A pilgrimage to the Ghent Altarpiece ends behind a ticket booth, with a battalion of audioguides and a voice describing, at length, the colour of a cloak. From there: the machinery of contemporary looking, and the art that survives it.

From Andy Warhol's cow wallpaper to Lady Gaga's burning bed: on the dispersal of art into popular culture, and what it takes to find it there.

An Aboriginal dot and a Damien Hirst spot can look like cousins, but one is a mark you are given and the other a mark you buy. On Papunya, the Archibald, and what the market does to the difference.

Cosplay looks like escapism. It is something stranger and older: a conscious delusion in which the self is annulled so the character can live, running from the masquerade ball and the commedia stage to the convention floor.

Call it the natrificial: the body that swears it is the most natural thing in the world and is, in every particular, made. From Orlan's filmed surgeries to the spornosexual's blank face, one feedback loop, and the doll whose strings still show.

The art academy now calls art a form of research and asks the artist to explain it, justify it, write it up. A look at the vocabulary that follows, and what it costs the work it describes.

In 1820 a French shipwreck drew fifty thousand paying Londoners to a Piccadilly spectacle hall. The figure behind it, the artist freed from the patron and answerable to a public, is where the avant-garde begins.

A lost city of erotic temples, a king's gold salt cellar, a painter's last unhealing canvas: what the West did with pleasure once it stopped serving God.

A watchmaker now calls itself avant-garde. The term once meant risk, penury, and a severed cord of patronage. A history of how the institution, the market, and the museum absorbed their own opposition, and where invention still happens.