The former Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia has been under hoarding for some time now, awaiting a wholesale mixed-use redevelopment. Late last year a group of local artists twigged that the iconic building was about to disappear with all its secrets and embarked on a last minute crusade to create work about the building, its history, and previous and future occupants. The developers granted them unlimited access to the site over a string of Saturdays......

Science and art coming together is a beautiful thing. A totally wrong coupling that sometimes climaxes in an eruption of sci-art fusion magic. That's presumably what the Science Museum is after in appointing not onlya writer but a dancer in residence for the summer months. Contemporary dancer and choreographer, Athina Vahla "concentrates on epic, site-specific work taking a collaborative approach to create multi-media pieces." That's artspeak for mash-ups, right? Vahla is specifically working on......

An entire catwalk of models dressed as Tilda Swinton; a dress covered in bells that you can hear before you can see; one model wearing an entire collection… such is life in the fabulous House of Viktor and Rolf installation at the Barbican. Including samples of each collection’s couture, as well as pieces of their early work and live footage of their innovative shows, the epicentre of the exhibition is a giant doll’s house,......

If you went through Stratford Station this morning you might have found the Stratford Grapevine thrust into your paw, in place of the usual news lite freesheets. What you might not have realised is that it was art. You probably thought it looks more like a community involvement initiative, celebrating Stratford on the road to 2012 and mustering local people into a renewed sense of - well, community. And you'd be right. There will......

Dan Shipsides, Several sequenced problems on Contemporary Art (Frieze), installation view, 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo by Andy Keate. Peckham. The mere mention of this seemingly blighted borough is enough to send some running for the hills. Much in the same way as mentioning Hackney in the 1980s would do. But this just makes its treasures more special. We aren't ashamed to say we are fans of Peckham. South London Gallery, created in the......

Although this season hasn't been much of a scorcher, we still need to visit the local lido at least once a year or it just doesn't feel like summer. With the number of gigs we attend, we're often faced with a choice between the dimly-lit venue and the lovely outdoor London we too often neglect. Thanks to the organisers of Wet Sounds, however, we can have a dip and entertain our ears all in......

Back in the days when Bankside Power Station actually burned oil, it stored its fuel supply in a trio of enormous round tanks lying beneath the rear of the building. Nobody can afford such a quantity of oil these days, but the tanks are still down there, and Tate Modern has big plans for them. Last weekend, small groups of museum members toured the eerie underbelly of the institution for a look at things......

Recorded sound hasn't existed as a physical object for very long, and no sooner does it arrive than it starts to slip away. One hundred and twenty odd years may seem like a long time when the records you bought last month felt outdated last week, but it's a brief moment in the history of sound. Although vinyl will likely remain, every other format is staring down a disembodied digital future. For most of......

Patrons of the arts are serving London's art-loving public well. Earlier this year, we told you about Artist Rooms and Anthony D'Offay's donation of his personal art collection. Now, some rarely- and never-before-seen works are on display at the National Gallery and Tate Britain. The late Simon Sainsbury (great-grandson of the grocer) bequested 18 works of art with a combined estimated value of £100m to the museums in 2006. Amongst the paintings are works......

Akram Khan & Juliette Binoche by roll the dice We were fortunate to be in the company of the beautiful people on Friday when actress Juliette Binoche and dance star Akram Khan revealed their upcoming Franco-British collaboration for the National Theatre. The project - In-I - is under wraps in the sense that it's still being made but will see a dance theatre performance of some kind, vaguely based on personal experiences of love hit......

Thinking of adding your footfall to the hordes that have already made the British Museum our most popular cultural attraction? Might not want to do it today - there's a strike on. Members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) and Prospect are planning to down tweed jackets at 2pm, having been most untickled by a proposed 1.6% pay offer. Management claim the museum will remain open, though access to some galleries could......

Sell your house right now and buy some art: that's Londonist's advice for beating the credit crunch. At least, that's the only conclusion to draw on hearing that Christie's have had a second record-breaking art sale inside of a week. This one saw a new world record set for a Jeff Koons sculpture – £12.9 million for his 'Ballon FLower, Magenta', a huge chrome sculpture that has stood on display in St James's Square......

It's far too nice to be inside tonight so we can't help but suggest you mosey on down to the river and enjoy the rays. Head down to the Tate Modern and enjoy the Street Art exhibition that's been daubing the external walls of the Tate Modern since for the last month of so. Then talk a short stroll to the nearby The Anchor pub and enjoy their riverside beer garden till sunset.......

Forget credit woes - art collectors certainly don't seem bothered by the global economic hangover. Christies last night saw a silly amount of cash flashed in their Impressionist and modern art sale, the highest amount ever for a European auction. Top of the bill was Claude Monet's Le Bassin aux Nympheas, which changed hands for a snip under £41 million. A Picasso still-life, a Henry Moore bronze and a Degas pastel were also sold,......

Londonists these days -- breaking Guinness Book of World Records left and right. Ok, sure, flamenco, coffee, and walking is all well and good, but records involving...toast? 26-year old Freddie Yauner broke a new world record for the tallest reaches a toaster's ever popped. His invention, showcased at the Royal College of Art's graduate show, popped a piece of toast to the grandiose height of 2.6 metres, or 8.5ft. Yauner's designs meld satire with......

Beak Street's finest: The Riflemaker. Unsurprisingly enough, it hasn't changed its Soho location since the last review. It has changed the artwork on display in the main room on the ground floor though. Daniela Schönbächler's exhibition is, to be frank, a bit hit and miss. We were unmoved by the big painted abstracts. We didn't loathe them, we didn't love them. There, now on to the good stuff. We did like the rest of......

We were unprepared for the sheer expansiveness of the Brunswick Gallery, set beneath Bloomsbury's Brunswick Centre, north of Holborn. It's a vast room with high ceilings underneath the Centre. Divination, a travelling group show, exhibited in artist run spaces has arrived in London via Hamburg and Paris and certainly makes good use of this immense space. Bit of the show were a turn off. For example, we were not keen on the video piece......

It starts tomorrow, folks. The London Festival of Architecture runs for a whole month and comprises some 600 events and installations. Previously, we selected a few ticketed events so you could book early. Today, we present a few highlights that run for several days and don't require any planning on your part. Just turn up. We'd encourage you to take a closer look at the full listings too, as we can only highlight a very......

London has been awash with modern Colombian art over the past year. Doris Salcedo's Tate crack (and accompanying White Cube retrospective) were followed by Once More With Feeling at the Photographer's Gallery, which wrapped up last week. One of the contributors to that exhibition, Oscar Muñoz, has his first solo European show that opened last week at Rivington Place in Shoreditch. Mirror Image cherry picks a number of pieces from across the span of......

'Morri's Gumpy' is an exhibition of elderly English drivers hand painted onto the bonnets of their Morris Minors. Why, we don’t know. But the results are pretty eye-catching as you walk past the windows of Saatchi & Saatchi at 80 Charlotte Street. Artist David Le Fleming (you may remember his nebulous EYELINER cartoons) has an awesome portfolio of similarly exuberant dementia and will consider commissions, should you want your own bonnet enhanced with gurning......

Nathan Horton: Controlled Explosion Number 2 Last time we talked about St Pancras Crypt, we were considering buying a London Borough. This week, the tone was rather more sombre with a group show, Responses to Conflict and Loss installed in these meditative, subterranean vaults. The Crypt is nigh on perfect for this sort of show. Its damp, fusty smelling waft and many vaulted rooms, nooks and crannies, with displaced gravestones lying around and family tombs......

Soho East. That's surely what Shoreditch has become. The Forster Gallery is one of the new breed of expensive gallery you'd normally expect to see in Mayfair, yet set in the (Nathan) Barley fields of Shoreditch. It's similar to Eyestorm in that it goes for artists that sell, and sell at relatively high prices. OK, time to come clean. This Londonista has been a fan of this artist's work since first seeing it in......

Whilst celebrated anniversaries generally include the first, tenth, twenty-fifth and so on, we'll afford a dodecadecimal exception to Raster-Noton. The German label has never been much for conformity, so why should they start now? Occupying a space between experimental electronic music and the dancefloor, the label's artists succeed at being simultaneously both but neither. We've never had the good fortune of hearing any club DJ drop one of their tracks into a set and......

As part of his ongoing first solo UK exhibition at the ICA, this Saturday sees French artist Loris Gréaud present an interpretation of his Cellar Door libretto with CocoRosie's Sierra Casady and pianist/violinist/cellist Gael Rakotondrabe. Whilst for the ICA this is another instalment in Stage of the Art, their cross-Channel cultural exchange series with Palais de Tokyo, for Gréaud this performance will be another step in his larger Cellar Door experiment. Having recently exhibited......

Last night, we attended the launch of Darwin 200 at the Natural History Museum. If he was still alive, Charles Darwin would be an actual living legend, due his 200th birthday on 12 February 2009. Clearly he's dead but that's no excuse not to have a national programme of activities around his life and work, especially since it's also nearly 150 years since the theory of evolution was pronounced and "Origin of the Species"......

Much as we love digital photography - heck, we regularly feature the work of our Flickrpool snappers - there's something about the fading world of film photography that still appeals. The people at Lomography agree, and this week sees the Photographer's Gallery play host to London Lomography Thursday. Lomography is the art of using old, Russian-built cameras to take photos in an endearingly spontaneous and creative way. The movement began in the Nineties, when......

Sitting in a jerry-rigged boat, floating in a flooded sculpture park atop the Hayward as the sun bustles through the clouds and lights up the London Eye, the building's Brutalist architecture almost melts away and resolves itself into a dystopian reverie, one not entirely unpleasant: the capital has been lost, and the temples of culture abandoned to the damp elements. It's a daydream easy to believe in, until the wetsuit-wearing gallery aid comes and......

At a loose end? Want cheap beer? Wandering aimlessly around Mile End, or Hackney Wick (you can read Londonist on your mobile's browser after all)? Want to buy some art? If you can check any of these boxes, then you should head down to Decima Gallery's launch of Decima Editions, a new project selling artists' products and merchandise. By multiples they mean limited, and non limited edition. A wide range of people/art groups have......

Vyner Street is like a scruffy version of Cork Street set in the tubeless expanse of Hackney. Well, replace the expensive established artists, with the up and coming avant guard and replace the suited rich art lovers at the private views, with eccentrics, artists, and critics (not that there isn't considerable crossover between those categories, obviously). One Thursday a month the place is abuzz with art openings, and people spilling out onto the street......

If you've been down Tate Modern way recently, you've probably noticed some new additions to the river-facing wall: the Street Art exhibition, which we mentioned back in April, officially opens on Friday 23rd of May, and the pieces have been slowly but steadily revealing themselves over the past couple of weeks. The tech-savvy Tate staff are live blogging as the artworks go up, and getting the artists themselves to throw in their pictures too.......