"My fatherland is South Africa, my mother tongue is Afrikaans, my surname is French, I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted me to go to Paris. She thought art was French because of Picasso. I thought art was American because of Artforum... I live in Amsterdam and have a Dutch passport. Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist because I’m too half-hearted and I never quite know where I am." (Marlene Dumas)

All human life, as they say, is here: we witness displays of warmth and tenderness in virtuous matrimony; reflection and contemplation in quiet solitude. We respond to the soft seductions of the flesh in its yielding ripeness, and we feel the pathos of the withering of the flesh in age; there’s even the mocking of the aged flesh still lusting for the piece of the old action. There’s civic pride and intellectual curiosity. And then there’s simply being; being in a fully conscious, thinking and feeling sense – don’t we get exactly that when we stand before a Rembrandt self-portrait?

In his director’s interview for Goltzius and the Pelican Company Peter Greenaway describes the public profiles that his films have achieved over the years, dividing them into an effective A and B list. He counts his 1982 The Draughtsman's Contract as his most approachable work, while acknowledging that its follow-up A Zed & Two Noughts was greeted by a really savage critical and popular reaction (though the director himself thinks it’s his best film).

Perhaps the most surprising - and certainly the most moving moment - of the 2014 British Academy Film Awards was the awarding of Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema to Peter Greenaway. Surprising, not because this wasn't colossally deserved (and in keeping with tradition it was of course announced ahead of the event), but because our most idiosyncratic and subversive auteur has fallen out of fashion in recent years: a 2011 Time Out poll listing the "100 Best British Films" as chosen by industry experts, sadly saw not a single one of his works placed.

Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to underline and reinforce everything they do, to enable them to land cleanly, decisively and unanimously, to introduce new ideas with care, precision and beauty, to treat the end of phrases with respect, love and punctiliousnes.

The term “snow day” may have been coined with the most recent spate of cold winters in mind, encapsulating the modern-day, not to mention British, consequences of winter weather, but Hendrick Avercamp’s Seventeenth-century “snow day”, painted in around 1615, is a hearty reminder that nothing changes. And just as today we tend to fall into two camps, those determined to enjoy the weather and those irritated by the disruption, Avercamp’s scene on a frozen Dutch river depicts all types, ages and temperaments.

All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam's gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before. With its world-beating collection and extended galleries, it is already an attractive destination, but a remarkable exhibition of the art of Kazimir Malevich and his contemporaries makes the Stedelijk reason enough to hop to Amsterdam right now.

Schalcken the Painter looks like a documentary shot inside a Dutch Golden Age painting, out of whose black depths the Devil one day materialises. Taking the truly ghastly guise of the invincibly wealthy merchant Vanderhausen (John Justin), he buys Rose (Cheryl Kennedy) for his wife from the great Dutch painter Dou (Maurice Denham). Dou’s pupil Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde), though thinking himself in love with Rose, does nothing to save her, and as the years pass, ambition for his painting career (destined to be minor) and brothel visits replace his callow feelings for the girl.

The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair.

Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17^th century.

Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortality