Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want, Hayward Gallery

TAD AT 5: TRACEY EMIN, HAYWARD GALLERY A major retrospective asks the key question: is she actually any good?

A major retrospective asks the key question: is she actually any good?

That Tracey Emin is one of the defining personalities of our time isn’t in doubt. Even if you never want to hear another second of her guileless wittering, another word about her abortions, traumatic early rape and relentless onanistic neediness, you can't deny that her self-effected transformation from chippy Margate outsider to big-league art-world player represents something extraordinary.

Douglas Gordon: K.364

'The journey seems agonisingly slow, interspersed as it is by desultory, Impressionistic fragments'

Nice music - but Gordon's sleight-of-hand trickery adds nothing

After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and while Parreno’s skills as a film-maker were pretty evident from that first UK solo exhibition, Gordon’s talents must surely lie elsewhere - that is, outside the frame. Neither technically ambitious nor visually seductive, his films are not even meant to be seen in their entirety, certainly not his 1993 24-hour Psycho, which is simply a frame-by-frame re-presentation of the Hitchcock classic.

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, Hayward Gallery

First British retrospective for a modern master

West Coast pop art always was a poor relation to the world-beating New York original. Beside the Big Apple titans – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg – LA painters such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and John Altoon remained essentially local figures. Or that’s certainly the way it has looked from this side of the pond.