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.

Wolfgang Tillmans is waiting in the departure lounge at Santiago airport, preparing to return home following the opening of his first South American exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art and a visit to the European Southern Observatory in Chile (astronomy, he says, was "the first love of my life as a child").

The Whitechapel Gallery in east London is holding the first major retrospective of Gillian Wearing. Adrian Hamilton is moved by her deeply affecting films and photographs

We are taking refuge in the past, whether it's 'Call the Midwife' and 'Downton' on TV, Coward and Rattigan at the theatre, or neo-Romantics in the galleries. Where's the sensation, asks Philip Hoare?

Over the past six years, artists Gilbert and George have pinched 3,712 lurid headline posters from their local newsagent. The result, London Pictures, is an exhibition that presents a starkly different image of London from the one promoted to visitors for the Olympics.

What we love, we're not sure about, we're buying and can't wait for...

It was an elegant yet acidic deflation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author's literary pretensions. Last night Adam Mars-Jones was rewarded with the Hatchet Job of the Year Award for the most scathing book review of 2011.

It was an elegant yet acidic deconstruction of a Pulitzer Prize winning author's literary pretensions. Last night Adam Mars-Jones was rewarded with the Hatchet Job of the Year Award for the most scathing book review of 2011.

The master of whimsy wears his art-school credentials on his sleeve, but his ideas feel derivative and the jokes wear thin

David Shrigley, 43

Police moved in on the protest camp of anti-war campaigners and their tents in Parliament Square to clear the pavement last night.

Sutherland is one of many mid-20th-century artists storming back into fashion at galleries and in salerooms alike

Modern art is often derided as a load of rubbish, but yesterday a Scot turned the cliche on its head, winning the top prize for contemporary art in Britain for a series of installations that include a rubbish bin.

Ferran Adrià, the globally fêted chef and guiding light behind El Bulli – the three-Michelin-starred restaurant on Spain's Costa Brava widely considered, until it shut its doors earlier this year, the best in the world – has long been celebrated for his innovative but always precise ways. His imaginative dishes may take a surprising, or even wondrous, form – flowers suspended in a "cloud" of spun sugar, flavours captured in a shard of ice – but one thing is constant: they show great respect for the essential flavours of the raw ingredients from which they are created.