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John Millais is the most paradoxical of Britain’s major Victorian artists. Already recognized in his teens as prodigiously gifted, he chose to risk everything by becoming a founder-member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a revolutionary group of neo-primitive painters who, despite the support offered to them by John Ruskin, the most influential critic of the day, risked being treated as outcasts by the ruling artistic establishment.

How do we expect public art to function in a contemporary society? By public art, we mean art that to some extent at least ambushes us. We encounter it as we go about our everyday lives, not in some special art-dedicated space. In other words, certainly not in a museum. However, Aida Mahmudova notes, in her introduction to this public art project for Baku organized by Yarat! Contemporary Art Space, conditions for public art are now very different from the way in which art of this kind operated previously.

The creation of a masterpiece needs more than simply determination on the part of a single individual - though this, of course, is a myth that has continuously gained in strength since the time of Michelangelo. As Michelangelo himself well knew, masterpieces grow from a will to see them made on the part of patrons, who often play nearly as important a part in the process as the man who holds the brush or wields the chisel. The Sistine ceiling would never have come into existence had it not been for Pope Julius II.

Britain’s Culture Minister, David Lammy, recently suggested that the history of slavery should be made a compulsory part of the nation’s school curriculum. Mick Hume, a columnist in The Times, promptly retorted, “Slavery and the Holocaust are now likely to be taught as little chunks of history, removed from any proper context. They become simplistic parables of good and evil, over which children are encouraged to emote and empathise...." How well founded was this criticism?

Edward Lucie-Smith reviews Frieze Art Fair London 2013, in a critical take on the contemporary scene. It's pretty easy to get the point of the Frieze Masters art fair, now in its second edition, after a very successful start last year. Its purpose is to present the best of the best - or, at the very least, a good slice of the top quality art that is currently on the market. One of the great pleasures of Frieze Masters, this year more than ever, is the accidental confrontations the event manages to set up.

Exhibition organizers at the Royal Academy are expressing bewilderment and mild outrage, at least in public, because the people who run advertising for the London Underground have decided to ban a poster featuring a nude Venus by the German 16th-century artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. In private, they must be hugging themselves. At the time of writing, three major newspapers have picked up the story.

"Citizens and Kings", the new blockbuster show at the Royal Academy in London, contains an almost overwhelming number of celebrated paintings and sculptures, even if one or two of them, such as Jacques-Louis David’s Marat Assassiné, turn out to be studio versions rather than the real thing. The show aims to trace the shift in attitudes towards the human personality that was set in motion by the American and French Revolutions and the wars associated with these great political and social upheavals.

The immense and very sudden success of contemporary Chinese art in Western markets is a phenomenon that Western critics are still struggling to assess. Many link it, not unreasonably, to the economic resurgence of China during the past decade and a half. This resurgence should not have been unexpected. Up to and perhaps including the period of the Ming emperors, China represented as much as 25% of the whole world economy.

The term avant-garde continues to be used, in my opinion with far too much frequency, in discussions of contemporary art. It derives, of course, from military terminology, and implies that the art to which it is applied is somehow ahead of the game. It’s worth taking a look at how this assumption works in practice. Essentially, Western and now world art has witnessed the emergence of a series of avant-gardes since just before the third quarter of the 19th century.

'Black British Style', the current costume show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, raises a lot of complex issues for someone like myself. I am not black, but I am undoubtedly West Indian. My family have lived in different parts of the West Indies for more than 300 years and in Jamaica for more than a century.

Thank God I wasn’t in Venice for the opening of this year’s Biennale, even though I had a number of artist friends who were exhibiting there. The crowds to get into the main shows are fierce, with queues at all the main national pavilions. So is the social competition. “Have you been invited to this?” “Have you got a ticket for that?” Elbows out. Armour-plated ego at the ready.

London is now a major centre for the international art world. The only other European city that houses as many studios is not Paris but Berlin. And Berlin does not have nearly as many galleries, public or commercial, which feature the latest developments in contemporary art.

We live at a time when there is great confusion, certainly here in the West, about contemporary art in Russia. It is now nearly a quarter of a century since the Soviet Union fell. No convincing narrative has emerged concerning the development of Russian art during that period.

Flying into Sarajevo is no big deal nowadays. Customs and immigration are quick. You don't need a visa if you hold an EEC passport. Perhaps the only noticeable difference between this and other flights within Europe is a slightly increased degree of airport security. Hand luggage goes through a scanner at two different points, before you board the aircraft. Nor is arrival at the hotel any different from arriving at big chain hotels in other European cities. The Holiday Inn is transatlantic in style, with a big fountain outside and a soaring atrium within. Things are busy - the receptionist leafs through lots of different pieces of paper before finally, and rather reluctantly, locating our reservations. "Do you mind having a room that overlooks the big boulevard? It might be a bit noisy." But when I get there, it's double-glazed, so there is no problem.

As a number of recent exhibitions have shown, there is a growing fashion for what is called appropriation in art. To you and me, what this means is slavish copying - no ifs and buts, apologies replaced by the paradoxical assertion that this is a thoroughly original, impeccably avant-garde thing to do. Examples were a recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, entitled "Post Pop: East Meets West"; and "Sturtevant: Double Trouble", on view till late February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Charming Baker is a phenomenon. Right now, a much bigger phenomenon in the British art scene than the much touted, but now rather tired and fading YBAs. The YBAs, after suitably Bohemian, in-your-face beginnings, are now the official face of British art. You will find most of them (though not quite all) represented in the closing galleries of the new hang at Tate Britain, which aims to tell the complete story of British art, from the Tudors until now.

The new exhibition at the National Gallery in London is entitled "Delacroix - And the Rise of Modern Art". In other words, Delacroix, one of the most important artists of the first half of the 19th century, is presented as being important, not so much for what he actually did as an individual creator, but because he in so many ways foreshadowed the kind of art that was made immediately after his demise - in particular by artists linked to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and even Fauvism.

Byzantine art has a slightly odd reputation. It is regarded, on the one hand, as something remote, hieratic, and difficult. On the other hand, the word Byzantium has a very romantic ring - it lives in our minds as the name of a citadel of civilization, a place that preserved for posterity both intellectual and material treasures that would otherwise have vanished forever. The remarkable exhibition now at the Royal Academy in London touches on both of these aspects.

Maybe it’s time for attention to turn back to the Russians. In the 1980s, as some of us still remember, so-called perestroika art was pretty big in the West, with enthusiasm from leading Western curators and critics, and some support from the big international auction rooms. In fact, the pattern was pretty much the same as what happened with contemporary Chinese art just a little later on.

Of all the British poets of my generation, Ted Hughes, now nearly 20 years dead, left behind him both the grandest and most sulfurous reputation. The controversies he aroused rumble on, and the hurts, in certain quarters, are still keenly felt. Any life story that comprises not just two but actually three suicides, plus a murder, does wrap a cloak of darkness about itself.