The Museum of Modern Art's show of the Alice in Wonderland film-maker's art overflows with his distinctive creations, but the organisers have wasted an opportunity to take him out of his rabbit hole

Gallery: Tim Burton at Moma

"That's the big deer from Edward Scissorhands," a woman in the sculpture garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art tells her friend, pointing at an outsized topiary stag based on the one in Tim Burton's 1990 film. "And I recognise this one from Beetlejuice, when the furniture tries to eat [the characters]," she adds, gesturing at a large, pointy, painted sheet-metal piece that bears a passing resemblance to something from Burton's 1988 movie but is in fact Alexander Calder's 1959 sculpture Black Widow.

The attribution might have been wide of the mark but at least a connection was made between Burton and a larger artworld. The peculiar thing about Moma's Tim Burton show, which has been running since November and continues to the end of April, is how little effort its curators have made to glance backward or sideways to place Burton's work within a broader context.

Burton has a distinctive sensibility, consistently expressed with wit, imagination and macabre charm, but he is not an obvious candidate for a blockbuster show at one of the world's most prestigious art museums. Part of the exhibition's job is surely to offer an argument about why he should be given a platform alongside the likes of Claude Monet and William Kentridge, both of whom also have shows at Moma at the moment, and how his work fits into and enhances a larger cultural narrative. This the exhibition does not do.

Instead, it gives us Burton, Burton and more Burton. You can see why: the man is plainly prodigious and each of the hundreds of pieces on show has its own reasons to be admired – from early Mad magazine-influenced cartoons and public-service posters created by Burton as a teenager in Burbank, California, to props and production work from his movies (Edward Scissorhands's leather-switchblade costume, The Nightmare Before Christmas's Jack Skellington figure with his two dozen spare heads). There are also nine new pieces created for the show, from a giant inflatable "Balloon Boy" in the main atrium to the monster's maw through which one enters the exhibition proper.

The bulk of the work on show consists of drawings, the vast majority offering individual vividness while remaining consistent with Burton's overall sensibility: there are monsters, aliens, fairgrounds and suburbia; creepy-sympathetic figures that are sharp-toothed, spindly-limbed, bristling with stalks and spirals but often bulbously top-heavy or buxomly dominatrixy. Stark black-and-white stripes alternate with splattered palettes of riotous, even fluorescent colour.

This consistency is striking and limiting. There's really not that much difference in sensibility and technique between Burton's latest works and the paintings of alien invasions or monstrous animations created during his adolescence. Impressive stuff for a teenager, no question, but it leaves the show feeling awfully samey. Even the novelty value of glimpses of early or uncompleted projects is qualified by a feeling that if we never saw Burton's Hansel and Gretel or Little Dead Riding Hood, we can probably imagine how they would look without much difficulty. Nor, a couple of installation pieces notwithstanding, does the show give you the feeling of being in Burton's world yourself in the way that, say, the unsettlingly immersive 2007 David Lynch exhibition at Paris's Fondation Cartier, with its disorienting red curtains and grinding industrial soundtrack, did.

All the more reason, then, for the exhibition to look beyond the contents of Burton's metaphorical garage. There are obvious connections to be made here: with other popular illustrators, such as Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman, Ronald Searle and Maurice Sendak; with ideas of childhood, sexuality and outsiderdom that could easily encompass the Grimms, Poe and Freud; and with cinematic movements such as German expressionism and classic monster movies. A Moma film season running in conjunction with the show, called The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, juxtaposes Burton's features with just these kinds of cinematic reference points (Nosferatu, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Tex Avery cartoons, etc). But the response to the main exhibition is a bit like the response you might have to many of Burton's characters: have you thought about getting out a bit more?

Kenneth Anger's crazy, gorgeous, disturbing films almost landed him in jail. The avant-garde pioneer talks Simon Hattenstone through all his demons

The gallery is so tiny I think I've walked into somebody's front room. A 10-minute film plays on a loop. Weirded-out rock stars who look like Mick Jagger, or who are Mick Jagger, preen, strut and do their late-1960s satanic thing. White dots form a pyramid on a black background, naked boys lounge on a sofa, marines jump from a helicopter. There's a cat, a dog, an all-seeing Egyptian eye, people smoking dope out of a skull. A synthesiser makes an unbearable noise. There are no words, no story.

Around the screen, in London's Sprüth Magers gallery, a bunch of 21st-century trendies and stoners are watching this film, called Invocation of My Demon Brother, in awe, their ages ranging from late teens to late 80s. Next door, hallucinogenic photographs eyeball you from the wall. You walk in, you walk out – and the show's all over in a flash. It can only mean one thing. Kenneth Anger is back in town.

Anger is a Hollywood legend. He has created some of the most disturbing, gorgeous, crazy and influential films ever, even if he has yet to make a feature. This great avant-gardist is also a writer, best known for Lalaland's two most scurrilous gossip digests: Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2; the first was published in 1965, banned immediately and not published again until 1975. Among the books' more scandalous passages are allegations that Lucille Ball started Hollywood life as a prostitute; that James Dean had a "disconcerting interest" in a 12-year-old boy; and that Bette Davis killed her second husband.

We meet at a London hotel that smells of cabbage. Anger is 83 years old; his hair is jet black, his shoes red, his trousers tan. One eye is bigger than the other, and his face is unlined. He is both beautiful and grotesque: Warren Beatty meets Frankenstein's monster. Anger wasn't always an outsider. He trained as a dancer, and as a boy danced with Shirley Temple. He was handsome enough to have been a leading man. But he did not want to be part of the system. "There was a possibility of going into the industry, but there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in the early 50s, the ridiculous witch-hunt of reds. I wasn't a communist, I just found it very unpleasant." His voice is a cat's purr.

Although he made films as a boy, Anger's earliest surviving work is 1947's Fireworks. This appeared three years before Jean Genet's groundbreaking homoerotic prison masterpiece, Un Chant D'Amour. Fireworks features a young man (Anger) wet-dreaming a sequence in which he is seduced/gang-raped by a group of sailors after he tries to pick one up. As with all his films, there are no words, and the story, such as it is, has a dramatic music score. The camera lingers on his apparent erection – which turns out to be a model of an African soldier. Blood pours from his eyes as he is pulverised by the sailors, and a firework explodes from his zip. His heart is ripped apart to expose a ticking time-piece. It's not only surreal and scary, it is devastatingly beautiful.

Astonishingly, it was made in the McCarthy era. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges following its release. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which declared the film to be art. Anger made it in his parents' Beverly Hills home when they were away at an uncle's funeral. "I just put the furniture in the garden and the living room was the set. Luckily it didn't rain."

How did public screenings go? "Well, it was shown to an elite audience," Anger says. "Among the people who came was James Whale, the British director of Frankenstein, and I became friends with him. Dr Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, also came. I became friends with him, too." Did his parents see it? "Um, no. My grandmother saw it. She was like my sponsor: she bought my camera for me. She said it's terrific. She was a painter." Did he know what he was trying to do with films? "Well, I knew all about French avant garde, so I was the American avant garde."

Six-packs, scorpions, swastikas

Anger was born Kenneth Anglemeyer in 1927. His father worked for Douglas Aircraft and his brother went into the airforce, but it was his grandmother who was his inspiration. She took him to exhibitions, introduced him to art and film. At Beverly Hills High school, he remembers looking out of the window watching The Song of Bernadette being made at 20th Century Fox next door. He was friends with Harry Brand Jr, son of Fox's head of publicity. They would swap Hollywood gossip during break.

In his teens, he founded his own film society to screen obscure European movies. By the time of Fireworks, Kenneth Anglemeyer had disappeared. The sole opening credit reads: "A film by Anger." Was it a name that reflected how he felt? "I just condensed my name," he says. "I knew it would be like a label, a logo. It's easy to remember."

It is Anger's use of music as a substitute for dialogue that marks him out from other film-makers of his time. He set 1954's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, inspired by Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, to Janácek's Glagolitic Mass. His most famous film, Scorpio Rising (another sadomasochistic montage of bikers, beatings, six-packs, scorpions and swastikas), has possibly the greatest pop soundtrack in movie history: Fools Rush In, My Boyfriend's Back, Blue Velvet, Hit the Road Jack, He's a Rebel. Scorpio Rising would later encourage Martin Scorsese (in Mean Streets) and David Lynch (in Blue Velvet) to use pop songs to help tell a story.

Lucifer Rising, a celebration of pagan ritual featuring Marianne Faithfull, had a soundtrack written from prison by Bobby Beausoleil, a convicted murderer and an associate of the Manson family. Wasn't Beausoleil a boyfriend of his? "He was a friend. We lived together." Has he known a lot of bad boys? "I seem to be attracted to bad boys, but I never let it go too far. In other words, there's always, 'OK, it's time for me to move out.'" I ask Anger if he was a bad boy. He smiles. "I was a smart boy. Too smart to be involved in badness." He has always preferred badness by association.

Anger was also a friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in the 1960s. Is he a satanist? "No, I am not a satanist. I am a pagan. Satanism is another thing." But, I say, people look at your dystopian films, with their myriad references to the devil, and assume you are a devil-worshipper. "Well, I can't help what people see in them," he says. Were you playing with ideas or was it your belief system? "Well, I suppose, a belief." In what? "Underneath it all is an appreciation of nature."

In Lucifer Rising, Faithfull plays Lilith, a demon. It was Anger's most expensive film because it involved a trip to Egypt. "I said to Marianne Faithfull, don't bring any drugs because they'll execute you. So she hid her heroin in her makeup box underneath her face powder. I think she was powdering her face with heroin."

'Hollywood is a dried-out prune'

Anger often found it hard to finance his films. This is where the Hollywood Babylon books came in useful. Although it took him years to get them past the lawyers, they became bestsellers. Many of their stories are still disputed. For years, we have been waiting for Hollywood Babylon 3. Anger says it is written, but it's on hold. "The main reason I didn't bring it out was that I had a whole section on Tom Cruise and the Scientologists. I'm not a friend of the Scientologists." He says today's Holly-wood is a dried-out prune of a place, its stars not even worth gossiping about. "I covered most of the people who were interesting to me in the first two books."

Not only is Anger still filming in his 80s, he tells me he is in the middle of a purple patch, having recently made a number of shorts: one about military uniforms called Uniform Attraction; another about football warmups called Foreplay; and a third, Elliott's Suicide, about his friend, singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who killed himself in 2003 at the age of 34. "He stabbed himself in the heart after a quarrel with his girlfriend. It's the most ridiculous reason to kill yourself."

Although Smith's songs feature in Elliott's Suicide, it is a film without dialogue. After all, why change a winning formula? Actually, there is one thing I have always wondered: does Anger ever watch, say, Lucifer Rising and wonder what the hell it's all about? He smiles for a long time, casting his mind back over all those years, all those films. "They are close to being dreams – and in dreams, you don't have to analyse what everything means."

Kenneth Anger is at Sprüth Magers, London W1, until 27 March. Then touring. Anger appears in person tomorrow at Tyneside cinema, Gateshead. Details: avfestival.co.uk

He was the anarchist of 1980s design, but the technical wizardry in his current London show feels over-polished and out of touch

Unless you die young, it's difficult to be a hero for ever. Heroes are commercialised. They succumb to what Norman Mailer called "exhaustion of the will". Or they simply go out of fashion. And that's what happened to Ron Arad – or at least, that's what we thought had happened. But the Israeli-born, London-based designer of bold, sculptural furniture has never been more ubiquitous. In the last year, a major retrospective of his work has bounced from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently landing at London's Barbican.

Arad is one of the design world's few nameable stars. Most people will probably know his Tom Vac chair (1993), a rippled plastic armchair on steel legs that once abounded in cool restaurants. Or perhaps his bestselling Bookworm bookshelf, a flexible ribbon that holds your books in a spiral. But these are merely the outward signs of his commercial success. He also works as an artist, selling one-off pieces for sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as an architect and teacher. Over the last decade he has been hugely influential at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the Design Products department until last year. Arad wasn't interested in teaching people how to be professional industrial designers: he wanted to teach them how to think for themselves, and a generation of designers graduated wanting to work just as he did – as a designer-maker, free from the technical constraints set by manufacturers.

To understand Arad the hero, visitors to the Barbican show should head straight up to the mezzanine galleries to soak up his early work from the 1980s. There they'll find a stereo and speakers encased in concrete, which look as though they've been hauled off a building site or hacked from a sea wall. Can you imagine a rougher envelope for all that delicate technology? So much for the precious, garish styling of the designer decade. Arad, recently graduated from the Architectural Association, had broken out of architecture to do his own thing. His work was raw and muscular, but also rich and clever.

It all started with an old leather car seat bolted to some scaffolding pipes. The Rover chair (1981), an emblem of Britain's fading car industry spliced with some DIY high-tech structure, was an instant punk icon, the furniture equivalent of the Sex Pistols' ransom-note typography. Before Arad had even noticed any connection to the prevailing counter-culture, Jean-Paul Gaultier was knocking on his door to buy six. He went on to hammer metal into clunky thrones such as the Tinker chair (1988), and turn looped steel sheets into a parody of your auntie's upholstered armchair in the Well-Tempered chair (1986). It was visceral stuff, and what's more, it looked like he was having fun.

Fast forward two decades to this show, and you see the Rover chair again – except this time it's made of flawless chrome. The sheer shininess of it epitomises everything that went wrong with design in the noughties. Galleries were falling over themselves to produce ultra-expensive limited editions for a growing collectors' market buoyed by the economic bubble. You want your chair in Carrara marble? You got it. The bling world of design-art was too often about expense for the sake of it. It was an upgrade of materials, but not of imagination.

None of that is Arad's fault. He had been blurring the distinction between design and art for decades, and we should thank him for it. It's not boundary-crossing that's the problem, it's the fact that the edginess of Arad's work has been replaced by a flabby, over-polished mannerism. It's too slick. Take a series of recent rocking chairs called the Voids (an apt name): no doubt they are technically impressive, but whether they're made of tiger-stripe acrylic or lacquered aluminium, there's no disguising that the designs are utterly vacuous. His architecture is even worse – this exhibition gives him so much credit for also being an architect that you wonder whether the curators have actually looked at these buildings. They're heinous: scaled-up, self-indulgent gewgaws.

Arad has been an early adopter of new materials and technologies – he used rapid prototyping (a method of 3D printing using plastic resin) to make a series of fruit bowls, and he incorporated text messaging into a chandelier for Swarovski – but often abandons them before he's achieved anything of substance. The show is a celebration of his magpie ingenuity, but you won't find much under the surface. Arad's work is all technique. It's pure expression through materials, form and movement. That means you can only judge it using taste. One of his giant rocking chairs (he loves rocking chairs) or overblown bookcases will bring someone a sudden jolt of pure joy, while the person next to them will retch. He's the design equivalent of Marmite.

The superbness of it all is part of the problem. It's so bombastic that it doesn't leave you any room to be you – Arad is too busy blinding you with who he is. There is no sociological dimension to his work; it's not about people, it's about him.

The reason why this show feels out of touch is that we've moved on. Sure, Arad helped erode the boundaries of design, but which boundaries are we interested in? If design is going to rediscover its sense of purpose, it has to crossbreed with other disciplines, from biotechnology to healthcare. The most interesting contemporary designers are already crossing those thresholds; Arad, though, feels like he's been left far behind.

Antony Gormley is breaking into America with a debut showing of public art in Manhattan

Fifty "women to watch" have been selected for the Cultural Leadership Programme by a panel of judges including choreographer Wayne McGregor, broadcaster Jenni Murray and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. Good to see such superb names as Kate McGrath, director of theatre producers Fuel, and Emma Stenning, executive director of the Bristol Old Vic chosen. But there are some significant omissions: I'll also be "watching" such women as Kathleen Soriano, who has taken over from Norman Rosenthal as exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts; inspired curator Polly Staple, director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London; and Jackie Wylie, the young creator of an interesting programme at Glasgow venue the Arches.

Jenny Holzer's bold new show draws on US military memos and torture techniques. Adrian Searle is left feeling paranoid

A river of words runs across the floor. "I swim in her," say the 10 lanes of yellow text, streaming through the semi-dark. "I sing her a song about us." How lyrical, you think. I am looking down from an interior balcony at the Baltic in Gateshead. Below me words flow by, disappearing when they hit the base of a wall, as if sliding under it. There are too many words, too many thoughts to hold on to: "I step on her hands"; "She tightens and I hit her"; "I wash her out"; "I can ruin your life."

This exhibit, called For Chicago, is a compilation of 13 different text works made by Jenny Holzer between 1977 and 2001. The phrases bloom in my mind, filled with monstrous possibilities. As you read, the voice in your head becomes by turns lover, mother, creep, sadist, rapist, murderer. Snag on a particular phrase and, as you watch it slide away, you'll miss what's coming up behind. Occasionally, the words blink on and off, or stall and reverse. It is hard to keep up, even though they glide by at a walking pace, silently. The phrases you don't quite catch matter as much as the ones you do. You can drown in all these words.

For Chicago forms part of the largest exhibition of Holzer's work to be shown in Britain. The artist has a good feel for the potent phrase, to set the mind racing or stop it dead. All these snatched fragments, whispers and threats read as aphorisms, commands and confessions. The tone is always flat and declarative. There are no adjectives, only statements. It might almost be a kind of poetry, but Holzer has always insisted she's no poet.

Born in Ohio in 1950, Holzer had a lonely childhood. She taught Sunday school and wanted to be a painter. But her art, and her reputation, began as a kind of rumour, with lists flyposted anonymously on the streets of New York in the late 1970s: "Abuse of power should come as no surprise"; "Murder has its sexual side"; "Stupid people shouldn't breed"; "Protect me from what I want." Holzer's Truisms proliferated on stickers, posters, T-shirts, even on metal plaques. They've since been carved on stones, projected on to buildings around the world, and appeared on the sides of trucks – infiltrating the planet in stark capital letters. Holzer continues to recycle her Truisms; lately she has been disseminating them on Twitter. She could be selling something. Whatever it is, it breeds mistrust.

One early Truism is writ large on the side of the Baltic. "The beginning of the war will be secret," declares the huge red-on-white banner, facing Newcastle across the Tyne. The war between Newcastle and Gateshead is no secret, but when did it begin? When does any war really begin? I stare at the sign blankly and begin to worry.

Holzer's work fills two floors. Her 1970s Truisms and her Inflammatory Essays reappear in Monument, spilling out purple, red, white and blue light as the words flow on. Beyond are two old tables bearing neatly arranged bones, which appear to be human; some wear engraved silver bands. You have to get up close to read the engravings, your nose inches from the bones. "To fuck her where . . . " I read on one band; and ". . . head explodes" on another. The silver winks brightly against the brown and ivory bones. You'll never get to the bottom of this forensic nightmare, but it's all a bit too gothic for me.

Over the last decade, Holzer has stopped using her own words (and those of US poet Henri Cole), turning instead to declassified statements, letters, reports and memos from the US military. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan now preoccupy her. As well as making ever more complex arrangements of LED signs, Holzer has started painting again – often direct copies of US government papers she has collected through the Freedom of Information Act. These frequently terrifying documents outline interrogation techniques: sleep deprivation, white noise exposure, open-hand strikes low-voltage electrocution, muscle-fatigue inducement.

Other documents appear to argue about the ethics of such treatment. In an exasperated memo, one officer writes: "I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al-Qaida. Restrictions on interrogation techniques had a negative impact on our ability to gather intelligence." The arguments go back and forth between the moral high ground and calls for "the gloves to come off".

What is troubling about these documents is not what one reads, but what has been blacked out: great swathes of text have fallen to the censor's pen; some pages are almost all black. Holzer was alert to the fact that these censored documents had the geometric look of suprematist paintings, and reworked them accordingly. One canvas of black rhomboids bears only the handwritten words "water board". I stare at the blackness, and imagine the cold technical description of this form of torture that probably lies buried under the impenetrable blackness. Other paintings reproduce enlarged palm prints of detainees and enemy combatants.

This material also works its way into her newer LEDs. There are reports of beatings and cholera, people with bags over their heads, displaced civilians without food or water, people handcuffed and forced into agonising stress positions. The flatly written reports churn through Holzer's machines. The absence of the larger context for each fragment is important: Holzer's work infers a complex, often malevolent totalitarian world. In the end, it's all too much to take in – what one is left with is atmosphere, and in my case, a creeping sense of paranoia.

The combination of paintings and luminous, flickering LED works does not, however, work well. The jumps are too great; the two forms need separate spaces. But does quibbling over form matter? I think so. Holzer knows there's a difference between a Truism sticker and a light projection on a building, between a techno-fairground of LED and a painting. The words come at you differently. It's the difference between a whisper and a scream, a song and an order, the word on the street and the words in your head.

A new exhibition celebrates the work of Ronald Searle as he turns 90. Steve Bell on what makes him Britain's greatest living cartoonist

When I first wrote to Ronald Searle with the idea of an exhibition focusing on his reportage work, he was polite but sceptical, pointing out the difficulty of locating artwork that had been scattered across continents. The idea for a show at the Cartoon Museum, where I have been on the board of trustees for some years, fell into abeyance until the approach of his 90th birthday; this time we proposed a more general exhibition and I was delighted when he responded positively.

I was thrilled to the point of almost dislocating my own jaw when a portfolio bulging with Searle originals arrived at the door. This turned out to be only the first batch. The sheer quality was astonishing, and this work, mainly reportage, forms the core of the exhibition. Another generous loan from his daughter Kate and son John ensured that all the other aspects of his long career, including St Trinian's and Molesworth, were not neglected.

What I had not reckoned with was Searle's own meticulous preservation and annotation of his own collection, and the fact that he has clearly hung on to his own best work. His archive consists of papers, books, sketchbooks and thousands of drawings, along with works by Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Leech and Pont, and most of it is now held at the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany.

Anita O'Brien, the curator of the museum, and I had an opportunity both to visit and study the large archive in Hanover, and to talk to the man himself at his home in Provence. What struck me most of all was his utter commitment to his own art and his lifelong (and, I would say fully justified) conviction of its significance. In the past he has described his brand of graphic satire as "a minor, parasitic art form", but I don't believe a word of it. Searle has a very clear-eyed assessment of his worth.

He was talented enough in his youth to get paid work as a cartoonist on the Cambridge Daily News from the age of 15 in 1935. Soon he came to the notice of the editorial board of Granta, where he began to be used regularly. His work from this time is fairly conventional, owing more than a little to HM Bateman, and gives little inkling of his future style, but his seriousness of purpose is evident. He was beginning to earn nearly as much as his railwayman father, yet felt a strong need to improve his drawing, so secured himself a scholarship to attend the Cambridge School of Art, where he studied and drew constantly until the war intervened. He enlisted in the Royal Engineers in 1939 and carried on drawing.

The German artist George Grosz was "a very great influence" and a small but beautiful volume of his work accompanied Searle throughout his wartime travails, for, other than a brief spell of action manning the rearguard of the British retreat down the Malay peninsula, he spent the entire war as a prisoner of the Japanese at Changhi on Singapore island and as a forced labourer on the notorious Burma railway in what was then Siam.

This profound and brutal experience changed everything for him and is still clearly with him to this day. The drawings he made and managed to preserve, at great risk, provide not only a unique record of a hellish experience but also demonstrate an astonishing artistic transformation.

He told me: "I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on. And in the end I was very lucky. At times I was so ill that I couldn't draw at all. You're doing 16 hours a day rock breaking and you're exhausted. You come back and have a bowl of rice. You have no light, but you have fire, a big fire keeping the mountain lions away, and snakes perhaps, and by the light of the fire, I made the drawings. I didn't have a watch or anything, so you just lie down in the tent until you were dragged out the next morning to go back to the rock breaking. And so all these drawings, some of them very bad, were all I could do in a state of exhaustion."

After years of war and starvation, Searle returned with two things driving him on: "What can I eat . . . and how can I live?" His comic work had continued, but had now acquired a darker quality. It soon found outlets, and St Trinian's, the first cartoon of which was drawn in Changhi, became a huge success. Through the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, his reportage continued, some of it real, some of it imagined, but all of it mercifully now paid for by a whole array of publications from Punch and the News Chronicle in the UK through to Holiday and Life magazine in the US.

Searle still works every day, his pen scratching and swooping and his ideas still flowing. Until only two years ago his work still appeared regularly in Le Monde and, he says, it is budgetary cutbacks that have caused him to be laid off, rather than any diminution of enthusiasm or energy on his part.

These most recent works are in themselves a kind of imaginative reportage, anatomising the great issues of the day in full, resplendent absurdity. His line is still vibrant, still questing, and drawing still absorbs him utterly. Searle and his wife Monica, a couple bubbling with zest for life, show no signs of flagging before his centenary. Perhaps by then his unique body of work will be given the space and resources that it deserves in one of the great galleries of the country of his birth. It is a depressing indictment of the condition of our visual culture that the Searle archive should now be ensconced in Hanover without so much as a batsqueak from any of our great art institutions of state, who had the opportunity to acquire it for the nation but never took it up.

What marks Searle's work out is genuine wit, intelligence and unabashed ambition. He is our greatest living cartoonist, with a lifelong dedication to his craft unequalled by any of his contemporaries. His work is truly international, yet absolutely grounded in the English comic tradition. It is the highest form of conceptual art, but devoid of any of the pretence that usually accompanies such a notion. Which is to say it is extremely funny, but not all the time. It cuts to the essence of life.

Eight artists have been shortlisted for UK's richest visual arts prize

The work of eight artists competing for the UK's richest visual arts prize went on display in Wales today– and none could be accused of triviality.

There was no sight of a light being turned off and on at the preview opening of the fourth Artes Mundi prize exhibition in Cardiff. This was big subject art tackling subjects from post-communist social order to consumerism and globalisation.

The prize of £40,000 is one of the most lucrative in the world and the biggest in the UK. It is presented every two years and, while it may have a lower profile than the Turner, for example, its status and importance in the world of contemporary art seems to grow each time.

Importantly, the prize provides a platform for international artists yet to make a big name for themselves in the UK. This year, nearly 500 were nominated from 80 countries.

Tessa Jackson, founding artistic director of Artes Mundi, said one aim had been to increase "the level and scope" of contemporary art on display in Wales, and one direct result has been the decision to create a dedicated space for it in the national museum from next year.

"There has been an enormous thirst for what we do and it has been one of the national museum's most popular exhibitions," said Jackson. "Beyond Doctor Who and dinosaurs even."

It will be an impressively well-versed visitor who knows the names or work of any of the shortlisted artists. Jackson said: "It has been a very conscious decision to bring together artists who aren't necessarily part of the London or commercial scene. We want a different range of players. People don't necessarily know the names of the artists, but they get very engaged with the work and the content of it and what it's about."

Jackson agreed that all of the artists tackled serious subjects, but said the show was not po-faced. "There is amazing humour in some of the work," she said. "I don't fish, but there's a bit of tickling going on here."

All of the artists this year were shortlisted for their skill in reflecting the politics that surround them, and there was a strong showing by artists from formerly communist countries, including the Albanian Adrian Paci; the Bulgarian Ergin Çavusoglu; the Russian Olga Chernysheva; and Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, from Kyrgyzstan.

The latter pair, who explore ordinary life on the new Silk Road, were not at the prize preview after they were denied visas. The other artists are the Peruvian Fernando Bryce, who has lived in Europe for almost 20 years; Chen Chieh-yen, from Taiwan; and Yael Bartana, from Israel.

Many of the exhibits show the continuing strength of film and video art. Bartana, for example, has on display her most recent work, a film called Wall and Tower, in which she imagines the return of the 3 million Jews who lived in Poland before the Nazi occupation.

We are the "same but changed" says the orator as Bartana re-enacts the building of a wall and tower in the heart of Warsaw. This new Jewish settlement quickly has barbed wire round it and although it has a welcome sign, it is anything but.

Bartana has called herself an amateur anthropologist and examines tricky subjects. "I've been exploring anti-semitism, the Jewish and Polish relationship, the economy of responsibility and guilt," she said.

So far, Bartana said she had managed to avoid hostility to her work. "The Polish project is more complicated and touching on some deep wounds. I'm expecting some more difficulties than before, maybe."

The exhibition at Cardiff's national museum, which opens to the public tomorrow, provides a snapshot of each artist, but they will be judged on their work over the last five to eight years. The winner will be announced on 19 May.

If the party is to reconnect with its soul, it needs to revive the passion for culture that seems to have ended with Michael Foot

Michael Foot was a name I knew long before I was old enough to vote Labour. My dad's fading paperback copy of the first volume of Foot's biography of Aneurin Bevan was one of the familiar volumes on the bookshelves at home. I don't think I knew he was a politician, but I did know he was a writer. Much later on, as a sixth-former, I read his collection of essays Debts of Honour – well-written and sensitive homages; model essays. Foot was the real thing: a cultured radical. But how many of those are left in the Labour Party?

I hate to be a party pooper. If Gordon Brown's political renaissance continues and he holds the line at the general election, I will be ready with the champagne. I've never voted for any other party and never will. But what happened, please, to the culture and learning that once flourished on the British Left? Where is the Labour passion for poetry and language that Foot epitomised?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I can't think of a single convincing book or article on an artistic, literary, musical or architectural theme that a leading and current Labour politician has published since 1997. I can't picture anyone in the cabinet who has a prominent passion for Keats – or even Bob Dylan, for that matter. They all seem completely cultureless. There may be a lot of economic learning in New Labour, but a zeal for the arts (as opposed to a desire to be associated with fashionable art) is nowhere to be found.

I'm not accusing them of lacking taste. I'm accusing them of lacking soul. Art, in the end, is the vehicle of feeling: Foot had deep feelings that he could perhaps express better by writing history and criticism than he could by leading the party. And surely the philistinism of the Blair and Brown years has been a reaction against what might have seemed the impotent intellect of old Labour.

But please: if the good news holds and Labour really does have an electoral future, let's bring books – and passion – back into it. The history of our working-class ancestors is what makes many of us vote Labour; and we get at that through poetry, because it is a feeling.

Four men and three women suspected of planning to kill Lars Vilks, who has had al-Qaida bounty on his head since 2007

Irish police today arrested seven suspects over an alleged plot to kill a Swedish artist who drew the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.

The target of the alleged assassination was Lars Vilks, who had a $100,000 (£67,000) bounty put on his head by al-Qaida in 2007, with a 50% bonus if Vilks was "slaughtered like a lamb" by having his throat cut. Another $50,000 was said to have been put on the life of Ulf Johansson, editor-in-chief of Nerikes Allehanda, the local newspaper that printed the cartoon.

The four men and three women, who were detained at about 10am this morning, are in their mid-20s to late-40s and are being held at stations in Waterford, Tramore, Dungarvan and Thomastown. Garda sources have confirmed that some of those arrested hold Irish citizenship and a number are from the Middle East. Some of those questioned have been confirmed as converts to Islam.

The suspects are being held under Ireland's Criminal Justice Act 2007. Under Irish law they can be held in custody for up to seven days.

Ireland's anti-terrorist special detective unit was involved in the operation. A spokesman for the force said: "Throughout the investigation Garda Síochána has been working closely with law enforcement agencies in the United States and in a number of European countries." The CIA and the FBI were involved in the investigation.

Vilks' cartoon caused outrage because dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet for fear it could lead to idolatry.

The controversy over cartoons depicting Muhammad began in 2005, when the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten printed 12 caricatures of the prophet after a children's author said he could not find an illustrator for his book on the life of Muhammad.

The drawings sparked violent protests across the Muslim world, culminating with the burning of the Danish embassy in Damascus and its consulate in Beirut in February 2006.

Jane Bown, Tom Hunter and Daniel Lynch will be among the celebrated photographers auctioning their works in London tonight in aid of the 2009 South Pacific disaster

Photographer who specialises in large-scale nude installations is asking for 1,000 volunteers to reinvigorate the spirit of LS Lowry. Cloth caps not needed

Just a week after coaxing 5,200 Australians to pose naked on the steps of Sydney Opera House, photographer Spencer Tunick has announced he will tackle an altogether chillier and more industrial location: Salford.

To mark its 10th anniversary, the city's Lowry has commissioned Tunick to create a one-off response to the artist who gave the gallery its name. But where LS Lowry depicted the folk of Lancashire in cloth caps, bowler hats and workers' clogs, Tunick is calling for 1,000 "everyday people" to leave their clothes behind and pose for a series of large-format photographs in eight different locations around Salford and Manchester in early May. The images that result will be exhibited at the gallery from 12 June.

Michael Simpson, the Lowry's head of visual arts and engagement, said: "Tunick's work not only reflects and records the landscape of an area, but also its people. This exhibition celebrates our achievements and signals our continuing ambition."

Tunick has created nude installations featuring ever-larger groups of people in locations as varied as Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Cleveland, Ohio and Vienna. He said that working in Salford and Manchester was an "intriguing prospect".

He added: "LS Lowry's paintings, depicting the mass of everyday people who contributed to the industrial machine of the 20th century, also provide an interesting frame of reference in terms of the compositional possibilities of the installations."

The press release reassures wannabe participants that they are taking steps to deal with the possibility of a chilly northern May bank holiday: participants will be ferried between the different locations in "heated buses", it says.

Volunteers can now register their interest in participating at thelowry.com/tunick

From the slums of Kenya to the Paris banlieues, the guerilla photographer JR aims to put a human face to the most impoverished areas of the world. Just don't ask him who he is

The Parisian photographer JR is a man routinely touted as the hippest street artist since Banksy. His work has sold at Sotheby's and been plastered 100ft high on the wall of Tate Modern. His celebrity admirers include Trudie Styler and Damon Albarn. But regardless of his undoubted artistic pedigree, it seems inevitable, given his name, to ask him about Dallas.

So is his two-letter moniker a tribute to the fictional 80s oil baron JR Ewing?

"No," he laughs when we meet in his Paris studio, a bright, airy space filled with video-game consoles and designer chairs. "It's just my initials."

And they stand for?

"I can't say."

The deliberately enigmatic reply is more than mere artistic pretension. In fact, JR's anonymity is crucial to the integrity of his work: this is an artist who prides himself on operating under the radar, on creating dazzling installations in unexpected places through the force of his personality and vision.

As a teenager, he started out as a graffiti artist but began taking photographs when he found a camera on the Paris Métro. Now aged 26, he mixes the two forms and styles himself a "photograffeur", pasting oversize black-and-white photographic canvases in surprising public locations. It is something of a point of honour never to ask permission from the authorities.

"The fact that I stay anonymous means I can exhibit wherever I want," he explains with a broad grin, a plate of microwaved lamb tagine balanced precariously on his knees. "No one knows my name, so it's easy for me to travel."

In the aftermath of the 2004 riots in the Parisian suburbs, JR chose to exhibit in the grand central districts of his home town, pasting up photographs on the walls of the Marais. Portrait of a Generation featured close-up pictures of the young residents of the banlieues pulling funny faces through a fish-eye lens. Instead of the immigrant thugs of popular imagination, the Parisians who walked past JR's photographs were confronted with a more human image. "Most of the media shots of the rioters were taken with a long lens," explains JR, who comes from a mixed-race background with Tunisian and Eastern European heritage. "I used a 28mm lens to capture them really close up."

The second phase of his 28 Millimètres project took JR to the Middle East, where he mounted what is believed to be the largest illegal photo exhibition in the world. Appropriating a border wall running the length of the disputed areas between Israel and Palestine, JR pasted a giant triptych of a rabbi, a priest and an imam wearing deliberately comic expressions. The message was simple but arresting: when you are mugging it up for the camera, what brings you together is more in evidence than what sets you apart. "It's about breaking down barriers," JR says. "With humour, there is life."

Most recently, JR's ad-hoc exhibition space has included some of the most dangerous and poverty-stricken places in the world. Women Are Heroes is the third phase of the project and has seen him travelling to the slums of Kibera, Kenya, where he covered 2,000m² of rooftops with blown-up photographs of the women who lived there.

"I was interested in women because I realised in the projects I'd done before – most of the time in the kind of places I was going to – it was men on the street, but it's actually the women who are the ones holding the community together."

Then in 2008 he went to Morro da Providencia, the oldest and most perilous favela in Rio de Janeiro, to paste portraits of its female residents on the sides of the houses in which they lived. The distinctively monochrome eyes and faces were positioned looking towards the centre of Rio, a constant reminder of the grinding poverty that exists on the doorstep of one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.

"I asked each woman to give me something real," says JR, recalling the process. And it is true that, in contrast to the usual media images of grief and despair, the women project a pride in where they come from and a certainty about their own identity. "The photo is the story," he says. "They all gave me really strong eyes because they knew they would be facing the city."

It seems difficult to imagine JR in the heart of a drug-ridden favela. He is a slim and smiley young man, today wearing the casual uniform of the urban hipster: a Day-Glo sweatshirt, a black trilby and a pair of fashionable, thick-rimmed glasses. Was he scared? "Yeah of course," he says, nodding his head vigorously. "You can't even get a taxi to take you there… There are kids with guns and bulletproof jackets on the street. It's like finding yourself in the middle of a war."

In fact, the favela is so lawless that journalists are banned and no NGO operates there. Undeterred, JR simply drove himself to the centre of the shanty town and started chatting about what he wanted to do to anyone who approached him. He had been drawn to the favela by news reports concerning the murder of three innocent young men caught up in the brutal turf wars between drug traffickers and corrupt military police.

"Everything is about eye contact," JR says. "The first thing they have to know is that there's no brand behind it, that's really important… I'm not trying to use the favela to advertise Red Bull or BMX bikes, and I'm not a journalist either.

"I could speak for hours about the origins of the poster technique, but out there, there is not the same frame of reference. You have to go straight to the point. There's this person in front of you and there's no fucking around. That's how I test my projects: if they get it, it's going to work."

Almost immediately, the women of the favela understood what JR was trying to do. He asked anyone interested in participating to come along to an informal meeting. "The women who came were the ones related to the three kids who had been killed: the grandmother, the mother, the best friend. They reappropriated my project to tell their story." The end result was startlingly beautiful: a faceless community with its humanity regained.

But however successfully JR's installations work as art, they have a social conscience, too. In Kibera the photographs of women on the rooftops were printed on to vinyl so that their homes would be waterproof. The sheets of corrugated iron used in another part of the shanty town were distributed afterwards to those who had taken part. Last April JR returned to Rio to set up a cultural centre in the heart of the favela. All of the money he makes from the sale of his work – in 2009 a print of one of JR's most famous photos, "Ladj Ly", sold at auction for £26,250, and he has just sold an image to Damon Albarn for the cover of the forthcoming Africa Express album – is ploughed back into his projects so that JR can ensure his continued independence. "The finance is a key part," he says. "You wouldn't take it in the same way if I did it with L'Oréal."

There is a sense, also, that if JR were to reveal his name or speak more about his background, this would somehow detract from his work. Most graffiti artists start out by tagging their name on empty walls and tube carriages. JR does something different: he takes those who live on the margins of mainstream society and he gives them back their individuality. Paradoxically, perhaps, the photographer without a name creates extraordinary art by restoring the identities of the nameless.

From the Troubles to Iraq, from Thatcher to Blair, no one can reinvent a contemporary news image like pop art veteran Richard Hamilton

Mordechai Vanunu is disappearing through the Jerusalem streets in the back of a police van. He is on trial for exposing Israel's covert nuclear arsenal to the west. Unable to communicate with the outside world, he presses his palm against the window in the hope that the message written there will tell his story to anyone with a camera: "Vanunu M was hijacked in Rome ITL 30.9.86, 21:00."

It is a harrowing photograph, not least because Vanunu really is about to disappear into solitary confinement, for more than a decade of his 18-year sentence. Richard Hamilton's painting reproduces the shot exactly. But it also commemorates the young man's passing, so to speak, for Vanunu's face is fading into the soft and muzzy surface of the paint (and the future). The terrible intensity of the photograph – the news of what had happened, what would happen – turns slowly, pensively, into the profundity of the painting. The chance reflections of foliage now look like laurels around Vanunu's head.

Or so it may seem to some viewers (me, for one). Others might find it peculiarly mute. It doesn't tell you that the Mossad drugged and "hijacked" Vanunu, how he was punished, why he is holding up his hand, what revelations he brought the world. It doesn't look so very different from the original photograph and if it weren't for the title – Unorthodox Rendition? – might seem equally neutral.

Consider, for instance, that the very same approach is taken to a bowler-hatted Orangeman on the march in Northern Ireland, a British soldier in Belfast and an IRA prisoner in a blanket: long-haired, bare-chested, Christ-like. You might put quite different interpretations upon these works according to your politics or you might imagine Hamilton to be some sort of militant republican. Though think again; he spells out his "vehement rejection" of the IRA in the catalogue.

These works are all based on photographs; this is crucial to their content. Hamilton isn't just relying upon news reportage because he cannot be there at the historic moment. The Troubles, the campus riots at Kent State, Israel, Iraq, the regimes of Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair: our sense of each is inflected, of course, by the media images. Hamilton was there at the very beginning of this vigorous strain in art, and one of the fascinating aspects of this show is just how many different directions he takes within it.

Take the Irish paintings. They come big-screen, small-screen, split-screen; in diptych and series, more or less legible or remote. Hamilton observes that the Maze protesters have achieved a strange mythic power in the midst of their self-created squalor, lone figures isolated from time and life.

Sometimes he breaks into three dimensions and the rusted metal verticals of the picture frame invoke the bars of a cell. Sometimes the paint precisely imitates what it describes: excrement smeared on the walls, staining, dragging, depicting; excrement itself deployed like paint.

Nothing came over so viscerally in the television images. And the medium's limitations are well-expressed in the Kent State pictures, where you can just about make out a body, or at least a lifeless arm, in the dozen bleary screenprints shaped like televisions. Hamilton had set up a camera to shoot the news footage of the university massacres in 1970 directly from the TV. Transmission diminishes; so does repetition. With each generation of screenprint, the outrage – in both senses – is correspondingly suppressed and obscured.

One of the great strengths of these works is their skilful match of one kind of image with another, of medium with media. But there are times when the two fall out of kilter. Hamilton has had some coins struck with newsprint shots of Blair and Campbell, complete with Latin epigrams; the actual objects are even less potent than the title – Medals of Dishonour.

And Tony Blair as an all-American cowboy (lifesize, in the manner of Warhol's gun-toting Elvis) is toothless either as propaganda or satire. It marks the point where politics takes over and art become subordinate. For those opposed to the war, it is insufficiently complex and forceful; for those in favour, one imagines it may appear, by the same token, naive and simplistic.

Well, leave Blair to Steve Bell. And leave Margaret Thatcher to her own devices. Making something of Thatcher – something more horrifying than she made of herself, at any rate – still seems to be in the gift of other kinds of artists, such as novelists and playwrights. It is good to see Hamilton's Treatment Room from 1983, a walk-in operating theatre where Margaret Thatcher is administering her brand of medicine from a video above the operating table on which you are cast as the helpless patient. But she is doing all the work merely by dictating her message in a party political broadcast with the sound turned off.

Hamilton has produced some of the most potent images of our times. The deathless shot of Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser being driven away after a swingeing sentence for possession, the flashbulb flaring on their handcuffs, went through many permutations – smeared like newsprint, fitted with solid silver cuffs, blurred as black-and-white telly – to become more redolent of the period than the original photo. And his Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland is a tremendous coinage, a hybrid of collage and painting, comedy and fear, with its prissy little mouth and protruding sci-fi eyeball.

What they have in common with the Maze pictures, say, or Unorthodox Rendition, is true staying power: sufficient force as images to keep some of the most catastrophic episodes of modern history alive. That may be latent in the source, but Hamilton, now in his late 80s, continues to find ways of bringing it out and keeping it before our eyes.

National Gallery, London WC2

Don't look! It is a sight too cruel to take: the teenage queen, blindfold, in her petticoat, bravely groping for the block on which to lay her young neck. Behind her, one maidservant swoons while the other turns away. Even the executioner averts his gaze. Our eyes go back and forth between the head and the block in horrified anticipation of the axe: witnesses to a scene so agonising even the participants cannot bear to look.

Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey is the kind of picture art lovers are not supposed to admire. Delaroche directs our attention like a traffic policeman. It is history told with too much pathos and drama; it is sensational yet pedantic in detail. But in the context of this unexpectedly fascinating show, it suddenly looks altogether more radical.

What inspired a French artist in the 1830s to portray the last moments of a 16th-century English queen? The monarchist sympathies of certain post-revolutionary French artists began to find subject and form in English literature and history.

You see it here in the many loans from French galleries: troubadours, medieval kings, Shakespeare, Byron, Walter Scott; the martyrdoms of Mary Stuart, the princes in the Tower, Charles I (Cromwell meditating on the corpse in its theatrically foreshortened coffin). It is France contemplating its own recent history by other means.

For some artists, the lure is visual: medieval drapes and high noon through stained glass, monks praying in deep shadow (Louis Daguerre as painter, always a surprise). For Delaroche, it is about exciting the imagination to active empathy. Partly that's a matter of reality – he never works without a living model, even when painting an early Christian martyr, halo floating above her drowned tresses like a shiny wedding ring. He can be high-definition, soft-focus, austere or all-out sentimental, but no matter what box of tricks he's using, the paintings are affecting to a purpose.

Look upon this scene, and this, of man's inhumanity to man, and ask whether history is driven by politics or barbaric and repeated cruelty.