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In pictures: Static - layered art from London's East End

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:47:35 +0100

The idea that visual art is only what can be spread flat across a canvas is one that has long since been abandoned. With sculpture and large-scale installations, the 2D print has become not so much outdated, but rather had to give up its monopoly over the art world and make way for more innovative uses of space.

Leonardo da Vinci and the body beautiful

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

We've had Leonardo the painter at the National Gallery.

Thomas Heatherwick: The Master of Design

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

To say Thomas Heatherwick has an enquiring mind would be an understatement. In conversation, the designer, 42, flits so fast between subjects that the effect is dizzying; one minute he is talking about the impact of the industrial revolution, the next about the tiny motor that drives the lens of a digital camera. He is every inch the mad inventor of popular imagination, his hair a riot of curls that stand up wherever he pushes them, his body alive with gestures, his floor-length red scarf sweeping along as if trying to keep up with him.

The English Prize, Ashmolean

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A few days into 1779, a pair of French warships rounded on the Westmorland, a merchantman bound for London from Livorno. The captain, out-gunned, surrendered. The Westmorland was towed into Malaga, where its cargo – anchovies, parmesan and 90 crates of art and antiquities being shipped home by gentlemen on the Grand Tour – was split up and sold. The crates were bought by Carlos III, Spain's Franco-Italian king, their contents dispersed among royal collections.

Observations: The fabulous 'theatre without a director'

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:51 +0100

As an actor I have toured the world, but always with the hard shell of a play around me. Five years ago I was invited to travel to the Galapagos with my childhood acquaintance, the artist Dorothy Cross. We share zoologist brothers; they are friends and we were treading in their dream world, our strange symmetry!

Alice Jones' Arts Diary: Silicon pigs? Stags stuffed with bats? It's taxidermy, but not as we know it...

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:42 +0100

Polly Morgan, aka the artworld's most famous taxidermist, has set her sights on larger prey following a safari holiday in the Serengeti.

Tom Sutcliffe: Space, the final frontier for what to say about art when we are lost for words

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:27 +0100

"I'd suggest you walk around and explore the space," said the usher at the door to dreamthinkspeak's excellent remix of Hamlet at the Brighton Festival.

Win a limited edition Tracey Emin monoprint

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:12 +0100

To celebrate her exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Tracey Emin has produced a limited edition monoprint, Golden Mile, based on a work from her Margate monoprint series (1994).

The evolution of Tracey Emin

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:06 +0100

The work on the wall is what we can see. Self-evident. We're here to look. We're here to look because we aren't good at looking. We see what we need to see for information and interest, for safety, for certainty, but our observational powers are limited. Human beings are not microscopes or telescopes. We see what is within our range and miss the rest.

David Lister: Screening live performances is of value but it's no substitute for the real thing

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:04 +0100

It doesn't happen often, but how I love it when it does. Occasionally, just occasionally, a leading mover and shaker in the arts utters a heresy.

Blank canvas: London gallery unveils 'invisible' art exhibition

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

In a move certain to leave art traditionalists apoplectic with rage, one of the country's leading galleries is to charge £8 for entry to a summer exhibition of works which cannot be seen.

My Secret Life: Polly Morgan, 32, artist

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

My parents were... My mum was a grafter and my dad very imaginative. I hope I've inherited both those qualities.

Ryan McGinley: Pictures of youth

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Ryan McGinley is hoarse. He had a bit of a party last night to launch his new shows at Team galleries in New York. The last time the photographer held a private view, in 2010, so many people turned up, there were police, sirens and threats of water cannons. This time, he thought ahead and had the road closed off, but a concert on the roof by his pal, Bradford Cox, lead singer of psychedelic rockers Deerhunter, annoyed the neighbours and along came the sirens again. Block party over.

Great Works: Last Stand of the Kusunoki Heroes at Shijo-Nawate 1851 (left to right: 38cm x 26.2 cm; 38.2cm x 25.7cm; 38 cm x 25.8 cm) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Great art can often seem quite cloistered, set apart in its cultural loftiness, the stuff of museologists and finicky, Harris-Tweeded connoisseurs. These feelings are often underpinned by the grave monumentality of so many of the wonderful buildings in which much of this art is displayed. We all know it so well, don't we? It helps us to walk tall among those who know just a little less, hem hem.

Chilling photographs expose the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacre

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:50:49 +0100

Endless rows of coffins, skeletal remains clothed in rags, and women in mourning, these are just some of the images that confront visitors to the Srebrenica – genocide 11/07/95 exhibition at the War Photo Limited gallery in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

'Art...? Sorry, but I just can't see it' - Hayward Gallery to show exhibition of invisible work

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:48:59 +0100

It is fair to say that a good proportion of the British public fail to see the appeal of modern art.

Frederick Wilfred: London Photographs 1957-62

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:03:24 +0100

A selection of previously unseen images of London taken by unsung photographic talent Frederick Wilfred go on display at the Museum of London next month.

Banksy's 'Parachuting Rat' accidentally ruined by Australian builder

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:09:49 +0100

A work by guerrilla artist Banksy has been accidentally ruined by a Australian builder after he drilled through it to put in a bathroom pipe.

Picture preview: Paul Spencer's celebration of British sub-cultures

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:28:53 +0100

In 1977 as the London punk scene came kicking and screaming from the darkest of London's back street pubs, a young teenager, Paul Spencer, was slipping through the back door to steal snaps of the dirty and the dangerous.

Justin de Villeneuve photographs: Faces of the Sixties

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:37:48 +0100

Photographer Justin de Villeneuve is best known for having launched the career of iconic supermodel Twiggy. An exhibition of his work opening at Proud Galleries tomorrow includes some of the best examples from his portfolio and is an album of faces of the Sixties.

What price street art? (Quite high, actually)

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

One of the obvious problems with street art is that while it might try to highlight social ills, it can end up selling for many thousands of pounds to the elite that it supposedly rails against.

Banksy gets the bunting out in north London

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:24:38 +0100

A new piece of street art bearing all the hallmarks of a Banksy (pictured, above) appeared overnight in north London.

Picture preview: Other Worlds

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:48:37 +0100

A new art exhibition at the gallery at Flannels department store in Leeds explores the landscape of Russia and former Communist satellites in the post-peristroika era.

Tiksi: A Siberian fairy tale in pictures

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:46:46 +0100

A modern-day fairy tale from the small Siberian town of Tiksi, told through the lens of Evgenia Arbugaeva, is one of the highlights of the upcoming London Festival of Photography.

Guy Ribes: The forger making a good impression in the film world

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:01 +0100

He was a master-forger jailed for faking Renoir paintings in a multi-million-pound scam that duped the art world for years. Now, having served his time, Guy Ribes has returned to his old trade – this time with a different aim.

El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

At the start of the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast's magisterial show, El Greco and Modernism, is a small panel, egg tempera on wood, of St Luke Painting an Icon of the Virgin and Child. Its battered state apart, there is something wrong with the picture. St Luke is making a proper, Byzantine icon, painted without perspective; but the image in which he does so is painted perspectivally. The work is a manifesto against the Greek status quo, and was painted by a Greek. Spaniards, reasonably, dubbed him el greco.

Tom Sutcliffe: Perhaps the dreaded interval is good for more than just selling ice cream

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:57 +0100

I'm not easily alarmed at the door of a theatre, even in these days of litigation-wary admonition. A threat of strobe-lighting, or fog-effects or gunshots won't even make me break step.

Alice Jones' Arts Diary: Kerb your enthusiasm... Seinfeld and David could be revving up for a reunion

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:36 +0100

He's announced that he is quitting arena shows, now Jerry Seinfeld is dropping cryptic hints about his brand new project for the screen.

David Lister: Artists must take a stand against ticket booking fees that add insult to injury

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:35 +0100

In my long campaign against booking fees in the arts, I have heard quite a number of horror stories from readers. But an email from Susan James this week probably takes the biscuit.

Observations: New show was five years waiting in the wings

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:07 +0100

The artist Keith Holmes paints actors, directors – even a show's technical crew – during rehearsals and backstage in the West End.

What To Do, See & Buy: The Midcentury Show; Alexander McQueen; Clifford Richards; Blank London; Tamara Taichman

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Hot desk

Great Works: My Room at the Beau-Rivage 1917-18 (73cm x 61cm) by Henri Matisse

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Rooms as painted spaces, forms of stage-setting if you like. Sickert's rooms in Whitechapel, for example: dingy, dark, mildly urinous; depositories for heavy, blowsy, pneumatic flesh sprawled across beds; exuding an air of indefinite menace. Or Vuillard's rooms in France: fussily patterned, closing in on themselves, smaller than they probably were.

In The Studio: Fiona Rae, artist

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Fiona Rae is what some would probably consider an old-fashioned artist, a "mere" painter. Her studio, in London's East End, showcases everything you might expect: rows of brushes, tubes of paint and canvases. I am surprised, however, to enter first a clean and tidy space, and find a large computer on a sleek glass table and the biggest printer I have ever seen. On the facing wall, shelves contain pots of glitter labelled with seductive names; "river green" catches my eye.

Exhibition of the week: Michael Kenny: Spirit And Matter, Quest Gallery, Bath

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

On Michael Kenny's gravestone in Highgate Cemetery is the title of one of his sculptures, More Loved Than Known. The legend has been prophetic.

Observations: Putting the stuffing into a long night at the museum

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Hundreds of museums and art galleries across the country will stay open late or all night next weekend as part of the Museums At Night project.

Anish Kapoor's Olympic Orbit tower unveiled

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:45:48 +0100

The UK's tallest sculpture was officially unveiled today at Stratford's Olympic Park.

Ai Weiwei reaps £480,000 from sack of seeds of fortune

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has sold a ton of the porcelain sunflower seeds he displayed at the Tate Modern for $782,000 (£480,000), a record sum for his work which should help to pay off his tax bill if an appeal against the Chinese taxman does not go his way.

Unemployed Ohio man's luck changes after discovering signed Picasso print

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:26:32 +0100

An unemployed US man was browsing at his local thrift store for items he could restore and resell when he spotted a Picasso poster. He handed over $14.14 for what he saw as a nice commercial print.

Early sketch by Andy Warhol goes on display

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:22:23 +0100

A recently-discovered sketch by Andy Warhol is to go on public display for the first time.

Tate gives a big show to Roy Lichtenstein

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The Tate Modern will next year stage the first major UK exhibition devoted to Roy Lichtenstein in 20 years, its most comprehensive retrospective of the celebrated pop artist. The exhibition, which opens next spring, will bring together 125 of the artist's definitive paintings and sculptures.

Picture preview: Diamond Geezer, iconography of the Queen

Wed, 09 May 2012 14:52:03 +0100

To mark the Jubilee year, a group of artists have created works responding about Queen Elizabeth II's reign, exploring ideas around royal conventions from street parties to memorabilia.

Ron Mueck: Sensational sculptor who's branching out

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The real sensation of the Sensation show of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy in 1997 was Ron Mueck. Most of the artists presented statements or concepts. Mueck showed a fact. The fact was an almost perfect plastic model, two-thirds scale, of a naked man lying dead on the floor and called simply Dead Dad. You could see even from a distance that rigor mortis was setting in. Looking more closely to examine just how realistic it was, you found yourself uncomfortably aware of the morbidity of your eye and the intrusion of your presence. That the body, made of silicon, polyurethane and styrene, was not actually life size only made its nakedness more glaring and your gaze more gruesome.

Serpentine Gallery reveals plans for Pavilion

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:33:36 +0100

This year's Serpentine pavilion is designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

How the war on terror could solve art's most enduring mysteries

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Software developed to recognise terrorist faces is being adapted to solve the mystery of portraits of unidentified people.

The art of staying sane

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Philippa Perry lives in a tall old townhouse in a leafy square near London's King's Cross, with her husband Grayson, their daughter Flo, Grayson's teddy bear, Alan Measles, and a large and terrifying Maine Coon cat called Baddie. Like the rest of the house, the sitting room is filled with art: Grayson's glazed ceramic pots line the shelves, one commemorating the couple's wedding in 1992; propped against the sofa is a series of small canvases, on which Philippa has copied the dot paintings of Yayoi Kusama in felt-tip; and on the wall is a vast portrait of Grayson in a wedding dress. He's a Turner Prize-winning artist and Britain's best-known transvestite. She's a psychotherapist.

Frieze: London's finest art fair goes stateside

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A damp, murky day in New York, and I'm on Randall's Island, fresh off the boat, after a lightly choppy crossing over the East River from 35th Street. Frieze Art Fair, London's frosty-yet-fun, moneyed-yet-curatorially-edgy contemporary art fair, which takes place every October in Regent's Park, is now making its New York debut. And, despite the weather, anticipation is high. On the eve of the fair's opening, at Sotheby's in New York a rare version of Edvard Munch's The Scream (1895) sold for just under $120 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction (even in these straitened times, those headlines just keep on coming) indicating some froth at the art-buying end of the economy. On the same evening, at photographer Ryan McGinley's opening at Team Gallery on Wooster Street in Soho, Deerhunter played a rooftop gig on top of the gallery, something that I couldn't picture happening in London, while across town, at PS1 – MoMA's Long Island City outpost – Martha Wainwright played a concert in a Kraftwerk installation, which was followed by a DJ set by Mark Ronson, at MoMA's "welcome party" for Frieze.

For sale: thousands of pounds worth of Pete Doherty's blood, sweat and tears

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Each piece could fetch tens of thousands of pounds when it is auctioned next week. But despite the high price tag, this is one collection of artwork unlikely to find its way into the austere corridors of Sotheby's.

Frieze: London's finest art fair goes stateside

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Adamp, murky day in New York, and I'm on Randall's Island, fresh off the boat, after a lightly choppy crossing over the East River from 35th Street. Frieze Art Fair, London's frosty-yet-fun, moneyed-yet-curatorially-edgy contemporary art fair, which takes place every October in Regent's Park, is now making its New York debut. And, despite the weather, anticipation is high. On the eve of the fair's opening, at Sotheby's in New York a rare version of Edvard Munch's The Scream (1895) sold for just under $120 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction (even in these straitened times, those headlines just keep on coming) indicating some froth at the art-buying end of the economy. On the same evening, at photographer Ryan McGinley's opening at Team Gallery on Wooster Street in Soho, Deerhunter played a rooftop gig on top of the gallery, something that I couldn't picture happening in London, while across town, at PS1 – MoMA's Long Island City outpost – Martha Wainwright played a concert in a Kraftwerk installation, which was followed by a DJ set by Mark Ronson, at MoMA's "welcome party" for Frieze.

Portfolio: John Carder Bush

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

I started photographing my sister Kate in my early twenties, when she was eight. We used soft, afternoon light, clothes from jumble sales as costumes, props from anything we could find, and we took the photos in the atmospheric, shadowy corners of the old farm in Kent where we lived.

Heads up: Yoko Ono – To the Light

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

What are we talking about? A new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, and online, this summer.

Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican Gallery, London

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Such are the turns of history that we tend to see the Bauhaus as having sprung to life fully formed, a launch pad for Modernism that owed nothing to what had gone before except the burning desire to negate it. Common sense says that this cannot be so, and so does Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican.

Christian Louboutin, Design Museum, London

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

When talking of high heels, it's as well to define terms. There are the sort that Marilyn Monroe wore to wiggle along that railway platform in Some Like It Hot. There are the sort that Strictly dancers wear to sharpen their silhouette. And then there are the ones that cause young women to clutch each other for support in the street on a Saturday night, bracing their knees and arching their backs in the attempt to keep upright.

Observations: Artefects from classic stage sets show the value of theatre design

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:40 +0100

There's an Inca mask from Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun; the bench that Laurence Olivier once sat on in Uncle Vanya; and a delicate Patrick Procktor watercolour of a theatre on green lawns shadowed by a golden oak.

Tom Sutcliffe: A really great title sequence will make me salivate like Pavlov's dog

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:14 +0100

I've honestly tried my hardest with Game of Thrones. My wife loves it, as does my oldest son. It's been recommended by friends who are high of brow and severe of judgement.

Alice Jones' Arts Diary: Expletives deleted as a comedian's songs become a serious business

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:12 +0100

Tim Minchin is getting serious. Next Tuesday, the comedian will play a gig but the set list will include none of the comedy songs he is famed for.

David Lister: All this culture was going on anyway. So why make an Olympiad out of it?

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:05 +0100

The Cultural Olympiad fascinates me. There it is in all its multi-million-pound glory, its London 2012 festival officially launched to tremendous fanfare a matter of days ago. Events announced included Jeremy Deller's "Stonehenge as a bouncy castle" and Martin Creed's Work No 1197 (this entails all the bells in the country being rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes).

In The Studio: Mark Wallinger

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

"Those are aluminum foil balls scanned on the office scanner," says Mark Wallinger, pointing to the in-scale set of the ballet he has designed. In the middle of Wallinger's set rises a large mirror that will "reverse expectations". Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 is composed of three ballets by different artists. Part of the Cultural Olympiad, it will have its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in July.

Great Works: The Shelf: Objects and Shadows – Front View, 1982-83 (71.1cm x 91.5cm) by Rodrigo Moynihan

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

To an artist, there is nothing more precious than his studio. It is his birthing suite and his retirement home. Francis Bacon's was a creative maelstrom. It looked like a scene of warfare, carnage. It was where, by sheer force of will, he fought his pitched battles against rage, despair, frustration.

Turner, Bacon, Freud, Constable? No, Britain is Banksy country

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Cheeky, yes. Rebellious, definitely. But quintessentially British? Banksy's image of kissing policemen, originally daubed on a Brighton pub wall, has been surprisingly named the single work of art that best expresses British identity in a poll of 1,000 artists.

Top 10 art auction record-breakers

Thu, 03 May 2012 18:47:10 +0100

A version of Edvard Munch's classic masterpiece The Scream has fetched a record-breaking $119.9 million (£74 million), making it the most expensive work of art to be sold at auction.

Man who's made an art form out of auction records

Thu, 03 May 2012 18:17:05 +0100

For Tobias Meyer, the moment that bids for The Scream reached $100m was special.

Picture preview: Gideon Mendel – Drowning World

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:09:39 +0100

In an attempt to search for ways to show the world the effects of climate change through a Drowning World, Gideon Mendel's only other camera on his journey was, alongside the lives affected, paralysed by flood waters.

Edvard Munch's 'Scream' sets auction record

Thu, 03 May 2012 07:01:55 +0100

It evokes the worst of human angst but at Sotheby’s in New York last night a version of the ‘Scream’ by Edvard Munch bought something closer to astonished wonder as it sold for $119.9 million, breaking all previous records.

In pictures: The iPad Picasso

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:09:18 +0100

With their chunky, textured brush strokes, Roz Hall's artworks wouldn't be out of place hanging alongside some of the great Impressionists at one of the world's esteemed galleries.

Bauhaus: Culture shock

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

First thing in the morning, I stepped outside my bedroom on to a vertiginous balcony that is embedded in architectural history, before descending four storeys to the canteen. Indulging in a sunny breakfast sitting outside was a treat in itself, but in this case my enjoyment was doubled by having just slept inside the world's first Modernist building: experimental, utopian yet ultimately doomed by the vagaries of German history.

From Jabba the Hutt to shipping disasters – the inspiration for Turner Prize art

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Spartacus Chetwynd (38)

Picture preview: 'Famous' artists exhibit in Secret Art Show

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:44:18 +0100

On Friday the charity Multiple Sclerosis Trust will be selling over 250 pieces of original artwork for £45 each online - but the names of the artists who made them won't be revealed until after the sale.

Turner Prize nominations unveiled

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:07:12 +0100

A man who has spent 15 years drawing an imaginary city whose residents are human excrement who have sex in public, and a woman who changed her name to Spartacus have been nominated for this year's Turner Prize.

Always Greener: Views from the contemporary countryside

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:52:41 +0100

An exploration of the reality that exists behind dreams of ‘a place in the country’ opens this week in West London.

Matisse: An Old Master who loved to learn new tricks

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

It would be almost impossible to produce a bad exhibition of Matisse.

Portfolio: Laura Pannack

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The word naturism may conjure up images of middle-aged, overweight Europeans, but it's a stereotype that English photographer Laura Pannack is keen to dispel. Her Young British Naturists series, of which two images can be seen above, is a product of a year of browsing online naturist blogs and websites and tracking down and photographing some of their users. "I brought these strangers together and organised trips for them at naturist clubs around the UK," explains Pannack, "but I didn't want the nakedness to become the main focus. It's more about the social and leisure side of naturism."

Out of Focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery, London

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Out of focus. On the face of it, not a promising name for an exhibition of photographs.

Observations: The trebuchet: the best way to get in touch with the past

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:54 +0100

The artist Matt Baker and partner TS Beall have devised one of the most attention-grabbing events in this year's Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Today, an afternoon community experiment entitled "Nothing about Us without Us Is for Us" will see various local groups and organisations attempt to communicate from one side of the river to the other using medieval methods.

Observations: Sculptors in full swing as they tee up a crazy course

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:46 +0100

Would you like to whack a sculpture with a golf ball? The first bespoke fine art mini-golf course in the UK has nine holes, each being designed by well-known artists, including Jake Chapman and David Shrigley.

Observations: Words make a lot of scent: poetry in the form of perfume

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:17 +0100

A dozen poets were given anonymous scents from which they had to write a poem. Meanwhile, six perfumers were asked to come up with a new fragrance inspired by a poem.

Arifa Akbar: We're desperate to know everything we can about Banksy - except who exactly he is

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:06 +0100

There's a flurry of new books on Banksy. The loquaciously named Banksy: You Are an Acceptable Level of Threat and if You Were Not You Would Know About It is published in June but in the meantime, you can read the one his friend's just published, or the one a former journalist's bringing out next month.

Face of a nation: Iain McKell challenges our notions of beauty with his evocative pictures of the British

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Iain McKell has documented the tribes of gritty modern Britain – the skinheads, punks, Blitz Kids and rockabillies – with understated ease. Yet when I go to meet him, I find the photographer in the incongruously leafy environs of Kensington. His house, despite the polite suburban setting, is a seething archive of his work of over 30 years, in which time he has contributed to influential magazines such as Italian Vogue, The Face and i-D.

What To Do, See & Buy: Draw Me a House; Chewton Glen; Edward Burtynsky's OIL; Sonia Rykiel; Frédéric Malle; On Plate, Still Hungry

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

New build

Art exhibition of the week: Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Prince Charles might decry it, art and architecture may have moved beyond it, but today's world was made by modernism – and the Bauhaus School in pre-war Germany was its hard core.

Anthony Caro: 'I am playing all day, doing what I love...I want to try it all!'

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The first time I visited Anthony Caro's studio was some 20 years ago. I remark to him that his assistant, Patrick Cunningham, is still the same. Caro laughs and says, "Yes, he has been with me for 40 years!"

Great Works: Thomas King as Touchstone in As You Like It, 1780 (91cm x 55.5cm), By Johan Zoffany

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

This painting, which usually lives as a non-paying guest at the Garrick Club, is currently on display at the Royal Academy's Zoffany show, and you come upon it there rather suddenly, quite close to the entrance, like some clever bit of theatrical staging. Here is Touchstone in Shakespeare's As You Like It, stepping in from the right to declaim to Rosalind some very bad, jog-trot verses in imitation of ones that have been pinned to a nearby tree by her love-sick lover, Orlando. You do not see Rosalind at all – the painting has been cut down.

The 50 Best festivals

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:00:24 +0100

The experts:

Elisa Bray is Music Editor of the Independent. She has been a festival-goer since 16 and has judged the prestigious Mercury Prize. This summer she is especially looking forward to Wilco at Wilderness.

Jenny Stevens is Deputy News Editor of NME magazine (nme.co.uk) and has written for the Independent and The Quietus. The first festival she ever attended was Electric Picnic in Ireland.

Blek le Rat: Streetwriting man

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Blek le Rat is known to many as the godfather of street art and to the French as its grandfather. But having honed his craft for more than 30 years, the spry 61-year-old, whose real name is Xavier Prou, has no intention of retiring. Despite being France's graffiti art pioneer (he says he was the second to make street art in Paris, after Zloty Kamien), he is most famous for being the artist whose style the pseudonymous Banksy "stole". Blek's spray-painted stencils of rats first appeared on the banks of Seine when Banksy, who is thought to be nearly 40, was still at primary school. In his unauthorised biography Banksy said: "Every time I think I've painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only 20 years earlier."

Tate Modern fills tanks with live performance

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:18:19 +0100

The Tate is looking to take performance and live art into the mainstream with the world’s first ever dedicated gallery space launching later this year.

Tate to showcase performance art

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The Tate Modern is launching the world's first dedicated gallery space for performance and live art.

Hans-Peter Feldman: Serpentine Gallery meets anarchic conceptual art

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The British have long avoided German art.

Beatles as you've never seen them before

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Unseen photos of The Beatles are going on sale after lying in a family album for nearly 50 years. The 20 black-and-white snaps have never been published and show the Fab Four on the cusp of becoming a world phenomenon.

Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Various venues

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:55 +0100

The selectors of the every-other-yearly Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (GI) face an enviable problem. There are too many Glaswegian contemporary artists, and too much of what they do is good. Head for head, the city creatively outperforms any town in Britain. Were London to compete, Hoxton would have to be 10 times as big. The danger for GI selectors is of over-favouring local artists, making the project parochial. The word “International” is there between “Glasgow” and “Festival”, after all, although in the past it has sometimes felt overlooked.

Portfolio: Alex Prager

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The tragedies captured on camera here may appear real – a timber home ravaged by fire, a woman lying inert over the strut of a power pylon – but in fact these dramatic sights have been constructed by the American photographer Alex Prager as part of her series "Compulsion", with which she aims to explore our responses to tragedy.

Julian Spalding challenges Tate director to public debate over Hirst exhibition

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:40:26 +0100

Julian Spalding, who has headed some of Britain's foremost public galleries, has laid down a gauntlet in a letter to the Tate director, challenging him to a public debate to justify why the art gallery has spent taxpayers’ money on a Hirst exhibition when the “works aren’t art”.

Skip to the Louvre... in Pas de Calais. Museum opens site in the north

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

There will be no need to travel all the way to Paris to see the Louvre from the end of this year. Over 200 of the museum's most important works will be moving to a new branch in Lens in the Pas de Calais, just across the Channel.

David Lister: Well done the Proms for showing you don't have to genuflect to the Olympics

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

This was the big week. The countdown to the event of the summer, with every newspaper along with TV and radio doing some version of the story. Yes, the Proms is just around the corner. But somehow the Proms neglected to present itself quite like that, and it was left to that other summer jamboree to garner the majority of the column inches. There is, though, something that links the Olympics and the Proms. At last an arts event has launched with the confidence and enthusiasm to show that the timidity and defeatism elsewhere in the arts is absurd.

What To Do, See & Buy: The Ralph Steadman Book of Cats; Mugaritz; Gavin Turk; Kirath Ghundoo's geometric wallpapers

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Meow meow

The curious case of the vanishing treasures