was an early environmentalist and the collection is housed in his former home, in magnificent grounds, all of which the borough owns. (c) Suggest giving......

That’s the creative process used by artist Paul Day to produce his landmark sculpture for the station. Or so we choose to believe. Sadly, the facts tell us that it’s really made from conventional modelling techniques, and shows the sculptor in a clinch with his half-French wife, Catherine. The nuzzling pair were today installed on the concourse beneath St Panc’s famous clock. According to Day, the 30ft group ‘reflects the romance that train travel......

Attention, sufferers of controller-thumb and Wii-wrist: the London Games Festival is here to make your condition even worse. From the 22nd of October to the 2nd of November organisers will be laying on talks, music and exhibitions celebrating the culture of gaming. Many of the events are geared towards those in the industry, but there’s also plenty to please the civilian gamer, especially in the festival fringe. And we can’t help but approve of......

This weekend Bloomsbury erupts with the Bloomsbury Festival celebrating this famous area. Well known for its literary and historical significance it is also a thriving haven for arts and artists and packed full of beautiful, quirky, intriguing buildings and organisations and the chockerblock programme reflects every aspect of life in Bloomsbury Quarter. Check this out: The Egypt Exploration Society, Foundling Museum, Charles Dickens Museum and the October Gallery are among the "Open Houses" over......

The breathlessly international Bicycle Film Festival is seven years old this year and it is rolling into London with a string of cool films and even cooler parties and exhibitions, from Wednesday 17 October to Sunday 21 October. Films about two-wheel transport range from modern-day radicalism in Canada to gruelling fundraising cycle hikes over the Alps, from the factory floor in America to changing lives in Ghana, a helmet-camera tour of several international cities......

As we noted yesterday, art fair season is upon us in full force this weekend. With so many events happening around the capital, it would be hard work to take it all in, and the best advice one can offer is to try to see as much as you can without making it all a rushed annoyance of cab rides. Possibly even better advice, however, would be to make a point to check out......

Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) is having an unusual autumn. While most performing arts venues start September with a new programme of plays, workshops and special one-off events, BAC is bolting its main doors and sending all those who dare approach through the back door and around each room in the venue for the mind-blowing Masque of the Red Death. We have had a range of experiences in this extraordinary production – and it just......

You might think the act of visiting an art gallery specifically to gawp at a hole in the ground would obviate the need to remind people not to trip over said hole. Apparently not. Mere days after the unveiling of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, a 548 foot long fissure running the length of the Turbine Hall, people are already coming unstuck. One young woman reportedly fell feet-first into the exhibit and had to be dragged......

Whilst spring may be the season in which our thoughts turn to love, autumn is definitely the time when it's a bit too cold for all that flowery stuff and so we turn to art for inspiration instead. This weekend will be a busy one for art lovers in the capital, as the art fair season comes into full bloom. Returning for its fifth year, the Frieze Art Fair will showcase the work of......

The Mayor of London wants you to stay up late. Stay up late for the Lates October season. He wanted you to cut back on sleep and catch up on culture back in May when the first Lates season was launched, now it's October, he wants you to check out the things you miss during the day in the big museums and galleries. Have you been meaning to see something at any of the......

You want entertainment in London, you say? And you want it for free? Well, good sir or madam, you've come to the right place. Anyone who's lived in this fair city for a while knows that free entertainment is actually all around us. From our world-class museums to almost uncountable numbers of galleries; hear talks by some of the planet's great thinkers, and japery from the best new comics. It's all free, and it's......

No, it's not some 'attack of the giant cathedral eating spiders' B-movie filmset but the return of Maman, the giant spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, which originally stalked the Turbine Hall when Tate Modern opened in 2000. Bourgeois herself is now 95 and, given that much of her work is based on introspection, nostalgia, the exploration of her psyche and her parents (the spider, Maman, is of course a tribute to her mother) this......

Fight the temptation to sneak under the duvet tomorrow night - it may be getting dark ever earlier and there's a definite hiding-under-duvet chill in the crisp air but fight! Resist! Protest! Agitate! Agitate: Late at Tate Britain! The first Friday of every month is the special late opening of Tate Britain and there have been some very good themed nights to kick off the weekend in style - the burlesque evening, the village......