The guests arrived intoxicated by success and danced through the night

Blackdown Hills, Somerset

Witnesses have described their horror at seeing a man plunge to his death at the Tate Modern.

They have been described by his most irascible critics as "junk food", created by anonymous helpers and easy to reproduce. Yesterday, a bunch of primary school children had their own go at making Damien Hirst artworks.

Liam O'Brien joins the artist at a workshop for the Kids Company charity in London

Britain’s richest living artist helped a bunch of children muck around with paint in London’s Covent Garden today.

Fiona Rae describes her love of painting thus: "You get to invent a world and you get to be in charge of what happens in that world. And you don't really get to do that in life, do you?" She smiles at the camera and continues to work on the lilac space around a pink Hallmark-esque heart, superimposed on the canvas. A lime-green thread appears, faintly, under her brush.

'My strategy was simple. I never said no to anything'

The sharks are circling Damien while Tracey displays a quiet maturity in her latest work

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

'My husband encouraged me to be more myself – to be what I'm really like...'

A thousand artists were asked to name the work best expressing national identity. Their choice was surprising

A critical view

Damon Albarn, Mike Leigh and Victoria Wood. Not the first names that spring to mind when you think of sport but they're all in the Olympics. At least, they're in the art world's answer to them, known as the London 2012 Festival, or the Cultural Olympiad, depending on which bit of the Kafka-esque 140-page brochure you get lost in.