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A sudden jump in the Asian art market is rapidly inflating prices for works that used to be bargains. “These sales have been dominated by Asian and, specifically, Chinese buyers, who believe that if a Picasso can sell for $100 million, then the best Chinese artists of the 20th century should be worth much more than they currently are.” But those bidding up Asian art are no longer confined to the Far East – recent sales in New York and an upcoming one in London are proving that Western collectors are as high as anyone on the new popularity of Asian works.

As Modernism and its proponents continue their slow and steady creep back to respectability, some critics wonder if it wasn’t the unfortunate results of the postmodern backlash that allowed Modernism to return so strongly decades later. “We have all but forgotten and forgiven the way Modernist ambitions for social housing and skyscraping – trumpeted by Le Corbusier and his allies – ended in a shockwave of disastrous tower blocks and alienating estates born of necessity in the 1950s and ’60s. The reactive postmodern excesses of the 1980s and ’90s, meanwhile, already look more dated than anything the heroic Modernists produced.”

There may not have been a more overexposed dead artist in the last decade than Goya, whose work formed the backbone of one of the early “blockbuster” touring exhibitions. But Robert Hughes says that not only is all the attention justified, but a closer look at Goya’s later works shows that this was that rarest of artistic geniuses who never lost his passion, his creativity, and his will to innovate.

“It is a simple fact that artists influence artists. But an artist overwhelmed by another’s influence is far less interesting than one who makes use of the first artist’s influences to develop his own individuality. Looking at this issue is ‘Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art,’ an exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London until June 18. It takes a quiet master of 20th-century art, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), and places his oils and etchings – still lifes and landscapes – next to more recent works of notable originality that may be connected in various ways with Morandi.”