Voluntary exile

We are away from home for three weeks, having let the house to a Spanish family. The ten of them arrived from Stansted in a hired bus late on Thursday evening. We immediately had the feeling they were going to make themselves at home, which was reassuring after all the effort to get things ready for them - as well as packing for our trip.

After a night in Worcestershire, we are now in South London for a couple of nights. Today, we went to the Matisse cutouts at Tate Modern and called to glance at Smiljan Radic's 2014 Serpentine Pavilion. My photograph was taken, however, on our first visit, to the throbbing Brixton Art Fair: I enjoyed this as much as either of the more prestigious cultural stop-offs.

I was stopped in my tracks somewhat when chatting to a foreign-sounding exhibitor: seeing me with a camera strapped across my chest, she asked me innocently: "Are you exposing yourself?"

The velodrome

I'm in London for a celebration of the life of Adrian Cave. It took place this afternoon in a large lecture room, part of the recently-opened Oil Tanks at Tate Modern. One of Adrian's last projects, he helped in designing its access with elegance, much recalled as his thing at the packed meeting. Its affectionate spirit was summed up by a grandchild's quite brilliant "performance" of Albert & the lion.

The gloomy Oil Tanks themselves were showing video instalations, the magic of which continues to elude me. No doubt I suffer from late onset ADHD.

Before leaving Bankside, I sampled Tino Sehgal's Unilever Series effort in the Turbine Hall. You hardly expect to see two-dimensional framed pictures in that giant space, but this "show" is the exact reverse of what one gets in a conventional gallery. It's a Whiteread experience.

A room full of Rothkos, for example, sees people looking at the walls in silence: Sehgal has us standing or sitting in the Turbine Hall, looking at one another: "us" includes Sehgal's animators, who are liable to come up to one and engage in random conversation. Thus I had the joy of discussing sea bathing off the English coast with an attractive young lady, who broke away as suddenly as she first approached me, only to go and stand 20 yards off. I waited where I was a little longer, wondering whether I was now entitled to walk up to someone in my turn, and what I should say; but I became distracted by the realisation that the Turbine Hall floor would never quite recover from being dug up by Doris Salcedo for her 2007 Unilever show.

En route from Paddington, I paused by the Serpentine Gallery. This year's Pavilion is another sombre affair: a subterranean chamber, with stepped seating finished in dark grey cork to match large mushroom-shaped stools which comprise the only other furniture. The "space" is covered by a flat disc, its surface covered by an inch or so of water. Eleven of the columns below the disc are supposed to characterise each of the eleven previous Serpentine Pavilions, but you could have fooled me.

Avoiding buses because I feared Olympic traffic congestion, I have been riding a Boris Bike for the first time. The sponsors' name has attracted the odd graffiti artist, as can be seen from my photograph. Renting is easier than in Paris, but the biking isn't such fun, certainly when rounding Parliament Square and crossing Westminster Bridge - a bit hairy, dicing with all those buses. Even on the bike route through Hyde Park, it was tricky, being so hugely busy: in Beijing (according to our friend Edward, who came to see us the other day - he's been living there), people are moving from bikes to cars, in London it seems to be the other way about.

The Boris Bikes are low-geared, so it's warm work on a day such as today has been. I arrived at the Albert Hall from Bankside very hot and sweaty just in time for the Prom, and - standing in the packed Arena - spent most of the first half mopping my brow. It was the great B Minor Mass: the Guardian critic gets it just right - four stars. "When counter-tenor Iestyn Davies sang his solos," he writes, "his extraordinary tonal richness and imaginative phrasing combined into something truly unforgettable."

Hortus Conclusus

This is the description architect Peter Zumthor gives to his construction in the garden of the Serpentine Gallery - a garden within a garden. Unlike in previous years, there is nothing much of beauty visible from the exterior, as you drive through Hyde Park glancing West. Indeed, the structure looks as much as anything like an industrial shed.

Fortune however favours the bold, who walk into one of the openings, turn left or right and then right or left again into the centre of the rectangular space. For there you will find a quite sumptuous display of flowers and grasses - mainly pastel colours, but with many delicate textures and hints of fragrance. I was there in mid-afternoon: it would be interesting to revisit in the late evening of a day that was hotter than yesterday.

So, I award high marks to the plantsman, Piet Oudolf for his tableau vivant; but Zumthor's architecture is surely only a very poor relation to cloisters such as to be found high on Mont St Michel!

Can and contents

Some of what we experienced in London last weekend made me wonder about contemporary culture. Would we really throng to the vast and sumptuous Saatchi Gallery, for instance, to see those enormous American abstract works of art (they seemed utterly baffling and indeed hideous to me), were it not free to enter and a mere stone's throw from Sloane Square station?

Ditto, the Telling Tales show at the V. & A. This again has a sumptuous setting (as the V. & A. is looking splendid these days). The pieces of furniture etc. on display are - we are told - known as Design Art: "they retain their role as functional objects, even if their usability is often subordinated to their symbolic or decorative value," in the words of the handout. So, we see two large blobs of red urethane on the floor with the title "The Lovers' rug," the urethane representing the average quantity of blood in two people. Cosy?

I was pleased to be able to get to the Serpentine Gallery for the first time: what a great space, and how lovely to be able to look out from it over Kensington Gardens! I admired too this Summer's temporary pavilion outside, by Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. But the exhibition? Jeff Koons has been working on a Popeye series over the past seven years: we are therefore treated to an array of huge, lurid cartoons, and brightly-coloured sculpture - something for instance looking like a rubber ring, crushed between a pile of plastic chairs, but which is in fact made of aluminium. Entertaining, and skillful work, but life-enhancing?

Certainly not in the way the BP Portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was. As usual, it was fun to criticise the judges' choice of prizewinners, but here there was plenty to admire and be grateful for. Interestingly, very few were self-portraits this year.

In the evening, we went again to the Tête à Tête Opera Festival at the Riverside. Here, the surroundings are none too luxurious for contemporary opera; but was this opera? I enjoyed it last year, for its novelty and nerve; but this year it was just tiresome. Four pieces over the two nights, and none worth repeating, was my view. Even a rather charming piece by Glyndebourne Youth Opera, "Who am I?"