If only more public artworks could be like The Burghers of Calais, a powerful monument to everyday heroes
It’s great to be able to celebrate a genuinely powerful and moving public sculpture. There have been so many disappointments, and that’s a gentle way to describe the ugly, stupid stuff our cities …

Artes Mundi’s rhetoric doesn’t convince – but its flashes of beauty do
The trucks roar through Kyrgyzstan, on what was once the Great Silk Road. Laden with scrap metal and heading for western China, they fill the air with dust. A lone boy on a horse chases them. A New Silk …

The artist Jacques-Louis David was no pacifist. But his epic painting of the Spartans’ last stand doesn’t merely glorify war
A war leader sits frozen at the heart of a bristling crowd of soldiers in Jacques-Louis David’s daunting canvas Leonidas at Thermopylae, a battle painting so vast that it would only …

Prof Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire is an expert on laughing, giggling and guffawing. He even has his own iPhone app. He’s giving a talk at the Royal Institution on Wednesday 31 March.
We also reveal the world’s funniest joke as told by people on the streets of …

V&A, LondonLost children, poverty, imprisonment: 300 years of stories both personal and political are sewn into the quilts in this wonderful show
The soldier looks peaceful but alarmingly pale. He has a metal plate lodged in his head. They’ve patched him up at the military hospital and even given him something …

John Tunnard, Chichester
Amorphous shapes dance in dream-like landscapes of seemingly infinite regress in the canvases of British artist John Tunnard. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Tunnard fused surrealism with abstraction in paintings exploring inner worlds, the Cornish vistas that surrounded his home and even space travel. Melodically composed with …

From spooky shadows in Birmingham to a rare survey of John Tunnards’s work in Chichester, see what’s happening in art around the country
Skye Sherwin
Robert Clark

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would …

In his latest work at UCLA, Chicago-based artist Nick Cave combines everything from vintage toys to sequins to create suits that make extraordinary sounds
The guide

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would …

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His new installation at Tate Britain sees him guiltily return a stolen stone to the Pyramid of Giza. It’s a gripping work of art
It’s unusual to see a new work of art about conscience. I mean individual conscience, not some generalised idea of political guilt. …

‘It’s like blowing the dust off buried treasure!’ David Smith revels in his discovery of township artist Ephraim Ngatane
When I lived in London, I was a sucker for the blockbuster art exhibition. Caravaggio and the Terracotta Army lived up to the star billing. Others did not. But there was an …