Elsewehere in the city, multigenre specialists Tarab are bringing their traditional, jazz and classcial vibes to UCC’s Aula Mxima tomorrow afternoon. One of the best double-headers in months is on in Dublin’s Sugar Club on Saturday night, but it’s sold out – lucky, then, for those in the south that Michael Kiwanuka and The Staves will be bringing their live show to Cyprus Avenue on Sunday.

If they’re a bit stuck for cash, perhaps they could go sharesies with Ms Dynamite on car rental. The rapper and singer is reclaiming her place in the hip hop firmament with a gig in Twisted Pepper on Friday, before showing Cyprus Avenue who is boss on Saturday. And if you manage to get a good spot at the bar in Cyprus Avenue, you might as well stay where you are. Hotly tipped Nordie act Fighting with Wire are rocking into town on Monday.

A rare embarassment of musical southern riches.

Art: There’s something odd happening on the streets of Nenagh. Strange shifts of movement in the night, and odd sounds down nighttime streets. Do not be alarmed. This is art in action. Switch 2012 is currently in full swing, with projected film and video works being thrown on to the town’s shopfronts, with work from international artists including Sarah Buckius, Flatform, Paul Grimmer, Fergus Fullarton, Mark Neville, Lucie Kim and Felix von der Weppen, David Theobald and Nathalie Lavoie. There’s a twilight walking tour at 6.45pm on Sunday, which is your last opportunity to see this excellent project in action. Other towns would do well to follow suit.

Nenagh by night. Exotic

Eat: Tomorrow sees the opening of the Science Gallery’s latest exhibition, and today I managed to get a tasty sneak preview. Edible: The Taste of Things to Come, aims to probe “how our actions as eaters shape what is sown, grown, harvested and consumed”. As well as a selection of fascinating exhibits, including an enormous inflatable colon you can climb into and a kind of nebulised Bloody Mary you can suck through a glass straw, punters can sign up for their own little taste challenge. The gallery is holding two “feeding times” per day where you get the chance to sample dishes that relate directly to the show’s theme. Today, we got to munch on insects, seaweed-inspired creations, and a version of perhaps the cruellest dish in the world: Ortolan. This now-illegal French dish involves catching the tiny Ortolan birds, force feeding them, and then drowning them in Armagnac. Traditionally, they are eaten under a napkin to “hide your shame from God”. (Former French president Francois Mitterand had it for his last meal.) Our version was vegan – so no animals were killed – but it was a brilliant approach that gave a full palette of flavours and all the crunchy texture you would associate with chewing your way through a whole, tiny bird. Science with bite, then.

A science experiment, earlier today. The beer was essential. The scientist said so

It was devised by Irish artist Matthew Nevin, the co-curator of Mart Group. The idea is that 200-odd individuals will be chosen from around the world. They will be placed in front of a camera, and handed a question that they have two minutes to answer. It’s an interesting idea that could work out brilliantly or crash and burn like a half-baked viral ad. Watch this space.

ANOTHER ARTISTIC idea that is well worth checking out is the 24 Hour Play Project at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Six playwrights, six directors, and a cast of more than 20 will have 24 hours to write, rehearse and perform six plays. The event, in aid of Dublin Youth Theatre, will be anything but amateur, with the likes of Gary Duggan, Deirdre Kinahan, Pauline McLynn, Paul Meade, Elaine Murphy, Tom Swift, Veronica Coburn, Wayne Jordan, Annie Ryan, Alan Stanford, Willie White, Amy Conroy, Derbhla Crotty, Peter Daly, Maeve Fitzgerald, Philip Judge, Louis Lovett, Aonghus Óg McNally, Rory Nolan, Mark O’Halloran, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Paul Reid, Karl Shiels, Don Wycherley and more involved – and they’ve roped in New York’s 24 Hour Company to get the show on the road. Creative chaos ahoy. It takes place on February 19th.

THE FACEBOOK IPO is set to make many millionaires in the coming months, but artist David Choe might be the most unlikely. He was employed by the company to paint sexually explicit murals at its head office in 2005 (your office doesn’t have some? How uncool.) Choe got paid in shares rather than cash, which at the time might have seemed like a typical fob-the-artist-off move by the fledging company. Now, though, Choe could make up to $200 million for his shares – making his murals (a sample of which are below) some of the most expensive works of art today, albeit in a very convoluted way.

IT MIGHT not be in the millions, but the Sky Arts bursary could make a massive difference to any Irish artist. It is offering five young artists £30,000 each to fund their work for a year. It’s across all artforms, be it dance, theatre, music or modern interpretative mala sculpting, and the winners will also get mentoring. There are 18 days left on the current funding round, so click here for more information on how to get an application in.

HERE IS something very special indeed. The Vincent Van Gogh Letters Project is a remarkable resource. It contains all Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, and to the artists Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, and much more besides. Many are richly illustrated and teem with information and insight. The book edition contains more than 4,300 illustrations, comes in six hardback volumes, and was designed by Wim Crouwel, one of the world’s best book designers. If you don’t have the £450 that Thames and Hudson are asking for it, you can search through the archive online here. An astonishing art history archive, that is freely available? It’s what the internet was built for. Well, that and amusing cat videos.

ONE FOR all the actors out there: if you haven’t read the interview with Brad Pitt from last week’s Guardian, it’s well worth checking out. Short on celebrity, with little scandal, it reads more like an on-the-money analysis of his own performances throughout his career. Refreshing honesty.

THIS ISa typically punchy, riveting bit of short fiction by Allegra Goodman in the New Yorker magazine. Barely a word is wasted.

AND FINALLY: sometimes you watch music videos and think, that must have cost an awful lot of money. Secondly, you think, these people have way too much time on their hands to be devising nonsense like this, but I’m glad they are out there doing it. This video, from – who else? – OK Go, triggers all of these impulses. 1,000 instrument. Two miles of desert. Some not very subtle car product placement. Huzzah.

Listen: Two major pop acts will be ripping it up in Dublin this weekend. Factory Floor will be bringing their post-industrial dance tunes to Tripod this weekend in their first ever Irish show. Huzzah. Then on Monday, Whelans will be hosting the rather rude Azealia Banks, whose 212 track has seen her hailed as the next big thing. Whether this comes to pass remains to be seen, but given the swagger and attitude she has displayed in her videos and on record to date, this could be a very special show indeed. Assuming, of course, you can find a ticket. This one sold out in minutes.

Trad: For music of an entirely different canon, and of an astonishingly high calibre, look no further than Triur, currently touring to promote their new album, which is reviewed in tomorrow’s Ticket. The all-star trio are Peadar Ó Riada, Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and they play Cork School of Music tomorrow, Tulla Court House in Clare on Saturday and then head for Limerick’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance on Tuesday. Sure they could easily slip in a support slot with Azealia Banks on Monday. Now that would be worth seeing.

Cabaret: Nighthawks at the Cobalt is a consistently strong and eclectic offering in the classy surroundings of North Great George’s Street’s favourite cafe. This edition on Saturday night features standup comedy and performance poetry, with Q (aka Colm Quearney), Ben Reel and The Crayon Set sharing a stage. Click here for more information.

Theatre: This week saw the opening of I Heart Alice Heart I, which created a major splash when it landed in the Absolut Fringe festival in 2010. It tells the story of two Alices in their 60s, played with heartbreaking effect by Amy Conroy and Clare Barrett, who toy with the audience’s emotions while demolishing a few theatrical tropes and creating something altogether different – a very rare thing in theatre indeed. It’s at the Peacock Theatre until February 18th, and you can read Peter Crawley’s full review in tomorrow’s Irish Times.

Paul Reid is up for his role in Man of Valour, which is understandable given that this paper’s theatre critic Peter Crawley named it among his highlights of the year, and Sara Keating gave it four stars when she reviewed it, saying it “embodies fun and feeling in equal measure. It is part heroic journey, part moving study of grief. The video projection by Jack Phelan, lighting by Aedín Cosgrove, and sound and music by Denis Clohessey lend an epic, blockbuster feel to Man of Valour, transforming a bare stage into a multitude of atmospheric locations, from a toilet cubicle to the sewers.”

Cillian Murphy has also been nominated for his role in Misterman, which earned standing ovations here and in New York. He brought his undeniable star quality to the production, and to the Galway Arts Festival during the summer. Peter Crawley reckoned this was a “genuinely virtuoso performance”. In his review, he said Murphy, “uses the minute detail of a film actor – his flickering eyes and expressive range are deftly eloquent – together with an impressive physicality that fills the stage”.

Murphy told Arminta Wallace in this interview that the play is “about guilt and loneliness”, and his own relationship to playwright Enda Walsh was crucial to the production’s success.

Judge, Murphy, O’Kane and Reid

One of the surprise star productions this year was the gritty and effective Trade, with Philip Judge in the lead role.

“It is a play of almost photorealistic detail,” wrote Peter Crawley in his four-star review, “which director Tom Creed’s production for THISISPOPBABY has matched with a meditation on intimacy – or at least its facsimile. Its grim look at the business of company and connection has sly implications for a theatre audience. All of us are paying for a service.” Incidentally, a review of Trade won our critics competition this year, and I’m almost sure it was the play that most entrants opted to review for the competition (you can read that winning entry here.) Similarly, Fintan O’Toole reckoned the production was “searingly raw” with the central conceit played out by Judge and Ciarán McCabe with “a flawless conviction”.

Patrick O’Kane completes the shortlist, with his nomination for the part of John Proctor in The Crucible, one of the most praised productions in the awards. “In something that is less a staging than an immersion, we could have been sealed into a fractious 17th century farmstead or summoned, with impressively orchestrated scene changes, to an eruptive Salem courthouse,” wrote Peter Crawley of this terrific production. The show is a feather in the cap of the rejuvenated Lyric Theatre and a standard bearer for Northern Irish theatre.

Apart from the fact that he’s a fascinating artist, Deller has the habit of saying blatantly unartistic things (or to be precise, things you would not expect an artist to say). He has a pop at established Brits such as Tracey Emin (he has previous in this regard), and laughs about how the “crap under his bed” from when he was a kid is now considered a work of art. But perhaps the best part is his take on how artists aren’t special, and anyone has the potential to be an artist, in the same way that anyone could be an accoutant, say, if they took the notion.

“Everyone has the potential to be creative. It’s just having the time and the space. I don’t think artists are special. A lot of people do. That’s the great product of marketing artists – ‘they are different and special’. I don’t believe that. You see as much creativity outside the art world as inside it. I mean, all children are creative.”

Jeremy Deller is living proof of this.

One of the people Deller namechecks in his interview is Chris Burden, who once had himself shot in the arm to make a film about it. I’ve mentioned his most recent project before, but it’s worth bringing up again – Metropolis II is a gigiantic model inspired by the city of Los Angeles that uses 1,200 cars and a lot of magnets to bring a teeming city into a warehouse. Burden has finished the sculpture after four years work and his team spent several months breaking it down so it could be transported to LACMA. It is now installed and open for business.

Closer to home, the Science Gallery is also in the mood for small, perfectly formed items. As parts of its forthcoming show Edible, it wants your ideas for original and innovative recipes – one-bite wonders only please. Click here for details on where to send your perfect mouthfuls – the winner gets their dish served up, 20 VIP invites to the show, and a course at Cooks Academy. Mmmmm. Science.

Meanwhile in London, the Photographers’ Gallery will reopen in May after a £8.9 million overhaul. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been scouring the globe for his series on the oil industry, and will open the gallery with what promises to be a spectacular show. Irish angle alert: the new building was designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey architects. The company is also responsible for the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and Temple Bar’s own Gallery of Photography.

And for something completely different: may we present The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Everyone’s raving about how The Artist is reviving interest in silent film, and Martin Scorsese could well win best film for Hugo, his paean to the first film-makers. This silent film, though, blends the old and new, with stop motion, computer and traditional hand-drawn animation. It’s the first short by animation studio Moonbot and is up for Best Animated Short. Two of the other nominated films, Wild Life and Sunday, are well worth a look and you can see them both here. For the moment though, here is Mr Lessmore in all his bookish glory.

We better finish this one quick: the park keeper is coming to kick us out

Listen: If you want your music on the rockier side of the equation, The Certain Three tour is still winding it’s way around the country. The triple-headline shows feature Katie Kim, The Lost Brothers and Puzzle Muteson, and you can catch them in the Workman’s Club in Dublin on Friday, or the Spirit Store in Dundalk on Saturday for the unprincely sum of €10.

Light relief: We’ve plugged it before, and we’ll plug it again – if you haven’t seen the annual Turner: A Light in the Darkness show at the National Gallery then make a date this weekend, as it ends on Tuesday. The show takes place only in the month of January and reveals the stunning detail and clarity of his watercolours, which have lost none of their vibrancy. True, the instructions that these works only be shown in this month, due to the weak natural light at this time of year, might have been superceded by modern musuem lighting conditions, but it seems a good thing that the National Gallery is respecting the wishes of Henry Vaughan, who bequeathed the pictures to the gallery. And, if you make it there on Sunday at 3pm, Dr Philip McEvansoney a of Trinity College will be giving a lecture on “Images of Europe in the work of Turner”.

Shock and grá: All eyes are on Michael Fassbender at the moment (or certain parts of him) thanks to his unsettling role in Shame, but at the IFI another film on human sexuality is proving just as controversial. Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance caused a furore at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It follows a group of girls working in a 19th-century Parisian brothel, so expect lavish filmography, sumptuous interiors – and shocking scenes of violence. Consider yourselves warned.

Something for the Small Hours: The Dock in Carrick-On-Shannon is a cracking arty enclave, and tomorrow night is no exception, when Donal Dineen will be bringing his audio visual show to town. The DJ, filmmaker and curator will be playing music together with experimental film and photography. Expect something special and surprising from a man who many envy for his taste.

Nominees must be Irish and they should be an “internationally recognised author or illustrator who has made a significant contribution to the field of children’s literature in Ireland”. Sure we’ve heaps of those. Individuals or organisations can make nominations, and the deadline is February 24th 2012.

For details click here. Laureate na nÓg is an Arts Council initiative with the support of the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Children’s Books Ireland and Poetry Ireland.

Tigran Hamasyan cuts a slight figure on stage, looking barely his 24 years, but from the moment he first touches the keyboard, it’s clear he is built for bigger stages than this.

I last saw Hamasyan play at the NattJazz Festival in Norway last year, and although he brought stunning fluency and technical ability to bear, it was a little lacking in lyricism. Perhaps the poetic aspects of his latest album A Fable are having more of an influence, or perhaps it’s playing to a more general audience than that of a jazz festival, but here, he rarely lets technical virtuosity drown out the beauty of his songwriting in a performance of rare intensity and effectiveness.

There is a colour and a depth to Hamasyan’s playing that comes to the fore when he’s playing live. This concert was dedicated to his uncle, who died 10 days ago. His uncle was the person who introduced him to jazz and set him on his stellar career, and it is easy to imagine that Hamasyan is pouring his own grief into the songs here.

His playing can be bombastic, and he’s not above deploying some fat, rolling low-end chords that stumble about the tracks like a drunken character villain, lending humour and guile to a song. But there is subtlety too, in the way he toys with notes, dampens strings and, at one point, creates extraordinarily slim sounds from the top end of the keyboard, a ghostly musical effect that sounds as if it is filtering from a music box.

Tigran Hamasyan. He’ll easily beat your box

Hamasyan, like many musicians, has a tendency to sing the lines he is playing, and it carries through on the mics around his piano, but what he is often singing is the underlying rhythmic groove, the beat he’s playing along to in his head. This, and the propulsion in his low-end playing, make a nonsense of his claim, in an interview with this newspaper , that he knew nothing about rhythm until he started working with the drummer Ari Hoenig.

He left no one in any doubt about his ability in this regard with a show-stopping performance of his track Rain Shadow. Opening with blistering sheets of notes, he reduced the track down to a relatively straight forward four or five chord figure with his left hand, and began beatboxing over it, varying the rhythm, bouncing it off the track, adding and dropping elements, throwing in accents and shifting time signatures in a epic display that had the audience in the palm of his hand.

This was a virtuosic tour de force, the wealth of ideas matched by genuine craft in his songwriting. Hamasyan is one of the best technical players of his generation; now he is becoming one of the most artistic.

Maier’s work was unknown in her own lifetime. She was born in New York City and moved between the US and Europe before settling in NYC in 1951 and then leaving for Chicago in 1956. She spent most of her life working as a nanny and carer, and used her spare time to build up a staggering photographic archive of more than 100,000 negatives, from the 1950s up until the 1990s. She scrupulously hid all of it in storage and her work was only discovered by chance after one of her storage lockers was auctioned off, due to delinquency payments. (In later life, Maier was poor, may have spent some time homeless, and was taken care of by three of the people she had cared for as a nanny.)

One of these storage lockers was bought at a thrift auction, and its contents eventually made it into the hands of John Maloof. He has built up the archive and championed her work, but it was only a few days after she died that he identified her as the photographer behind the collection of pictures.

A handsome new website is now online, which does her pictures some justice, and Maloof’s original blog is still online. There is currently an exhibition of her images at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in LA, and a documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier, is now in production.

It hardly needs saying, but Maier seems to have been an intensely private person. Maloof says she was a socialist, a feminist and would hold forth on her liberal views. She had a gift for social documentary, and as well as taking pictures, she recorded interviews with some of her subjects. Most of her work is street scenes, and she frequently took pictures of homeless people or others who were marginalised in society, making the archive a brilliantly illustrative record of the development of modern America.

There is a clarity to her images that is uncommon, and her work inevitably recalls that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but it also carries echoes of Spanish photographer Luis Ramón Marín. He also had an astonishing backstory and, like Maier, his work went undiscovered for decades. It seems a terribly sad story, and there is still so much mystery surrounding Maier, but at least now her images have made it out of the storage boxes and into the limelight they deserve.

Karate chops: It’s the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese, and there’s 1.3 billion of them so they can’t all be wrong. This is the perfect excuse to take up kung-fu, eat food that perhaps you shouldn’t, and dress like Bruce Lee for 12 months while delivering pearls of his wisdom from his book on philosophy (oh yes, it exists). Or you could just take part in Dublin’s Chinese New Year Festival. There’s a film festival, lots of opera, a lantern-making workshop and plenty more – no word yet on the nunchaku workshop we had been hoping for. It kicks off tomorrow and runs until February 3rd.

Me. Earlier today

Theatre: You can still catch at least three of the performers nominated in this year’s Irish Times Theatre Awards in action (and you can hear the judges justify their choices in this podcast), as Big Maggie is still doing the rounds. This excellent production from Druid has an all-star cast, including Keith Duffy, Charlie Murphy, Sarah Greene, John Olohan and Aisling O’Sullivan (the latter pair were nominated for their roles in this play, while Charlie Murphy got a nod for her role in Pygmalion). The production is at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo until Saturday, and then heads to the Town Hall Theatre from January 24th to 28th.

Jazz: If you manage to keep your powder dry over the weekend and save some energy for early next week, the NCH has a special treat in store. Virtuoso pianist Tigran Hamasyan is playing a solo concert in the John Field Room on Tuesday night. I saw him at this year’s Nattjazz festival in Bergen, Norway. Technically, he is astonishing; when Herbie Hancock is singing your praises you know you’ve got chops. But he’s also got a singular, lyrical sound that is brought to bear on his latest album A Fable. I interviewed him last week – keep an eye out for the piece in next week’s Irish Times – and he should be bringing his A game on Tuesday night, so take the chance to see him in a small setting while you still can. Here is a taster for the weekend. You’re welcome.