Interesting concept this. What would Martian anthropologists make of us Earth-dwellers if all they had to go on were examples of contemporary art? The Barbican Art Gallery, disguised as a museum on the red planet, plays out this indulgence in a new exhibition. Those crafty aliens have bagged some prize exhibits. Warhol, Hepworth, Hirst - and a Henry Moore maquette, covered in molluscs for some reason. Dozens of cultural relics are scattered around in......

Our Amy dedicates her Grammies to London. Respect. Bozza on the buses. Well, his thoughts on kiddie crime therein at any rate. It’s London fashion week. We don’t rock to that beat, but we thought we’d better mention it. Any fashionistas out there who'd care to comment on it? Brits do OK-ish at Baftas: could do better. B-. Waltham Forest can’t afford to keep its library or art gallery open, but it can afford......

Having closed its doors in 2004, and playing host to squatters in recent months, there's finally some good news to report about the Commonwealth Institute in west London. The disused building is to be the welcome recipient of £20 million development plan, with hopes to turn it into an art gallery (yay!), museum (double-yay!) or "centre for a corporate foundation" (erm, possibly yay - we're not sure what that means). This should hopefully mean......

The trains have been re-routed, the signage amended, the tube announcements re-recorded (completed, luckily, before the woman behind them was given the heave-ho). The re-opening of St Pancras means that Waterloo's reign as Britain's main international train station, a duty it fulfilled without complaint for thirteen years, is well and truly over. But what to do with those elegant Eurostar platforms, so admired in their mid-Nineties infancy? The plan in the short term is......

A week after opening for the Queen, St Pancras International is finally ready for the likes of us. The station has been restored beyond its former glory. Britain's answer to Central Station is ready for business. Everyone knows by now that the sumptious Euston Road frontage to the station was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. But what else in London did the Great Scott design? Time to dust off our old 'Stalks' series,......

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......

We’re gob-smacked we are that Brits have a bad bed rep. As far as the eye can see, quite literally, we’re about as randy as a canine on heat. Sexual sighting number one: freshers strip during freshers week – now that sure is an original way to make friends (although the residents of Kingston might argue to the contrary). Sexual sighting number two: Swedish porn at the ICA. This really qualifies as six sightings,......

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......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 9th July 1968: The Hayward art gallery on the South Bank is opened by the Queen. Tuesday – 10th July 1958: Britain’s first parking meters are installed in Mayfair. Soon there would be 625 of them in the district, charging 6 pence per hour. Wednesday – 11th July 1848: Waterloo Station is opened. The original station would survive just 52 years until 1900, when it would be......

From the tallest skyscraper in the City of Brotherly Love to Canadian tourism copywriting brilliance, here's what you should know from our -ist cities: This week, Phillyist took a gleeful listen to the White Stripes' exciting new release, watched in awe as their new tallest skyscraper was finally completed, found a cheaper way to get to Gothamist, invented a tasty new dessert, and brought back their Craigslist Round-Up feature with a bang. Bostonist watches......

. Catherine Bullen is just finishing her studies at Cambridge School of Art. Her final show is being exhibited at Free Range 2007. Londonist has a cup of tea and a chat with her to find out what it's all about. What should Londonist readers know about your work, Catherine? I try to base my work around issues that effect me personally or the world in general, drawing inspiration from news stories and personal experience.......

Would you like to see the Queen gagged and blindfolded? If monarchy muzzling is one’s thing, one should really get oneself to Barbican Art Gallery. There, in homage to Liz’s Silver Jubilee and the 30th anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ romp down the river playing God Save The Queen, is an exhibition of punk art like never seen before in Britain. Forget bringing a picnic lunch and wading knee-deep through sproglets in the gift......

Since 22 February, the Barbican Art Gallery has been home to the tiny models of buildings, pictures of buildings, drawings of buildings and, last but not least, things to decorate the interior of buildings. The topic of this architecture-filled exhibition is Alvar Aalto Through The Eyes of Shigeru Ban. The work of Aalto, the Finnish architect and designer, has inspired the contemporary Japanese architect Ban. In fact, this exhibition is the interpretation by Ban,......

London Underground is a great place for art - impromptu performance art, educational text-based displays, satirical artistic responses to political situations... there are Poems on the Underground, musicians, performers... If you've ever wanted to contribute your artwork to this sprawling world of underground artistic expression and fancy having a go in a medium a little more sophisticated than sticking chewing gum over the eyes of models in adverts running alongside escalators, then get clicking......

The words 'sublimely beautiful' and 'Euston Road' seldom decorate the same sentence, but here goes... Walk past the Wellcome Trust's HQ on Euston Road for this sublimely beautiful window display, and learn some science at the same time. The eyecatching fluorescent baubels, by designers Graphic Thought Facility, represent the structures of several proteins implicated in human disease. The rogues' gallery includes: leptin, a small protein that can cause obesity if it gets mangled; PPWD1,......

It's surprising how much Londonist skin ends up covered in ink - and we're not just talking about the days that M@ leaves his pocket protector at home and has a Bic explosion. We quite like having needles shoved into us (just not in the 'Hey look I'm a wanker' Pete Doherty way) so we're looking forward to this year's International London Tattoo Convention: The list of artists who will be setting up stall......

Favourite naked woman dancing with dead pig story of the day: Animal rights activists have described as "sick" a live art performance involving a naked woman cradling a dead pig for four hours. Kira O'Reilly's show, called "Inthewrongplaceness" will be performed at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance, southwest England, later Friday. James Green, the gallery's director, defended the show, saying that the audience would be controlled, with one person at a time watching......

This week - A documentary about Mongolian nomads (The Cave of the Yellow Dog), a music documentary about a hip hop concert in Brooklyn (Dave Chapelle's Block Party) and a teeny flick with Lyndsey Lohan and McFly (Just My Luck) You know that it is a week to go to the ice rink when the first film reviewed on Friday Film News is about the zen-like simplicity of the lives of Mongolian nomads. It......

It’s not always easy to be different, even in the art world. The supposed creative freedom, the idea that artistic eccentrics are respected and perhaps even nurtured by the establishment is often an illusion - the community is driven by market forces, clearly defined trends, and a narrow scope of accepted forms by an even narrower assortment of bankable artists. Which is why a new exhibition Inner Worlds Outside looks so compelling. Showcasing Outsider......

There can't, nor shouldn't be many of us who have never come into contact with the Mr. Men, today celebrating their 35th birthday. Since advertising copywriter Roger Hargreaves's son once asked him what a tickle looked like, there have been over 80 Mr Men and Little Miss books translated into 15 languages worldwide, selling over 100 million copies and making Hargreaves the third best selling author of all time in Britain in 2005. Hargreaves......

The Turbine Hall in Tate Modern is, to put it mildly, bloody huge. It's... enormous. And sometimes filled with polystyrene sugar cubes, strange weather or the mutterings of millions. However, a space like that has rarely seen live performance which makes sense if you've been there - it would be a bit like shouting Shakespeare into the upturned wok formerly known as the Millennium Dome. "Collaborative performance and installations" do, on the other hand,......

This day in London’s history 1905: Thomas and Ann Farrow, South London shopkeepers, were discovered by neighbours after having been violently attacked at home. Thomas was already dead and Ann died four days later. Their killers, brothers Alfred and Albert Stratton, were convicted on the basis of fingerprint evidence, the very first time this technique was used, launching forensic science in the process. The Strattons went to the gallows in May of that year.......

No, we're not misquoting Jack Nance. This is the strange story of Sharon Baker, an artist who has baked a life-size model of herself out of bread dough. Her as yet unsliced doppelganger is naked and due to be eaten by an audience as part of an exhibition in London's Docklands tomorrow: "It was prompted by the sad and early death of a friend from breast cancer... I wanted to create a body in......

This day in London’s History 1938: Trouble at the top. Anthony Eden resigns as Foreign Secretary in protest against Prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policies of appeasing Hitler and negotiation with fascist Italy. The inexorable march towards war continued. London fact of the week Bar Italia, the late-night coffee house on Frith Street, Soho, gave birth to the modern age. In a room upstairs, John Logie Baird first demonstrated the transmission of moving images, which......

Interesting times these for London architecture. While eyes remain transfixed by Lord Richnorm Rogfoster’s kiss-my-glass office spaces, and ears prick at the frustrated shriek of a dozen would-be skyscrapers unable to move from blueprint to footprint, a quiet revolution seems to be going on at grassroots. The world of architecture is opening up to us all. It begins, for many, with Open House weekend. Those glorious two days in September when London unbolts its......

If you're stuck for something to do this Friday afternoon then you should maybe think about getting down to St James' Square for a bit of free speech and a picnic. It doesn't get any more British than that does it? New Speakers' Corner comes courtesy of the ICA and Hames Levack ('the art gallery without a fixed venue') who had the idea of giving Joe Public the chance to get on their soapbox......

Last weekend Channel 4 screened the results of its online poll to find the top 100 cartoons, and while it threw up the odd oversight (Fantasia at 53 while Shrek and Shrek 2 come in at 6???), it was pretty much the usual suspects in the top 10 with the Simpsons inevitably at number one. One of the artists that featured regularly throughout in one capacity or another was animation legend Chuck Jones, whose......

March is set to see a frenzy of Robert Crumb activity in the capital. Crumb is the artist and illustrator who's longevity and interest in large bottomed women has seen him rise from underground comic genius to weirdo icon while remaining a source of inspiration for anyone working outside of the mainstream. Terry (Ghost World) Zwigoff's documentary Crumb proved once and for all that if anything Robert is the normal one in the family.......

A few stories have popped up in the papers over the past few days which point to a bit of a cash injection in the capital's cultural artery (did we just mix our metaphors then? Apologies if we did). Here's a quick rundown of the London's arty shopping list for the next couple of years: A £2.2m building is to be built on the South Bank, near to the Tate Modern and the Globe......