Christmas might not seem the most appropriate time to ask you, dear reader, if you’ve ever suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet for many this festival of conviviality amid the darkest hours of the year exacerbates a sense of loneliness and desperation. The break in routine, so welcome for most of us, can become a swift passage to the mental abyss. Snow, that magical, muffling coating of the damp, dark everyday world can appear – particularly in the northern countries – relentless and oppressive, yet another manifestation of a visual world that is veering out of control.

Rubens's gigantic masterpiece loudly contradicts the folkloric silent night. This typically muscular painting is deafening in its depiction of the commotion around the holy family when the Magi arrive to offer gifts to the divine king of Christian belief.

October Gallery first mounted a show of William Burroughs’ paintings in 1988, soon after the writer had published The Western Lands, the last novel in his final trilogy. More books would come – on lemurs, pirates, Madagascar, cats, dreams – but no further fiction. And with the death in 1986 of Brion Gysin, his friend and collaborator in Cut-Ups, films, arcana and performance art, Burroughs became a painter, exchanging brushes for firearms, and hung his first exhibition of shot gun art in New York and then London.

What would Sigmund Freud say to newcomers infiltrating his priceless collection of Greek, Chinese and Egyptian antiquities? His study on the ground floor of 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud and his family lived after fleeing the Nazis in 1938 (he loved the house, saying it was “incomparably better” than his flat in Vienna, but only lived in it for a year before he died in 1939) has always been filled with his Egyptian gods and goddesses, bodhisattvas and buddhas, Eros figures, mummy masks and Greek vases.

Unusually for a Turner Prize, or for contemporary art generally for that matter, it was the year that film outshone other media. Paul Noble may have initially been the popular, and the bookies' favourite, but as technically impressive as his panoramic drawings are they are also quite lifeless, made inert by the process of their meticulous execution.

William Turnbull was a Dundee shipyard engineer’s son who became a highly respected fixture on the London art scene for over six decades, principally as a sculptor, but also as painter and printmaker. While he never quite became a household name, Turnbull had a reputation as an artist’s artist who worked in highly diverse idioms – from a classically slanted primitivism to the fringes of pop and minimalism – bringing to bear an approach that was distinctively cool, some might argue a touch dry.

Perhaps the longest-lasting, the oddest – and almost certainly the most gratuitous – battle still busy raging with its roots in the ideological conflicts of the past century is the one regarding the artistic output of Italy’s engagement with Fascism.

Since becoming Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts almost exactly five years ago, I have become increasingly interested in why it was established. In particular, I almost inevitably got interested in the so-called Laws which govern its operation as a binding constitution.  

Last night, someone who’s never professionally held a camera won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery. John Stezaker is a collagist. Since the Seventies he’s been slicing found photographic images, often of Hollywood stars, to make new composite images. His work, pleasingly old-fashioned both technically and aesthetically, harks back to the Dada/Surrealist collages and photomontages of figures such as Hannah Höch and Joseph Cornell.

The most striking thing about the first photographic exhibition to specifically address post-revolution Libya is that there is no blood. Libya: A Nation Reborn is situated in the marbled ballroom of Tripoli’s five-star Corinthia Hotel – a long way from the dust, sweat and blood of the streets – and poignantly lays out the reality of the revolution. And its costs.