Michael Jackson: On the Wall

The religious aspects of the exhibition are divided. Some works stand as testament to Jackson’s enigmatic international appeal. One room contains footage from the 1992 Dangerous world tour, revealing delirious crowds, a mass euphoria even outstripping Beatlemania: while the Fab Four played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium in 1965, Jackson’s concert in Bucharest is estimated to have been attended by nearly 100,000. And the numbers don’t stop there: more than 1,000,000 fans are said to have congregated outside Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, while the televised spectacle itself is said to have been watched by more than 1,000,000,000 people worldwide. “We’re more popular than Jesus,” said Lennon of the Beatles in 1966. One wonders where this places Jackson. Review by Rowland Bagnall

Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire, and Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire

Looking at some of Cole’s earliest American landscape paintings, made after his move to New York from Philadelphia in 1825, the contrast is arresting. The Edenic quality of his scenery is hard to miss. There’s a quiet stillness to paintings like ‘View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains’ (1827), in which the landscapes seem both fresh and undisturbed; not only are they new to Cole – and “new to Art”, as he writes in his journal – but they seem somehow newly created, as if the painting’s mists were rising from a just-finished topography. Review by Rowland Bagnall