With last night’s packed private view opening of Stay Free at the cavernous Tramshed (6-8 Garden Walk, EC2A 3EQ), a Victorian Grade II listed building in Shoreditch, prolific street artist Sickboy stepped up to the challenge of wowing London’s jaded art mob with his first major solo exhibition- an exhibition that’s as defiant and provocative as it is fun and vibrant. The centerpiece of the show is Sickboy’s Stay Free Factory installation. Completely covered......

Temperatures drop, shopping stress rises, and London rolls into festive season good and proper this week. Here's our guide to the saner side of London's arts scene; it's not all about carols and pantos, you know. That Hamlet starts at the Novello today, without the skull, but most definitely with Doctor Who. Tickets are pretty hard to come by. If you get your hands on one, let us know how. Londonist is wondering about......

The homeless can sometimes be invisible; it is easy to look the other way and ignore the bodies in doorways, curled up on discarded cardboard or huddled in underpasses. There's an even harder to see section of the homeless moving from sofa to spare room to hostel to street and back again. Homeless in the Capital is a new exhibition that gives faces to the faceless, names to the nameless and dignity to these......

Opening tomorrow and running until the 13th of this month, Barcelona XL at Smithfield Gallery (16 West Smithfield, EC1A 9HY, nearest Tube: Farringdon) is the first major UK exhibition to focus solely on the distinctive Barcelona style of graffiti. Artists participating in the show include Debens, Eldone, Eox, Flan, J.Loca, Kenor, Klinisbut, Kram, Maze, M.Wert aka Mike, Mr Kern (Bordeaux), Sendys, Skum and Zosen … a few of whom you may have become acquainted......

The Effing and Blinding Cabaret offers entertainment that can't be seen at all but is still cabaret... five blind performers do songs and sketches in total darkness. Without dwelling on the novelty of the situation, the songs and sketches are surreal cabaret subjects such as how Charlton Heston really died, selling property and auditioning actors. We're looking forward to seeing how it goes down here - though of course, we'll not be 'seeing' anything.......

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... Today it's all about art as we prepare for the One Ton Show to come to town just in time for Xmas pressie buying.......

Bourgeois and Maurice. Image by The Two We witnessed the devastating glamour, glory and grot of Georgeois Bourgeois & Maurice Maurice at GSK Contemporary late night cabaret at the Royal Academy not long ago and we just had to share them with you. Words failed us, so fortunately, they've got some great ones themselves: Visionaries and victims of the 21st century hype-machine that is life, Bourgeois & Maurice are your transient musical guides through the......

It went ahead but our worst fears weren't realised; he wasn't allowed into Stockwell tube station or onto the platform, thankfully. With cooperation from the police, Mark McGowan managed to stage his reenactment of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes outside Stockwell tube on Saturday afternoon but it seems that the biggest local impact it had was to draw out the paparazzi and get a well dodgy cameraphone style video - possibly intentionally for......

German boy-girl graffiti team, Herakut, are back in London with a new show, titled Dirty Laundry and running until the 7th of December. That’s not a lot of time to examine their stains – so we advise getting over the 22 Wellington Street (WC2E 7DD) venue round the corner from Covent Garden ASAP. For those unfortunately unfamiliar with the works of Herakut, think darkly witty feminine broad strokes (that’s the Hera contribution) emboldened by......

And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon... south London soil, Doing the Lambeth Walk? Though reading like a specially written song to celebrate a different Blake's release to walk free on London land, this specially adapted verse is actually to draw your attention to a weekend of William Blake activities: the Blake in Lambeth Festival. Born on this day 251 years ago, Blake lived in Lambeth for ten happy and productive years,......

With Christmas creeping up on us, London's arts and theatre scene begins to slide into festive mayhem. Don't worry; your Londonist Fairy Godmother enters in a cloud of glitter stage right, to sort the handsome princes from the ugly sisters. If you can't stand panto, take the little ones to see The Gruffalo at the Duchess Theatre instead. It opens today. If you can't beg, borrow or steal a kid, head to the very......

If we were ill we'd definitely hope to see our doctor wielding a stethoscope rather than a sketchbook - but from Da Vinci's anatomical drawings to Damien Hirst's medicine cabinets, art has long been influenced by medicine. A new exhibition now aims to prove that art can positively affect the healing process. It's hoped that patients at Barts and The Royal London will benefit from visiting newly refurbished gallery spaces in the hospitals that......

Tucked away about 5 minutes from the dilapidated 70s mall charm of Elephant and Castle, past that partially boarded up estate at the west end of New Kent Road, and a pub which claims to be the 'only English owned pub left on Harper Road', you may be convinced you've slipped into some gritty Channel 4 drama, with huge queues outside a run down block surrounded by neo-brutalist council estates, when you arrive at......

It's only Monday afternoon and we already have a winner for the WTF and FFS award of the week. Artist Mark McGowan will be re-enacting the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes this coming Saturday afternoon, at Stockwell station where the original incident took place. It could be seen as a rather confused and distasteful attempt to treat the public's post-traumatic stress disorder, forcing the public to confront the event one more time to......

The Argentinian art collective Mondongo (the word for a traditional Argentinian tripe stew) are renowned for using a wide range of materials in their work - freeze-dried slabs of meat and biscuits, plasticine and hair. Unenticing as it sounds, their work still manages to be reminiscent and beautiful. The textiles-aspect of their work means that it is a delight to study up close - the feathers, cotton thread and plasticine that make up their......

The venerable art of tapestry-making is alive and thriving in the British contemporary art scene. At least, that's what the people behind the exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales want us to believe. New arts commissioning group Banners of Persuasion have gathered an eclectic set of artists, ranging from pop artist Peter Blake to transvestite pottery-maker Grayson Perry, and given them the task of translating their work to woven form. It's a nice idea, and......

Now open and running until the 24th of January at James Hyman Gallery (5 Saville Row, W1S 3PD) is a comprehensive retrospective of works by camera-less photographer Garry Fabian Miller. Fabian Miller is famous for the long process of exposing light directly onto photographic paper through organic material and substances such as plants, lead, engine oil and water to yield unique images for which there are no negatives. On view for the first time......

Londonist brings news of lots of lovely openings in London this week, filling us with a nice juicy sense of anticipation. Rather than that anxious stomach-achy guilt feeling when you know something fab is closing and you're never going to get to see it. Today, confusingly, brings Yesterday to London. Award-winning choreographer (and Sadler's Wells Associate Artist) Jasmin Vardimon celebrates her company's 10th anniversary with a retrospective at the Peacock Theatre. There's multimedia, new......

The use of blasphemy in the title got us along to the second show at Fitzrovia's recently opened contemporary art gallery on a wet and windy night. After all, swearing is funny (don't tell the children this). The art on show in question is much more polite, with nary a sign of expletives, though there was a naked lady or two on show. The exhibition is made up of work from painter Paul Normansell,......

The anonymous crowds of Trafalgar Square continue to provide inspiration to artists intent on introducing us to one another. Last month we were sending out smoke signals through the Memory Cloud; coming up this month, we (or the 200 of us filmed earlier at the Tate Modern) will be jumping creepily out of each other's shadows. For Under Scan, 110,000 lumens of light are to be thrown onto the square nightly from tomorrow until......

Or, Dear Martin Creed: I didn’t really want to run in your exhibition anyway Been to see the sprinters at the Tate Britain yet? Whatever are you waiting for? Whilst you’ve been working, eating, sleeping, living – they’ve been running running running: some 310 km each, or 192 miles, or 7-plus marathons (that’s fifteen 86-meter sprints every half hour interval, times four intervals a shift, times three shifts a week, times 20 weeks). And......

Singer-songwriter Edwyn Collins once harboured a secret dream of updating the prints in Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Isles, but let this dream fall by the wayside to become a rock star. But when the former Orange Juice frontman suffered a brain haemorrhage in February 2005 (his recovery from which was documented in this year's touching BBC special Home Again ), it was music that was put to the......

If you've been round the back of the venerable Royal Academy lately, you might have noticed the neon flags flying from Burlington House. Abutting the eminently respectable Byzantium mega exhibition up front is GSK Contemporary, an eclectic 3 month season in 2 parts, exploring contemporary visual art. Featuring multi media artists we've yet to hear of and an intriguing programme of events, film, performance, experimentation, discussion and debate this major show will be open......

It seems the streets of London are not paved with gold but instead, art. There was the Grand Tour last year which basically turned the National Gallery inside out, there was Find Me just recently which got artworks into the unlikeliest of places, and this week a big giveaway by street artist Adam Neate. In his latest exhibition The London Show, Neate will be leaving 1,000 artworks around London, for canny collectors to spot,......

Much maligned as the impromptu canvas of the expletive-loving graffitist and the inevitable arena of post-pub violence, London's bus stop's have been given a long-overdue shred of attention by graduate students at Kingston University. Sheltered: The Bus Stops Here features designs for the ideal bus stop contributed by emerging London architects in conjunction with The Architecture Foundation. The show, at the Bargehouse, Oxo Gallery (map), runs until Sunday, and is curated by students from Kingston's......

It's Barbican Late. Really late! Take advantage of post work hours opening and check out the Robert Capa war photography exhibition, free music in the foyer and lounges and interact with the huge, new sculpture in the Curve until 10pm. But that's not all. DJ Justin Spear takes over at 10pm with an eclectic post-concert soundtrack and there's a pre-Halloween Late Nighter film at 10.45pm: The Man Who Laughs (12A) with live accompaniment by......

The Banksy daubing just north of Oxford Street is not long for this world. No mindless act of vandalism for this graffito, though - instead, Westminster City Council have decided that the mural will be removed in order to "send a message" to the city's urban scribblers (yeah, that'll work). Displaying a remarkable want of aesthetic curiosity, deputy council leader Robert Davis sneered at the mural's appeal, positing the question: "what is the difference......

A three-day festival in Dalston begins tomorrow, bringing together filmmakers, writers, theorists, architects and urban planners to kick about ideas and knowledge on cities "from the ground up". Refreshingly starchitect-free, This Is Not A Gateway welcomes theorists and practitioners from across Europe for over forty events addressing the pressing needs of the modern urban environment. The talks, symposia and highbrow chin-wagging will be held at some of Dalston's finest creative hubs, including Rio Cinema, The......

You've got just four weeks from today to gaze on Titian's masterpiece, Diana and Actaeon, at the National Gallery, hanging with its sequel, Death of Actaeon, which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1972. They haven't been seen together for 200 years. The painting's been brought down from Scotland to help accelerate the huge and desperate joint fundraising campaign by the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland to find £50m by New......

We were sent a curious bundle of sticks through the post, creating a mild Blair Witch-ish tremor upon the doormat last week... but then realised these plastic rods form a key to a very cool project at Tate Modern this coming Saturday and we are in fact going to be part of Malhas de Liberdade / Meshes of Freedom. Artist Cildo Meireles based the original network sculpture on a doodle he drew in 1976,......