art & design
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A Dutch court has ordered Abramović to pay €250,000 to former co-creator and lover Ulay as his share of sales of artistic collaborations
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James Barnor helped put black women on the covers of British magazines and documented fashion in a country marching towards independence. Now, aged 87, he has taken to Instagram and a London gallery is exhibiting his work
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The Danish photographer went alone from the north pole to the Antarctic – and his photos are scratched and damaged by the landscapes he travelled through
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Bolshevism, Einstein, a journey to the moon… the South African artist’s new show is a dazzling montage of modern times
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Tate director Nick Serota suggests solution for Neo Bankside tenants who don’t want to make an exhibition of themselves
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It is packed with thrilling works by Pollock, Rothko and the rest, but this major exhibition is also overloaded and erratic – with little space for female artists
news
in pictures
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The failed ceasefire in Syria, the aftermath of the bombing in New York, the Brownlee brothers, London fashion week – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week
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talking points
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The RA’s mega overview of abstract expressionism opens this week, along with portraits of dream worlds and pop stars
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By blending surrealist imagery with mainstream painting, Magritte’s apples and pipes have appeared on fridge magnets worldwide. But there’s something eerie and existentially troubling at the heart of it all
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reviews
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This jumbled exhibition tracking changing attitudes to mental illness could have been a powerful study of Bedlam and psychiatry. Instead it fails to make sense of the real place and the myth
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The former Turner prize nominee’s portrait of the painter toys with truth and artifice as cleverly as her first foray into theatre with actor Stephen Dillane
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The artist’s odyssey from Cuba to Europe and back again turned him from a disciple of Picasso into a feverish painter of gods, monsters, mystery and sex
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The great photographer’s awesome images – taken from drones, propellor planes and a 50ft selfie stick – show how industry has drilled and drained our planet
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The appeal of the Dangerous Sports Club was dreaming up stunts that were beautiful and theoretically possible
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A trio of events looks at where the city has come from and where it’s going to with changing laws, suburbs and people
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An exhibition at the Highground Veterans Memorial Park in Wisconsin has brought together a collection of photographs by veterans who served in Vietnam
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More than a thousand people live afloat on the tidal Thames in London. Katherine Fawssett hops on board to meet some of them
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For last week’s photography assignment in the Observer New Review we asked you to share your photos on the theme of pathway via GuardianWitness. Here’s a selection of our favourites
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From steamrooms suspended under remote Czech bridges to the Swedish robot sauna straight out of Star Wars, the spa experience is getting a guerilla makeover
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From London’s Barbican to Wiltshire and Yorkshire, these cutting-edge properties capture the architectural spirit of the age
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Letters: The viewing platform is the museum’s principal site for a work of performance art enacted by visitors and the occupants of adjacent luxury flats
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Germany’s second largest city is where Brahms and Mendelssohn were born, Telemann and Mahler worked and the Beatles came of age
the big picture
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Whether it’s her father or the victims of Isis, Chinese artist Ying Ji is fixated on death – and also how to thrive in its shadow
you may have missed
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She’s explored cities around the world, and now the Italian artist has cast her eye on the Minhocão, a controversial emblem of a splendidly untidy megalopolis
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Caroline Bergvall’s Raga Dawn is a mash-up of English, Punjabi and Romansh, poetry, music and performance art. She explains why she’s opposing ‘isolationist pride’ on the spot where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948
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Patrik Schumacher preaches the gospel of ‘parametricism’, a system of architecture designed to cut out human error by valuing technology over art and intuition
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It started with 176 icons. Now it’s grown to 1,800. But who decides what becomes an emoji? We lift the lid on the California coders who live and breathe smiling cats and banned aubergines
video
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A 120-meter long model of the 17th century London skyline burns to ashes to mark the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London
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Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo takes us on a tour of Bogotá and her studio
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As a child, Stanley Spencer was always rummaging in dustbins – a tea pot, jam tin and cabbage stalk seemed to him a holy trinity. In this short film, Spencer’s paintings glorifying the everyday are brought to life in the artist’s own words
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My best shot Syd Shelton’s best photograph: a stagecrashing punk in Norfolk