Over exposed

Most street art is well-executed and sharp. It is obviously intended to be eye-catching, can distract or amuse and, at it's best, intrigue but it's rare that it reveals much about its creator. (Banksy insists on his anonymity.) A couple of recent examples in Shoreditch are changing such preconceived ideas, however.

First up was Amsterdammer Laser 3.14, whose artless spraycan slogans appeared in EC2 late last year. "How can be peace be so violent," he questioned. "These are five easy words," seemed a moment of drunken inspiration, as was, "Please let me finish my sentence for…"

But then the words became more troubling: "Haunted by regret and the consequences of endless longing"; "Give me the key out of this cage." There's more if you want to hunt out further evidence of a breakdown played out on the streets of Shoreditch.

Then, near Valentine's Day, came a series of black and white portraits of a faceless (married?) woman performing a strip tease. The photographs were taken in a flat and posted in a seedy alleyway near Old Street.

The first time I saw them it felt like a minor assault. You are immediately aware of how exposed she is (she pulls her bra down to brandish a nipple, her raised skirt reveals the crotch of her white knickers). This could be a horrible revenge – the public revelation of intimate photos – but the placing of them in this single side street hints not. Still, the first time you see this form of street tart, it takes you aback. Attention seeking it may be but it's certainly attention grabbing.

Other pictures around the same time also featured a woman, again displaying her pants – this time with slogans written on them ("Up yours"). They were posted further afield, and printed differently – in colour or on coloured paper – so it seems to be someone else (both in terms of subject and photographer). They hit on the same mode of very public expression simultaneously.

Cuban scheduling crisis

Little more than a week after the film Che: Part Two (Guevara goes to Bolivia) was released and it's hardly showing in any London cinemas. You're more likely to find the more immediately commercial Part One (the fight for Cuba) showing at more convenient times.

Presumably the distributors decided to follow the model of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill duology and release the two parts of Steven Soderbergh's epic separately. It's a shame they weren't more ambitious as I'm sure there would have been an audience for event cinema of this kind – four hours is hardly that long, after all.

Hugely assured, Che is probably one of the films of the year – way better than anything nominated for 2009 Oscars – and a good deal more inspiring than such recent biopics as The Baader Meinhof Complex and Milk. A shame, too, that a map sequence seems to have been excised from the beginning of Che, though it is still credited at the end. 

Where the art is

It's been a quiet couple of years for London's National Gallery, overtaken in the blockbuster show stakes by the Tates, Britain and Modern. My Tate membership has served me well over the last couple of years, with exciting exhibitions of Cildo Meireles (who can forget the experience of walking on broken glass, or barefoot in a darkened room, shin-high in talcum powder?), Juan Muñoz (reminding you that art can be funny) and even Rothko (OK, the gallery was overly keen to emphasise the canvases' layers but that first, main, room, still served as a sort of minimalist cathedral) – all at T Modern – plus a welcome introduction, for me, to British painter Peter Doig (British meaning Scottish) and Martin Creed's wonderful Work No 850, both at T Britain. Despite Van Dyck at T Britain at the moment, the Tates' forthcoming calendar looks a little dry (Rodchenko & Popova at T Modern anyone? Thought not).

I wonder if my Royal Academy membership may also get a little dusty this year, following recent showings of Lucas Cranach and Vilhelm Hammershøi. It's to be seen if the oddball Hayward Gallery can recreate the success of Psycho Buildings with Walking in My Mind this summer.

Now the National Gallery has reaffirmed its central place, on Trafalgar Square, with Picasso: Challenging the Past, hoping to follow after Rubens, Caravaggio and Rembrandt over the years. Plus, next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, is Gerhard Richter, whose Paintings from Private Collections at the Scottish National Gallery was another of my treats of last year. 

The Courtauld Gallery always delights, and a major venue that has to now be considered on the London art scene is the British Museum, currently celebrating Shah Abbas. But who can be bothered getting out to the Barbican? 

The new Auster-ity

I've always been a huge fan of American author Paul Auster's work and, when you're waiting for his next novel, you can enjoy the latest book by his wife, Siri Hustvedt. She shares many of his fascinations, tics, even subjects.

The main topic they share is grief: The Book of Illusion, the best of Auster's recent output, is a wonderful, empathetic treatise on grief. In Hustvedt's latest, The Sorrows of an American, the narrator, Erik, is separated from his wife (she is noticeable throughout by her absence; only halfway through do we learn why she left: "I'm fucking Alan. It's time you knew"); his sister, Inga, and Inga's daughter, Sonia, are mourning Inga's husband, a writer and filmmaker, Max; and Erik, Inga and their mother all miss their father, Lars, whose presence is evoked throughout by Lars's memoirs (taken from Hustvedt's own father's text).

As with Auster's characters, these are New Yorkers, who meet at dinner parties, in the majority opposed the Gulf War and struggle with their memories of 9/11. As Auster did for filmmaker Hector Mann in The Book of Illusions, Hustvedt enjoys creating a back catalogue for Max (his film Into the Blue is so beautifully imagined, it's tempting to check its existence on IMDb).

Hustvedt, too, gives thought to the naming of her characters: a nebulous figure is named Schadow; an unpleasant journalist is named Fehlburger – "curious name, Fehl is fault or blemish in German," the book's comic detective figure notes. And there is playfulness: the narrator of What I Loved – the book that preceded The Sorrows… for Hustvedt – Leo Hertzberg, is invited to one of those dinner parties. ("My friend," says Inga, "yet another professor, but a retired one, from art history at Columbia, lives on Greene Street, sees poorly, but he's very interesting and extremely kind." In case you wanted an update.)

While Auster's leads tend to be writers – especially in his most recent, introspective, work – or detectives, Erik is a detective of the mind, a psychoanalyst, who works in decoding his patients' tellings of their troubles. (Another recent paperback, Hanif Kureishi's much looser, London set, Something to Tell You, also features a therapist at its heart, though he could just as well be a writer. On a side note, I wonder if UK book jacket designers struggle depicting therapy-centred novels, as both Something… and The Sorrows… have covers more appropriate to chick-lit, though this may be a more general trend in publishing currently.)

Of course, the strangest intersection of Auster and Hustvedt's worlds comes in What I Loved; Mark, the son of one of Leo's friends, threatens to rip his parents' world apart with his drug-taking and malicious behaviour. Mark becomes friends with a cool new painter and together they are involved in a murder that is more like something out of American Psycho. The scene owes much to reality: in 1998, Auster's son by his first wife, Daniel, pleaded guilty to stealing money from a drug dealer; Daniel is also said to have been present at the murder of the dealer, Andre "Angel" Melendez. (Michael Alig – later played by Macauley Culkin in the movie Party Monster – poured drain cleaner down Melendez' throat, chopped up the body and dumped it in the river. Mark's victim is called Rafael Hernandez and his body thrown in the Hudson River.)

Auster tackles the same territory in Oracle Night: a writer called Trause (hmm) has a junkie son who attacks the wife of the book's narrator, Sidney Orr. ("You're lucky you don't have any children," Trause tells Orr. "They're nice when they're small, but after that they break your heart and make you miserable.") The boy is a manipulative liar who wreaks disaster in both books.

Auster and Hustvedt rarely discuss their private lives but what is perhaps most wrenching in The Sorrows… is Inga's plight following the death of her husband: the journalist Fehlburger is determined to avenge herself on Inga for some imagined slight. The chance arises when it seems Inga's husband Max had an affair with an actress, and even a child by her.

While Hustvedt achieves her own revenge – Fehlburger is the only character not afforded some redemption – most disturbing is the image of people climbing over Inga's body (Max's biographer even begins a consensual affair with Inga) to get to her dead husband. It's an eerie foretelling of a potential reality.

Cinema stalled

In the year Slumdog Millionaire swept the Oscars, it's perhaps appropriate that Hollywood should follow Bollywood and target suburban multiplex audiences so assiduously. The Oscars have always been middle-brow, but never can the list of award contenders have been so middle-class.

Away from the Slumdog glare, there was Milk, Frost/Nixon, Changeling, Doubt – even the best animation winner, Wall-E, has an environmental message. A series of movies that stand up as fine demonstrations of film-making craft but hardly blow you away (which is perhaps why Slumdog had its day).

Kate Winslet deservedly won for her performance in The Reader, a film with a lot of German accents. David Hare's script is notable for excising much that doesn't make sense in Bernhard Schlink's humdrum novel but foregrounds every surprise the book has in store. Winslet's other turn, in Revolutionary Road, was perhaps a little underhand for the Academy; Leo and Kate reunite for an abortion-suicide movie, luring suburban audiences only to throw their existences back in their faces.

Best for fun? In Bruges was nominated for its script, though lost out to nutritious Milk; and Penélope Cruz won for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, though Rebecca Hall's was truly the stand-out performance in Woody Allen's little farce. You almost wanted a film inspired by a studio attraction to be up there just for the ride.

Five things I've learned from pop music

1. "In World War II the average of the combat soldier was 26/In Vietnam he was 19" – Paul Hardcastle, 19
2. "Just for the sake of it, make sure you're always frowning/It shows the world that you've got substance and depth" – Pet Shop Boys, Miserablism
3. "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas/A gigantic nuclear furnace/Where hydrogen is built into helium/At a temperature of millions of degrees"– They Might Be Giants, Why Does The Sun Shine?
4. "Two things you should be slow to criticise: a man's choice of woman and his choice of work" – Prefab Sprout, Jordan: The Comeback
5. The Rain Falls Deepest On The Shortest Haircut – The Lilac Time, b-side to Dreaming

A couple of film things

Following the BAFTAs, someone suggested Israeli movie Waltz With Bashir should have won the award for the best film in a foreign language, rather than I've Loved You So Long, the French drama starring a rather wonderful Kristin Scott Thomas. This could be indicative of a continuing anti-animation bias, or snobbishness, but I do think I've Loved You… is the better film. (Waltz is essentially a rather straight, personal documentary with some very beautiful artistry on top.)

I'm still bothered, however, by I've Loved You's tremendously limp, if not downright nonsensical, ending. Throughout the film I was convinced we would discover that Scott Thomas's character, Juliette, was covering for her younger sister, Léa (the equally brilliant Elsa Zilberstein), that Léa had killed Juliette's young child, and had blanked this childhood trauma from her mind. The actual ending is tremendously disappointing; a good film that needs a final kick in the tail to become a great one?

I hope the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is up there next time with a BAFTA nomination for his typically gloomy Three Monkeys. Beautifully filmed, as ever, I hope that he will one day tackle a Simenon adaptation, he has such a knack for capturing humanity, and atmosphere. There's some lovely characterisation in Three Monkeys, and all those train whistles, creaking doors and boat horns would fit directly the world of Simenon, a world of misplaced people, looks and wishes.