Two painters make a solid start, but what follows is endless sixth-form performance art

Sotheby's staged the biggest auction in its 268-year history last night, led by a $75 million (£47.1 million) Mark Rothko and a record-setting $40 million (£25.1 million) work by Jackson Pollock at its post-war and contemporary art sale.

A photograph of Matisse working in his studio as an elderly man inspired the young American conceptual artist Mel Bochner to create Theory of Painting (1970). It was not the woman that Matisse was painting on the canvas that caught Bochner’s attention, however, but the newspapers spread under his feet.  

Next week Milan-based Stefano Mezzaroma’s first UK exhibition opens at The Italian Cultural Institute in London. No Jokes Please: We’re Italian features works lampooning well-known multinational brands, and will be popular with fans of contemporary pop art.

A painting by Paul Cézanne of two peasants playing cards has sold for a record price of £158.4 million.

The death of Roderic Fenwick Owen a month before his 90th birthday marks the belated breaking of many moulds. Descended from an old Lincolnshire family and heir to a handsome fortune, Fenwick Owen spent the late 1940s crewing his way around the world on tramp steamers; these typically belonged to shipping lines owned by the families of schoolfriends from Summer Fields or Eton. The young Englishman jumped ship from the SS Wairuna on a remote Tahitian island, intent on a year of beachcombing. Instead, he was seduced by, and married, a Polynesian princess called Turia, only to desert her a year later and sail on. The story of his youth reads like a novel by Somerset Maugham. Containerisation and mass tourism would make it impossible today.

Brown, though never as celebrated as his pals Cage and Feldman, produced some of the more enjoyably questing systems music of the last century.

Since her early novels After You'd Gone and My Lover's Lover, Maggie O'Farrell's fiction has been touched by the otherwordly. In this new book - winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award - she exchanges the more febrile expressions of romantic love for a haunting tale of the baby blues.

A film featuring racy sex scenes, the sinking of the Titanic and portrayals of Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and James Joyce might be dismissed as too far-fetched by Hollywood standards.

It was to ward away "ill thoughts" while her husband had cancer that Margaret Drabble took to doing jigsaws. A self-confessed untidy writer, Drabble finds succour in them, and the escape they offer from the messiness and ragged edges of human life, where broken ties cannot easily be mended, and missing pieces refuse to be filled.

Urban gardening can be frustrating around this time of year when gardening magazines up the ante for late summer colour. Drifts of heleniums, echinacea and asters to extend the season are just fine but many of us simply don't have the room. Containers are often the answer and even a wide shallow pot of montbretia is enough to lift the spirits. I had intended to beat the slugs by buying in a selection of dahlias to offset the feeling of summer deprivation, but things didn't go to plan and our garden this season has had to endure a certain amount of neglect ("What's new?" I can hear it growling in the background), because of holidays, an obscure viral infection (a parting gift from Nepal) and then several more weeks trying to catch up at the design studio, not to mention the allotment.