It’s that time of year again. The National Portrait Gallery exhibits the finalists in the annual Taylor Wessing Portrait prize. The judges have seen 4,303 photographs from 1,842 photographers and now show us 57.

Compiled by an anonymous panel, the 15th edition of ArtReview magazine’s annual list of the most powerful and influential people in the art world was published on Thursday. And who doesn’t like lists, to poke fun at, to argue with – or perhaps even agree with?

While the Turner Prize shortlist can reasonably be expected to provide some sense of British art now, the extent to which British art can or should attempt to reflect a view of British life is surely a moot point. Art that is socially or politically engaged can all too easily tend towards the artless, its functionality placing it uncomfortably close to pamphleteering, with the certainties of propaganda drowning out the possibilities of art.

Helaine Blumenfeld was living in Paris in the 1960s when she received an invitation from the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine to attend one of his salons. Zadkine had emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the century, evolving a style influenced first by Cubism and then African art. His most celebrated sculpture The Destroyed City (Rotterdam) had drawn comparisons with Picasso’s Guernica, while his social circle had included Henry Miller, Picasso, Brancusi and Modigliani.

If you’ve had half an eye on BBC Four’s conceptual art week, you’ll have noticed that the old stuff is where it’s at, with Duchamp’s urinal making not one but two appearances, equalled only by Martin Creed, that other well-known, conceptual stalwart (who actually isn’t as old as he looks). The BBC would say that this is because 2016 marks the centenary of Dada, the anarchic, absurdist art movement (if a movement is what it was) that saw artists begin routinely to challenge and ridicule accepted ideas about art – what it is, why it is and what it’s for.

The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from real materials sourced from the streets, builders’ yards and shops, that startled: the idea made manifest without old-fashioned notions of the hand-made, craft or manual skill.

Guiseppe Penone’s lyrical and tactile works, made from the simple elemental materials that typify the 1960s Italian Arte Povera movement (of which he is a key exponent), belong largely to the outside world of woods and gardens. But they also find an ideal setting in the serene light-filled spaces of Marian Goodman Gallery, where Penone’s perennial fascination with the relationship between man, nature and art is fruitfully explored in an exhibition entitled Fui, Sarò, Non Sono (I was, I will be, I am not).

Neon was once the triumphant glowing symbol of commerce and capitalism. In the 1930s the distinctive tube lighting gleamed above broadway theatres and on prominent billboards in the world’s great metropolises from New York to Paris. These glory days were not to last. Within just few years neon signs were removed from their downtown pride of place, demoted instead to apologetically jutting out from roadside motels and peripheral dive bars.

“Outside the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always midnight in one’s heart.” Oscar Wilde’s description of his incarceration in cell C.3.3 at Reading Gaol hits home when you stand inside the mean little room (now number C.2.2) imagining what it was like to spend 23 hours a day locked in this claustrophobic box. 

Just a few hours earlier, as helicopters clattered overhead and thousands joined the good-humoured but impassioned March for Europe, an evening of contemporary art felt like the last thing anyone needed. On this day of all days, launching an art festival inspired by the success of Nuit Blanche in Paris felt like an unnecessary application of salt to the wound.