Last year gave us three giants of Post-Impressionism. The Royal Academy promised to unveil the real Van Gogh by showing us the man of letters; Tate Modern delivered a sumptuous survey of Gauguin; and a significantly smaller but nonetheless intelligent and illuminating display at the Courtauld Gallery homed in on just one series of paintings in Cézanne’s oeuvre - the ambitious, masterly and compositionally complex The Card Players.

Oh dearie, dearie me. Modern Perspectives sounded like it had such promise. Running alongside the big Canaletto show in the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, two finished works and one work in progress by Ben Johnson are on show in Room One. The idea is to look at a contemporary artist who, like Canaletto and his coevals, produces panoramic views of cities. Johnson, despite his quasi-illustrative, photo-realist style, says he produces not "topographical representations of a real place, but perhaps a manifestation of a dream... timeless and transcendent". Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

Simon Starling’s wonderfully eccentric exhibition Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) will inevitably mean more to those who have visited the Camden Arts Centre regularly over the years. Places gradually acquire a patina of memories that accumulate layer on layer and infiltrate one’s perceptions in the present moment. Travelling round London, I encounter my past at every corner – the Slade where I spent many hours drinking coffee before being gripped with ambition to become an artist, University College Hospital where I gave birth, the house where I discovered how hard it is to be an adult, the doorstep on which a former lover confronted a future one, and so on.

Norman Rockwell’s America. What did it look like? At the height of Rockwell’s incredible fame as an illustrator, you might say it looked a lot like a movie still. Think of the films of Frank Capra, for instance: heartwarming scenes of family life shot through with poignancy as well as humour. This vision came with an instinctive appreciation that the most precious things we have in life are also the most transient and fragile. It’s a vision that clearly comes with a sense of empathy for the common man, an empathy that elevates his American everyman into the heroic figure of home and hearth.

Some rare restored film of pre-First World War Europe, shot by intrepid travelling cameramen from 1905 to 1926, is being shown tomorrow in an intriguing event at Europe House, the new home of the EU in London. Travelogues were a very popular early use of film, and cameramen competed to bring back the most spectacular footage or most exotic action from abroad, in order to have their film used on early cinema programmes which, before the age of feature films, were composed of several short films.

As I wandered round this year’s New Contemporaries at the ICA, a few yards away in Trafalgar Square, thousands of students braved the cold for the third time to protest against the Government’s proposed spending cuts on education. How many art students joined the rally is impossible to tell, since most London art schools have been swallowed up by universities and lost their individual identities in the process. Whereas the high-profile sit-ins of 1968 were orchestrated by students from Hornsey College of Art (now part of Middlesex University) and, 20 years later, students from Camberwell College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts, London) were leading vociferous protests against cuts in art school funding, any art students involved in the current unrest are all but invisible.

A retrospective at Tate St Ives can be a poisoned chalice for the major artist. It postpones his or her prospect of a showing at Tate Britain by a couple of decades, and can appear to consign them to the comfort zone of "Cornish Art": the heritage Modernism of Barbara and Ben, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron et al, stuff we love (well, most of us) because it reminds us of being on holiday, but may feel, in our heart of hearts, to be more than a touch minor. On the positive side, Peter Lanyon, who was killed in a gliding accident in 1964, isn’t around to mind, and there’s something to be said for being able to look from one of his lyrical canvases straight out at the surf crashing on Porthmeor Beach and the edge of the windswept, ancient landscape Lanyon regarded as his personal Calvary.

There is probably only one thing that Ann Widdecombe and I have ever agreed upon: we both think it might be a really good idea to stick William Wilberforce on the Fourth Plinth. Why not? It’s nice to have contemporary art in Trafalgar Square, of course, but surely there are few other reforming characters as worthy as the great abolitionist? And Wilberforce was many other things besides – though not all of them would necessarily impress the nation to quite the same degree.

It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by train, say £30 to £40, tickets all told, plus a drink on the town. Something for the Arts Council to take on board when considering who to lash out £364,044 taxpayers’ annual subsidy on, no? Or too base a criterion?

Albrecht Dürer painted himself as Jesus (pictured below). Luckily, he was blessed with the looks, the hair and the initials – echoing the geometry of his golden locks the A straddles the D in his inscribed paintings. And when this German messiah of painting died, his beguiling 1500 self-portrait – one of the most hypnotic ever painted in the history of Western art – was carried through the streets of Nuremburg, his birthplace: celebrated during his life, upon his death Dürer became a cult. A lock of that famous hair is kept at the Vienna Academy.