The Duchess of Cambridge has spoken of the power of art to change people's lives in a speech to celebrate the work of one of her charities.

Their portraits, whether photographic, sculptural or painted, are captivating. But now the cameras have been turned on Sam Taylor-Johnson, Marc Quinn, Mat Collishaw and Julie Verhoeven...

Click on the gallery above to see the images

The Paralympic opening ceremony will be an “exquisite journey of discovery” with Professor Stephen Hawking as a guide, its co-artistic director Jenny Sealey has said.

The British sculptor Richard Trupp, 38, a protégé of Sir Anthony Caro, is exhibiting two gravity-defying sculptures. They are part of a group show, Sculpture Al Fresco, in the historical grounds of the Great Fosters hotel in Surrey.

Etchings by Canaletto, engravings by Hogarth and prints by David Hockney can all be procured at the London Original Print Fair 2011 which opens its doors today.

A Royal Academy exhibition shows some of the great works of the last hundred years, but ignores the art that excites the public, says Adrian Hamilton

Even the most rarefied of fashion designers is unlikely ever to describe him or herself as an artist. That would be rushing in where angels fear to tread. Art is art – a highbrow and only ever a coincidentally commercial pursuit – fashion is fashion, catering to the pretty, privileged and vain. Or so any purists out there might argue. It's a far from modern view, though. Witness the Louis Vuitton flagship store that opened on London's New Bond Street earlier this year with its Michael Landy kinetic sculpture, Damien Hirst monogrammed medicine chest and hugely successful bags designed in collaboration with Takashi Murakami to see how these two apparently very different disciplines benefit one another. Or how about the Prada Foundation in Milan, home to some of the most innovative artworks of the age. The brains behind it – Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli – are presumably more than a little aware that if designer fashion is aspirational, fine art is even more so and any association only serves to heighten the outside world's perception of a brand's status and power.

Grayson Perry, Sir Peter Blake and Ben Eine are among 52 leading artists and designers who have joined forces to highlight Britain’s housing crisis.

Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri's latest exhibition consists of sculptures made from long ropes of synthetic human hair.

While the rest of the country is glued to the World Cup, Emma Townshend will be traversing the UK exploring the best that the new 'Good Gardens Guide' has to offer

Marc Quinn's is a world of calculated provocation. He invites us to look again at the essential characteristics of traditional, idealising portrait sculpture of the kind that was common to the Greeks, the Romans, Michelangelo, Rodin, and is still the norm today in rigid, academicising circles. This school argues that there are certain body types, certain bodily postures, and the use of certain traditional materials which have not only represented the acceptable norm for millenia, but which also, by extension, have come to define the way in which we think about issues as wide-ranging as heroism, manly beauty and appropriate behaviour. What we fail to recognise, Quinn argues through his own sculptural practice, is that this kind of sculpture piles convention upon convention and that, in short, it is an exclusion zone. Things need not be this way. What exactly does it exclude? It excludes the kinds of behaviour that the conventional choose to regard as transgressive, beyond the pale, morally outrageous, deservedly marginalised – yes, there are many different ways of putting what amounts to the same point.

Masterpieces of 20th-century art to be seen in Britain for first time as art fair turns all eyes on the capital

'Self', Marc Quinn's visceral sculpture made of nine pints of his frozen blood, fast became one of the most recognisable works from Charles Saatchi’s collection of works by the "Young British Artists" in the 1990s.