Fed up with egg hunts? Then put a bounce in your break with Pina Bausch on film, Ghost on stage, acrobatics on the South Bank and much more. Elizabeth Davis selects the holiday's cultural highlights

Go for a drink at The Ten Bells pub in east London this month and you'll see (and hear) Tracey Emin. Not literally of course, but on a Beck's beer label and audio recording as part of the beer brand's celebration of 25 years of Beck's Art Labels.

How much is that doggy in the window? If it's a shiny sculpture by the artist Jeff Koons, then they start at $7,000 [£4,400]; if it's a plastic bookend produced by Toronto manufacturer Imm-Living and sold in a San Francisco art gallery you're looking at a mere $30 [£19]. And therein lies a snowballing legal dispute.

Now, I don't tend to do guided tours. Don't like the idea of having my hand held while I move from exhibit to exhibit, room to room. Once, 18 years ago, I wangled a trip to New York just so I could see the Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and I remember being shocked at the lines of visitors, glacially moving from exhibition space to exhibition space, dutifully listening to the catalogue headsets, and nodding earnestly, almost as one.

I walked past one of Joana Vasconcelos's large sculptures at Haunch of Venison before I realised it was there. As I entered the lobby it seemed that part of the gallery had been cordoned off and I was being led in a particular direction by a series of ropes. It wasn't until I looked more closely at the ropes, the kind you might find sheathed in velvet at a fancy club, that I realised they were made from long thick glossy hair in blonde, brown and auburn, which, arranged in a plaited style, seems like women's hair. The work is called One Way (Una Dirección) (2003) and, with a simple gesture, Vasconcelos highlights the ways in which women can be oppressed, held in place, or, worse, trafficked, and how ideals of beauty can play a part in this. This exhibition is filled with works that brilliantly tackle this kind of territory without being bogged down in it – this Portuguese artist's sculptures always look wonderful, excessive and extremely rich, while posing awkward questions.

As a painting that scandalised Paris comes up for sale, Arifa Akbar speaks to the gallerist who made it happen

Unique print projects pop artist into top-10 sellers list

The younger of the Gao brothers bursts into his studio, explains that he is late because of a car crash, and pulls Chairman Mao's head from a plastic bag. Then he attaches it to the late Great Helmsman's corpulent, kneeling body.

Forget WAGs: there is a new female royalty. They spend their time espousing worthy causes while dressing for maximum impact. They maximise every photo opportunity, they twitter and they blog; getting their man's message out is the name of the game, all in the name of PR. But, unlike their husbands, they've never stood for political office. In fact, they don't really have a proper job, in spite of being well educated and highly intelligent. Some might say they represent a giant step backwards for womankind. These leaders' wives are famous for being a Mrs – women with another man's name identifying them. I don't know about you, but this isn't what I've fought for in the name of equality.

A provocative nude picture of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields was removed from a major exhibition following a police pornography probe.

When new york city's Gramercy Park Hotel opened its doors in May 1994 to a group of gallery owners showcasing the works of their young artists, a "spontaneous" event in one of its rooms involving a British dealer and his female protégé made the city's adrenaline-fuelled art world stop and stare. Tracey Emin, a tousle-haired artist from Margate, had accompanied Jay Jopling, her London dealer and the owner of White Cube Gallery, to the contemporary art fair, which was spread across 32 hired rooms at the Manhattan hotel – and on that Sunday morning, she crept into the bed on which Jopling was perched, impishly covered them both with the embroidered bedspread she was there to sell (for $4,000), and smiled for the cameras.

The Armenian artist's works are deeply clever in their throwaway way