A sound piece, lasting 75 seconds, has won a prestigious prize for drawing.

Adjectives, lines and marks, the winner of this year's £8,000 Jerwood Drawing Prize, will be exhibited alongside two other prize winners from this week.

Its creator, Alison Carlier, describes the piece as "an open-ended audio drawing" that offers "a spoken description of an unknown object".

Established in 1994, the Jerwood Drawing Prize is the UK's largest annual open exhibition for drawing.

It is the first time an artwork consisting solely of sound has won the top prize in its 20-year history.

The extract Carlier reads aloud describes a "hard, red, brown" Roman pot found in the London borough of Southwark.

Its source is a reference book on Roman excavations in south London held by the Museum of London.

 “The shortlist is made up of those artists who knew how to embrace, or indeed reject, the manifold approaches to drawing that exist today. Naturally such a process of selection is always a subjective exercise grown out of the different visual and intellectual sensibilities of the jury. This vital tension between the judges ensured that the final selection went beyond any singular voice or tendency delivering a superb and surprising group of “drawings” for exhibition and commendation.”

I am speechless.

[...] from my experience teaching it is this type of crap-speak that is being taught in the universities. The new generation unleashed on the public will all be "communicating" in this way.

They took the roof off. They opened up some windows in the ceiling. They commissioned an acreage of gorgeous red damask. They managed somehow to make the space appear twice as big. All this works. I’m less sure about the hang. The finest Wallace pictures are here — the Rembrandts, the Van Dycks, the Velazquezes and, of course, Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier — but instead of grouping them according to national schools or matching genres, the Wallace has scattered them about the new gallery by following a pattern of tenuous connections.

Thus, Lawrence’s posh portrait of George IV, from 1822, is hanging next to Van Dyck’s moody self-portrait as the shepherd Paris, from c1628, solely because Sir Richard Wallace intended once to give the picture to George IV, then changed his mind when the king predeceased him. Is that really a good enough reason to disrupt chronology this much?

I thought the pictures also looked overcrowded in a busy two-tier hang. Fewer connections, better spacing would be my doctor’s orders.

Experience

• A recognised and established leader in the art world with an international reputation for excellence and an outstanding record of achievement.

• Expert knowledge of The National Gallery’s collection probably with experience gained in museums or academia.

• Management experience gained in a major institution, with a track record of motivating staff, managing performance and delivering change.

• A proven ambassador with experience of successfully persuading and influencing a range of audiences, including funders.

Attributes

• A passionate advocate for the role of old master painting in the modern world with the ability to communicate this passion widely.

• The ability to lead with wisdom, imagination and energy.

• A strategic thinker with a clear vision for the future of the National Gallery and the ability to provide direction whilst encouraging entrepreneurship, spontaneity and creativity in others.

• An exceptional communicator with the ability to inspire staff, engage supporters and excite partners; the ability to build relationships of trust and strength through diplomacy and persuasion.

• The ability to manage financial, operational and commercial activities including meeting ambitious targets for both income generation and efficiencies.

• The ability to demonstrate confidence, resilience and effectiveness in a high profile role; an impressive leader who can handle demanding organisational and political contexts well.

• A practical, inclusive and open management style with the ability to generate confidence, build teams, take difficult decisions and deliver change.

There are those who assert that selling a couple of works to save the institution is a reasonable thing to do, as has come up in the Detroit bankruptcy case. But a sudden influx of cash to address a financial bind doesn't solve anything.

Recently, there has been a lot in the press about the Delaware Art Museum's determination to sell as many as three of its most notable artworks to pay off debts incurred through an ambitious expansion about a decade ago. The first, William Holman Hunt's Pot of Basil, has already been sold.

While hardly a household name, Hunt was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young painters who, in 1848, challenged the British art establishment with a vision entirely at odds with accepted practices. Because their brightly colored, meticulously detailed style was also at odds with most forms of modernism, their fall from prominence was precipitous and long- lasting. Now they are back in fashion with a vengeance and the Delaware trustees hoped to get $8 million out of the painting -- almost half the debt. It sold for $4 million, probably creating the need to sell more than the two already assigned for sale: a Winslow Homer painting and an Alexander Calder sculpture.

The museum and the community are being stripped of their masterpieces -- its very reason for being. The debt may be satisfied but patrons may be scared away and a new shadow cast over the museum.

A few years ago, rather than address the structural problems causing annual operational deficits, the National Academy of Design (NAD) -- the oldest art museum in the country founded by some of the nation's most important artists -- sold two paintings, one given by an original member!

There were alternatives that would have entailed sacrifice. But selling art did not solve the [Manhattan museum's] problem, and a few weeks ago, the NAD let go a significant portion of its staff.

In the Great Depression, the DIA remained open and staffed, largely thanks to the secret support of Edsel Ford. The City of Detroit arts commissioners could have sold the van Gogh self-portrait, Matisse's The Window, Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery, or even Breugel's Wedding Dance, but the thought never seems to have crossed anyone's mind.

And if they had, not only would we not have them today, we would not have been given much of the art that came from private donors or the financial contributions that enabled so many purchases. Why give to a museum that, in times of crisis, converts your treasured donation into cash to make up for failed fundraising, bad management or poor fiduciary judgment?

One day in 2010 I was walking down Maiden Lane, where JMW Turner was born, and I went into this pub [the Porterhouse] for a quick pint, and I saw Turner’s name on a plaque. So I phoned Mike Leigh because about seven years before he’d mentioned that he was thinking about doing something about Turner, and thought I might be right for it. So I left a message saying I was sitting right under where he was born. I  was about to go home when I got a call asking me to come to his office, where he said: ‘Untitled 2013 is going to be the film about Turner I mentioned. I want you to play him, and I want you to start painting.’ 

You always spend a lot of time working on a character, but preparing for Mr Turner is the most I’ve ever done. They found me a wonderful teacher, Tim Wright, who was absolutely brilliant. His portrait of me is in the BP Portrait Award exhibition [at the National Portrait Gallery until 21 September]. I had two years of lessons. We did life drawing, still life, speed drawing, working in ink, watercolour and then oils. I did about 300 images in all, including maybe 10 quite large watercolours and oils, culminating in a full-size copy of Snow Storm – Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Edge, which is just so wonderful. Even having studied it so closely, it’s still one of my favourite paintings. Look at it, and you can tell that he was on that deck, you can see he went to the top of that mast. You know he was there.

[...] allows visitors to rediscover the well-known Tudor monarchs through the most complete presentation of their portraiture staged to date.

Works from the Gallery’s Collection are presented alongside exceptional loans and a prized possession of each monarch, as well as recent research undertaken as part of the Making Art in Tudor Britain project, to help visitors understand how and why such images were made. The search for a ‘real’ portrait of Lady Jane Grey in the sixteenth century is also explored through the display of a commemorative portrait of Jane that dates from the Elizabethan period.

Following its London run The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Rediscovered will form the core of a larger exhibition organised in partnership with Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, in 2015.

Regarding Constable and  Turner the former was the greater painter and the latter the greater artist.

A similar statement was made I believe regarding Picasso and Matisse.

From 30 October, Leonardo’s drawings, including the famous sage-like self-portrait [above] and the drawing for the head of the angel in the Louvre’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, will go on permanent display in the Sala Leonardo, while drawings by other masters in the collection — including Raphael’s ‘Study of a Youth Playing the Lute’ — will be shown in the second vault. In December, with the reopening of the Galleria Sabauda, the Savoy paintings will go back on view. As well as works by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, the Pollaiuolos, Filippino Lippi, Veronese and Orazio Gentileschi, the collection includes Netherlandish paintings by Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, Memling, Rembrandt, Brueghel and Rubens — among them a charming portrait by Van Dyck of the three children of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, sent by the English Queen to her sister Christine of Savoy.

As we are covering a period in depth, we are not doing so strictly chronologically, but thematically. That said, the first room is by way of an overview and retrospect, so visitors will see Turner’s death mask before they come to most of his work; and his last exhibits in 1850 will be on the last wall in the final room, which seems fitting. The only significant installation challenge is integrating watercolours and oils, which have to be zoned to allow for different light levels.

[...] is a selection of the most talented and inspirational young people who are driving forward the art world today. This year, the list covers individuals whose main place of work is considered to be Europe; future editions will be dedicated to North America and the rest of the world. 40 Under 40 is published in association with AXA ART Insurance.

•     Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice
•     Emilie Gordenker, director of the Mauritshuis, The Hague
•     Isaac Julien, installation artist and filmmaker
•     Thaddaeus Ropac, owner of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris
•     Martin Roth, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Bendor Grosvenor is best  known for his work as an art historian, most recently for his discovery of a lost Allan Ramsay portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Such high-profile finds have helped establish him as a regular presence on UK television, while confirming his credentials as an expert in the field of British art. This year, he was part of the steering panel behind Art Detective, a new online forum that encourages connoisseurs to provide specialist knowledge to public collections in the UK. After nearly a decade working in Philip Mould & Company, he has now left to concentrate on writing and consulting.