A top tip for the exhibition is to make sure you pick up the free printed exhibition guide, available by the exhibition entrance. Not only does it contain an intro and a map of the space, it’s also the only place you’ll find any kind of interpretation of the exhibits, as the labels contain the bare minimum of information: title, artist and form.

The exhibition is divided into four sections, imaginatively named ‘Section One’ to ‘Section Four’. The sections are neither intended to be chronological, nor thematic, but to ‘allow each work to speak for itself’. There are meant to be ‘groupings and polarities’ between the works in each section, but this is neither obvious nor explicit.

The exhibition then is a collection of art works, each of which have some relation to ‘the book’. Some are books, some are sculptures in the form of a book, and one of which is plaster snowballs thrown against a white wall. They range from the interesting to the frankly bewildering.

The stand out piece is by Damien Hirst, from his New Religion series of works. Located at the centre of ‘Section Two’, the piece is a huge white chest containing a number of huge multi-coloured hardbound Bibles, each within its own drawer. Visually stunning, the piece seems to both revere and mock religion at the same time.

Other well-known artists represented include Francis Bacon, Anish Kapoor, Picasso, Matisse and Miró. The plaster-snowballed-wall is an original commission for the exhibition, from artist Not Vital.

Surrounding the exhibits is a wall-long projection of seemingly random words and phrases moving slowly about. It makes for an odd backdrop, the wordiness contrasting with the mostly purely aesthetic art works.

Curating an exhibition of art works based on ‘the book’ is perhaps an quirky endeavour, and the result tells you more about art than it does about books.

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book is on at the V&A in London until 29 June 2008. Free admission.

“Not a very thrilling concept you might think - there’s only so much you can do with five rings and a few sportsmen - but it’s actually a fascinating way to view the evolution of global 20th century design. See how the artists of the day tackled the Olympic brand brief, from proud torchbearing patriotism to abstract symbolic ingenuity.”

Read more of his review at Diamond Geezer: A Century of Olympic Posters, including his footnote ‘Sorry if that last sentence reads like critical artistic tosh, but most of the labels in the exhibition were like that and I fear I’ve been infected by pretentious verbosity’.

A Century of Olympic Posters is on at the Museum of Childhood until 7 September 2008. Free admission.

The exhibition’s angle is to explore both the murders of Jack the Ripper, and their ‘enduring legacy’. Exhibits include photographs and documents from the police investigation. The exhibition is ‘not recommended’ for children under the age of 12, which makes it sound a bit more exciting, although it’s unlikely to be on the same level of creepiness as the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.

Advance bookings are now being taken, and you can get 20% off by jumping through a few hoops at Jack’s Notorious Notes.

Jack the Ripper and the East End is on at the Museum in Docklands in London from 15 May until 2 November 2008. Admission charges apply.

As late night opening isn’t yet a daily or even weekly event, to attend you’ll have to know when and where they’re on. Which is where the list below may come in handy.

• V&A Friday Late - each event has a theme, and usually features talks and workshops, as well as a DJ. Last Friday of each month (except December), until 10PM. Free.
• late @ Museum of London - these events sometimes feature music and storytelling, but the next one is a pub quiz. First Thursday of each month, until 9PM. Free.
• late @ Museum in Docklands - these events feature live music and and comedy performances. The next one looks at East London’s Asian music scene and history. First Thursday of each month, until 9PM. Free from 4:30 onwards.
• Geffrye Museum First Thursday Open Evenings - at these events you experience the delightful galleries and gardens of the museum, complete with a glass of wine. The May event also includes a social history and old food tasting session. First Thursday of each month, until 8PM. Free.
• Late at Tate Britain - a good chance to visit if you want to avoid the crowds. There’s also usually an event of some sort - the next one features an audiovisual collective presenting the ‘AV Social’. Last Friday of each month, until 10PM. Free, with half-price entry to the special exhibitions.
• Late at Tate Modern - the Tate Modern started staying open late almost as soon as it first opened in 2000. Additional evening events include The Long Weekend, in May, which includes a night of audiovisual performances and a set of film screenings. The Tate Modern is open late every Friday and Saturday, until 10PM. Free.
• Late at Tate Liverpool - music, food and drink accompany these late openings, as well as themed tours and occassional performances. Last Thursday of every month, until 9PM. Free.
• Late events at the British Museum - this museum is open late almost more often than not at the moment, thanks in large part to the popularity of its First Emperor exhibition (see review). If you just want to hang out in the Great Court though, a Chinese food themed evening features food tasting, live music, traditional games and a dance workshop. China Late: Food is on 3 April 2008, until 9PM. Free.
• National Gallery Wednesay Lates - this weekly event includes live music and a series of ‘bite-sized talks’ on the collections, which at ten minutes each are short enough for anyone to enjoy. Every Wednesday, until 9PM. Free.
• Late opening at the National Portrait Gallery - this museum stays open late every Thursday and Friday, giving you plenty of opportunity to explore the rooms, as well as the latest exhibitions (see Vanity Fair Portraits review). The Fridays though also include live music (mostly classical), if that’s your bag. If not, you could always go for a drink on the rooftop bar. Late openings are every Thursay and Friday, until 9PM. Free.

For additional information about late-night museum and gallery events, there are a few other websites worth visiting. First Thursdays covers art events in East London (on the first Thursday of each month, as the name suggests), supported by the Arts Council England in association with Time Out London. Lates covers a range of events across London, on various days of the week, funded by the Mayor of London in association with thelondonpaper, and includes a mailing list and a Facebook group you can sign up to for regular updates.

The exhibition contains 150 or so prints, arranged chronologically along the walls of a fairly small room. If you follow the timeline, which nearly everyone does, creating a kind of people carousel, you’ll notice a few things. Firstly, the prints get bigger and bigger as you move round. The earliest photos are tiny, requiring you to elbow someone out of the way to get a closeup view, whilst some of the later ones are displayed as enormous prints, making it easy to walk backward into someone as you step back to take in the full picture (a huge photo of Margaret Thatcher is particularly startling).

Secondly, the subjects photographed by and large get more recognisable, and less noteworthy, as you move round. Early subjects include philosophers and scientists, as well as entertainers like Charlie Chaplin, whereas towards the end you find yourself wondering exactly which American sitcom it is that you recognise that actress from.

Some of the most interesting exhibits are the prints that have been scribbled on by the magazine editors with notes about where to crop the image and so on. There are also several photographs paired up with the magazine covers that they appeared on, giving you a bit more in the way of context. In fact, you can end up wishing they’d have done this with a few more of the photographs.

The mix of subjects covered is quite striking, and reflects the varying types of article in the magazine. Some of the portraits have a clear news purpose, such as the chilling composition of the United States War Cabinet at the time of the Afghanistan invasion. Others fulfil more of a traditional glossy magazine remit, such as the Photoshopped-together montages of up-and-coming American actresses.

The exhibition really though is really one for photography fans and enthusiasts. The labels accompanying each of the photos give the barest of details, containing mostly just some fairly dull biographical information about the photographer or subject (flipping seemingly randomly between the two). There’s little attempt to explain the significance of the portrait, or even where and how it was taken - which would have been especially interesting for some of the more creatively set up shots.

If you do visit this exhibition, and are happy just to take in the portraits, absorbing the photography, then be sure to visit at a time when it’s fairly quite, if you want to be in with the chance of having an at all relaxing experience. Otherwise, consider just buying the exhibition catalogue, or even just browsing the Vanity Fair website.

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 - 2008 is on at the National Portrait Gallery in London until 26 May 2008. Admission charges apply.

In the UK, an not-for-profit organisation called China Now are co-ordinating a series of events to celebrate Chines culture, starting in February with the Chinese New Year, and running right up to the opening of the Olympic Games in August.

Unsurprisingly, these events include several exhibitions. The China Now website is a little hard to navigate, so some of the highlights are presented below:

• The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army - the hugely popular British Museum exhibition (see review). Open until 6 April 2008.
• Angels From Hell - an exhibition of the work of artist Han Yajuan. Opens at the Olyvia Oriental Gallery from 17 April to 21 May 2008.
• Heaven on Earth - an exhibition looking at the Chinese astronomical art. Opens at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, from 24 May to 7 September 2008.
• Modernism in China: Architectural Visions and Revolutions - exhibition at RIBA, London. Opens 15 July to 15 September 2008.
• China: An Olympic Celebration - Now and Then - exhibition at Ricefield, a Chinese cultural centre in Glasgow. Opens 2 August to 31 August 2008.

The big exhibition that China Now are promoting though is the V&A’s China Design Now, which opened last week. The exhibition takes a look at some of the high profile contemporary design being produced in three of China’s biggest cities: Bejing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. It’s the exhibition, above all the others, which seems to be promoting China as the vision it wants to be: a modern, high-tech, cultural powerhouse of the world. The exhibition is open until 13 July 2008. Full review coming soon.

A selection of the most recent recent pictures from the pool are also displayed automatically on the photos page of this website.

If you’re already a member of Flickr, then join the group without delay. If you’re not, well it’s free and (relatively) easy, and a great site for exploring and sharing photographs - whether you took them with a posh camera or not.

Walking around the exhibition is a mixed experience, with the exhibits being so varied. You can’t help but go around spotting which ones you’ve seen or read about before, keeping a mental tally to evaluate how on-the-pulse your design knowledge is. More worthwhile though is the discovery of the new, such as gorgeous mobile phone designed by Tokujin Yoshioka, or the innovative and playful PizzaKobra table lamp, which can be flexed into either of the shapes that its name suggests. Also worth playing with is the Tenori-on electronic musical instrument, which is both intuitive and duffer-proof, enabling anyone to quickly compose nice-sounding tunes.

Whilst the products probably hold the most popular appeal (a Wii and an iPhone are also featured), the transport and architecture projects are also pretty engaging. Several of the transport entrants will be interesting to Londoners in particular, such as the Christoph Behling designed solar powered boat, which shuttles passengers across the Serpentine lake in summer months. There’s details too about how the number-plate recognising CCTV cameras were overhauled for the western extension of the congestion charging zone. Londoners should also pay attention to the designs of the Velib communal bike hire project, currently operating in Paris, which politicians are hoping to export to the capital.

Within the ‘interactive’ category, two of the entrants are set up as live installations that you can try out yourself. SHOWstudio’s The Replenishing Body Kiosk (pictured above), features a projection with a five by five grid of 1 second looping videos, recorded by visitors using an attached video camera. The nature of this exhibit means it’s constantly changing, giving you a view of the recent visitors. Direct participation involves a certain amount of extrovert performance, but it’s not too hard to think of a second’s worth of amusing body animation.

Even more intriguing is a piece called Private View, by Paul Cocksedge Studio. At first appearing to be nothing more than a blank, black wall, if you follow the instructions to take a photo of it with your digital camera/cameraphone, an image is magically revealed. How it works exactly is a mystery, but it’s certainly a neat and novel trick, if limited in its application.

The fashion, graphics and architecture categories are a little less visitor friendly, although there’s a good deconstruction of a project by Ian Cartlidge to redesign the signage system at the Selfridges department store. Also worth picking out are the architectural designs for the Stephen Lawrence Centre, which opened in Lewisham, London recently, and was shockingly vandalised soon after.

The seven category winners in this competition will be announced on 11 March, with the overall winner being declared on 18 March. Visit before then if you want to have a go at picking out your own preferences, or after then if you want to see whether you agree with the judges. Either way, wandering through this exhibition is a rewarding experience, and acts as a good shop window into the rich and varied world of design.

Brit Insurance Designs of the Year is on at the Design Museum in London until 27 April 2007. Admission charges apply.

Increasingly, museums are offering audio tours as free mp3s that you can download to your personal audio player and listen to in the exhibition. This has the advantage that different kinds of audio tour can be offered. In fact, they don’t even have to have been produced by the institution they’re about - anyone can make them. The only problem with this is that you have to remember to download the tour before you go, making spontaneous visits a bit more tricky. However if the downloadable audio tours are interesting and well publicised enough, they’ll be the thing that motivated you to visit the exhibition in the first place.

With that in mind, this post lists some of the downloadable audio tours currently available for museums and exhibitions in the UK. If you do try and of them out, you can post your experience in the comments below (let us know if there any other tours we can add to the list too).

The downloadable audio tours:

• Tate: Modern Paints - A tour of 10 key works currently on display in Tate Modern.
• Tate: Materials, Science and Art - An audio tour of selected rooms in Tate Modern, looking at the works from a scientific and sensory point of view.
• Tate: Art Lookers - An audio tour of the Tate Modern galleries by people involved in their youth programme.
• Canal Museum - A 19 minute audio tour of the museum.
• The National Gallery ‘Be Inspired’ Tour - A tour of key paintings, voiced by the artists, poets and photographers who have drawn inspiration from them.
• The National Gallery ‘Grand Tour’ - A series of separately themed tours, including a ‘lovers’ tour’ and three ‘lunchbreak tours’.
• The Aberdeen Maritime Museum - An audio tour introduction to the museum.

Note: if you’re looking for downloadable audio tours, it’s worth bearing in mind that some museums seem to mistakenly call them ‘podcasts’.

The exhibition narrative runs roughly chronologically, and so starts off at King’s Cross station, underneath which Queen Boudica is said to have been buried, sparking a fascination with the subterranean that Londoners have held ever since. Historic underground structures in the city include roman ruins, buried rivers, and coffin-housing catacombs built when traditional cemeteries filled up during the Black Death.

The most famous sort of underground infrastructure in London is of course the tube network, and correspondingly ‘transport’ is one of the key exhibition themes. Looking back, there are some photographs of disused tube stations, tube stations used as air raid shelters, and tube stations connected to secret security bunkers. In more contemporary terms, there’s a look at the Jubilee line extension, the ‘High Speed 1′ Eurostar link to St Pancras, and the planned Crossrail project. The star exhibit, though, is an architectural scale model of the complex network of underground lines beneath King’s Cross. The colour-coded tubes let you see how the Picadilly, Circle, Metropolitan, Victoria, Northern and Thameslink lines manage to snake their way around each other in a way that would be impossible to explain in a two dimensional diagram.

Other underground infrastructures covered include London’s historic sewer system, built by the Victorians to such a high specification that it has only just begun to reach its full capacity today. There’s also a feature on the Thames Water Ring Main, an incredible network of deep-level tunnels (twice as far down as the Underground) built in 1993 to improve the supply of drinking water around London. Further forward, there’s a look at the possible underground infrastructure of the future, including eco-friendly combined heat and power services, and a ‘multi-utility’ system being planned for Elephant and Castle.

Despite being contained a small space, the exhibition offers a glimpse into all manner of interesting underground projects and services. Whilst it’s mostly text and images, there are also a few videos and a good selection of models to keep you interested. Plus, you get an excellent free exhibition catalogue to take home, full of photographs and extra information.

A series of breakfast talks accompany the exhibition, including one by Andrew Smith from Subterranea Britannica, a society dedicated to the study of some of the more esoteric man-made underground structures, which promises to be interesting.

If you live in London, it’s definitely worth seeking out this exhibition, especially if you haven’t been to the Building Centre before. Just remember though, it’s unfortunately not open on weekends.

Underground: London’s Hidden Infrastructure is on at the Building Centre in London until 19 April 2008. Admission free.