What are we going to do about ordinary life? It is always out there demanding our attention in tones sometimes muffled, sometimes shrill. Most artists wish it would just go away so they can get on with framing and hanging up little squares of painted canvas, or producing nice mysterious videos, or making pieces of abstract sculpture, or inventing strange mad installations.
Martin Creed is unusual in that ordinary life interests him. Now that his collected works have finally appeared in book form, it might be worth trying to define what he does.

Louise Bourgeois is the sort of artist every curator wants to have and to hold; the objects she conjures up with such skill and steely, creepy passion draw large crowds. They stay in your dreams. You can put her work outside like a monument, or in your most massive indoor space. Or in intimate rooms, all the more to frighten you. What large tentacles her spiders have!

The idea for Richard Long that the world was once undisturbed remains deep and powerful. A world before archaeology, before maps, before human sounds and shapes. A time when there was pure geology; when there were bird sounds and loose stones and forest and water, when history came in the form of clouds and rain, and social change came from a clear sky and the beginnings of a twisted pathway.