Newsnight Review discussed Cindy Sherman at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

PAUL MORLEY:
I love Cindy Sherman. I like the idea that really what she has been doing over the years is creating a series of image changes in the way that actors or pop stars might do. I kind of like the way that she does that and has been incredibly influential on the way that people who actually do do something, change their images, not least Madonna. Some of Cindy Sherman's images I like more than others. This isn't particularly my favourite image change of Cindy Sherman's. But because it's Cindy Sherman I'm prepared to go with it, knowing where it might go next. The idea of doing the clowns seem so clichéd and so obvious, and again in the post 9/11 thing, such an obvious thing to do in terms of the way of dealing with that. But then I'm prepared to accept that as part of some of Cindy Sherman's, you know, uncanny cunning. That I'll go with because she has done such great things over the years.

LAWSON:
You also see how much she leads to. The number of visual artists who have used their own body, their own lives. I mean Tracey Emin, Mark Quinn all of those¿.

MORLEY:
Its incredibly influential to put yourself at the middle of it and make yourself the art work. Yet we don't quite know actually who she really is. So she has created this kind of weird abstract fame that I think is part of her talent.

BONNIE GREER:
I love Cindy Sherman too, I mean she is part of my life in many, many ways. I love the clown. She's an older woman now and she's actually sort of making a statement about that.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
It's like she is laughing at our kind of reactions to her ageing process. It's interesting, comparing that to Nicholas Nixon's Brown Sisters and how he treats the ageing process in that kind of neutral way. It's quite a massive, kind of, chasm of difference in terms of how they both, you know, how you feel looking at both.

LAWSON:
She also taunts you to make connections which may be wrong, there is one from the year 2000 of a woman who looks suspiciously like Hillary Clinton. You think that is exactly when all that was going on. One of the clowns, is it supposed to look like Ronald McDonald's? There are all those things that are going on in there.

MORLEY:
We are children of images. So there are the references points we immediately lead to. Ronald McDonald. It's a damn shame, but that is what we do.

GREER:
Exactly. This is what is so pathetic about it. Because we're going from image to editorial. Instead of going inside.

MORLEY:
That's something that's interesting about photography, that it can transcend the fact that it's used so commercially and is brutalised so much by its constant use in that way that it can I think come across with warmth, the warmth of the way it engages you to place it in a certain kind of context.