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The reportage illustrator on sketching in war zones and refugee camps, and the joys of unexpected encounters

A reportage illustrator specialising in travel and current affairs, George Butler, 33, has worked in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2014 he helped establish the Hands Up Foundation to fund health and education services in Syria. A new exhibition of his work, Anima Mundi: Drawn Stories of Migration, will be at Bankside Gallery, London, 20-25 November. Butler grew up in Oxforshire and is now based in south London.

What is it like trying to draw in the thick of a war zone or humanitarian crisis?
I actually find it quite peaceful in a funny sort of way. You have, in the worst moments, a job to do and a way of distracting yourself. It becomes your way of comprehending what’s going on. And at the beginning, when you’re trying to work out who to speak to, it’s just a wonderful introduction. Lots of stories have led from that moment, where people come and sit next to you and say: “Why don’t you come into my shop?” or “Let me show you round this prison”.

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Turmoil in Latin America and partying in New Jersey – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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The cave man Alley Oop will be back, and readers get to learn about his preteen years through a new character: Li’L Oop.

Miranda Lambert leads the female trio, whose third album, “Interstate Gospel,” is timeless and harmony-laden.

Colored diamonds and more contemporary designs are among the trends as Christie’s prepares for Magnificent Jewels, a much-anticipated sale.

This Canadian artist with Mexican roots is opening a show at the Hirshhorn that showcases his sometimes eerie melding of technology and human biology.

The document, which is more than 800 years old, has been temporarily removed from display in Salisbury, England.

An image of Edmond de Belamy, created by a computer, has just been sold at Christie’s. But no algorithm can capture our complex human consciousness

From a distance, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, which has just sold at Christie’s in New York for $432,000 (£337,000), looks almost plausible. Up close, however, the paintwork becomes a grid of mechanical-looking dots, the man’s face a golden blur with black holes for eyes. Look into those eyes. They show no sign of feeling or life. Did a computer make this?

The answer is yes. The first artwork generated by AI to be sold at Christie’s, its impressive price would seem to suggest that in future we will get computers to make art for us. Robot van Gogh will harmlessly cut its ear off and robot Picasso will be a genius, minus the misogyny.

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Sydney’s seaside is resculpted, boulders roll in Liverpool and Artes Mundi gets political – all in our weekly dispatch

Vuillard
This sensitive painter of everyday life portrays his mother in his many homages to her support for his work.
• Barber Institute, Birmingham, until 20 January.

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Firehoses, grenades and fibreglass sombreros feature in a shortlist that takes in Michael Dean’s evocation of economic despair and Cerith Wyn Evans’s sublime floating instrument

‘SORRY”, reads the incident-scene tape, again and again, that makes its way around Michael Dean’s wreck of an installation in the second Hepworth Prize for Sculpture in Wakefield. I say wreck positively. More an apology than a cordon, the tape droops its way about the room. The scene is extremely bleak and intermittently funny. More tape repeats the word BLESS, as if some faint hope might be found here. No such luck. Flattened drinks cans and casts of crossed fingers and decaying plastic and hardened sacks of concrete create a mock-up pavement crossing the room, a scene from Britain’s economic war zone. Drifts of spilled pennies count out 24 hours’ worth of minimum wage and a single person’s three-day emergency food bank allowance. No wonder you keep your fingers crossed. Padlocks festoon miserable love hearts, tokens of togetherness when the world is ripped apart, and bent metal bars and lengths of plastic guttering spell LOL as you make your way over the grim terrain.

Related: Artes Mundi 8 review – engrossing works blunted by limp liberal agenda

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US artist to stage Ashmolean show after accepting award from Oxford University society

Jeff Koons, one of the superstars of the contemporary art world, is to get a rare UK museum show and it is largely thanks not to curators, but the Edgar Wind Society for Art History.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the world’s oldest public museum, announced on Friday that it would stage a major Koons show in 2019 displaying works, most of which have never been seen in the UK.

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The Japanese photographer’s dreamlike images have been honoured with a Taylor Wessing show. She tells us about her meditative approach and why ‘thinking too much is boring’

A translucent bubble floats in the air next to a picture of a baby’s head cradled tenderly in an adult’s arms. Nearby, among an arrangement of similarly intimate images, an infant’s tiny hand is gently enfolded in an elderly grandparent’s grasp. On a single wall in the National Portrait Gallery, amid the contrasting styles and subject matter of the 2018 Taylor Wessing portrait prize, Rinko Kawauchi’s vivid images of four generations of her family create a quietly intense space in which to pause and ponder the beauty and fragility of the everyday.

She is the fourth photographer to be commissioned for the In Focus section, which highlights new work by established artists in a mini exhibition. (Pieter Hugo, Cristina de Middel and Todd Hido preceded her.) “I need many elements to come together in a series to create a mood,” she says, “not just portraits, but landscapes and tiny details and also the mood, the sky, the air. It’s about creating mystery, but also expressing my own feelings about time passing, the fragility of life. They are metaphorical images, really, [about] how fragile our world is.”

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Ron McCarty spent his career refurbishing and refurnishing the 56-room palazzo owned by John and Mable Ringling, bringing back an array of memorabilia.

A new exhibition looks back at “Surrounded Islands,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s popular but controversial 1983 project, which draped 11 uninhabited islands in fabric.

The Japanese pop artist combines her famous polka dots with Halloween’s motif of choice, the pumpkin

The polka dots that make Yayoi Kusama’s 2018 Pumpkin appear to pulse go back to the Infinity Net paintings, which first established her in New York’s art firmament in 1960. Channelling the disturbing visions of all-consuming patterns she’d had since girlhood, these canvases were partly a challenge to tired abstract expressionism.

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Pine tar and turpentine, climate change and hurricanes affect her fantastical art of the rural South, in a show at Mass MoCA.

Changes in the way we live in our homes have created a serious problem for the art and collectible industry.

26 October 1948: Direct, unpretentious, and refreshingly honest, Lowry’s work gains greatly from being seen in quantity

Mr. LS Lowry is a very original painter. Many other artists are that and originality has become a rather overrated virtue in a civilisation which needs above all to settle down and get its breath back. Yet Mr. Lowry has other basic qualities which too many of his more fashionable colleagues lack: he is direct, unpretentious, and refreshingly honest. These are characteristics of a primitive or childish painter, and yet he is not that. Like them he sees what interests him, and sets it down clearly and firmly in a shorthand of his own which, though far from photographic, has a perfectly plain meaning. There is, however, a subtlety to his colouring – look at Doctor’s Surgery, with the scarves and hats of the waiting patients gently lightening the general drabness – and a delicacy in his painting of the smudgy, watery atmosphere which add great depth to his surface simplicity.

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“Disappearing Acts” lets us see with clarity where the artist stands and why he is pertinent to our wrenching moment.

Objects that were made for kings and queens and remarkable examples of American art lead the exceptional displays here.

A portrait produced by artificial intelligence sold for more than 40 times Christie’s initial estimate of $7,000-$10,000.

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives the blockbuster treatment to Armenia, the oldest Christian country in the world.

The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling is the capstone of an innovative mixed-use building that also includes a preschool and low-income housing.

Across the country, institutions are mounting exhibitions that connect ancient and modern periods, demonstrating the continuing influence of the art of the past.

Before their deaths on World War I battlefields, the painters Franz Marc and August Macke helped open the door to abstraction.

Fisnik Ismaili created the 10-foot letters of “Newborn” to celebrate independence 10 years ago. He repaints it each year to reflect the nation’s development.

National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
This year’s shortlist features industrial angst, a cryptic shadow play and hypnotic images of American paranoia – but the artists are be being used as human slogans

Artes Mundi is Wales’s window on global art. It is also, it claims, “the UK’s leading political art prize”. The five artists on this year’s shortlist offer perspectives from Thailand, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria as well as the US, and yet the shadow of America looms largest. Well it does, doesn’t it? Growing up in Wales, I dreamt of America because it was not England. Now Trump’s America is a nightmare that keeps the world awake, and electrifies the best work in this uneven exhibition.

I can’t immediately see the politics in American artist Trevor Paglen’s crystal-clear telescopic photograph of the moon. This beautifully detailed image of rugged craters and dark dust seas appears simply to be glorious astrophotography. Perhaps it refers to conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landings. Because, guys, this is a very large photograph of the moon and I cannot – repeat, cannot – see any evidence of a human landing. Just saying. #moonlandingsfaked

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Since becoming the house’s chief executive four years ago, he is closing in on his target of $1 billion in annual sales.

Since the 1890s, the city in Maryland has been home to more than 240 cinemas and while many of these buildings have survived, only a few of them still show films. On 17 November, the National Building Museum in Washington DC is opening an exhibition to celebrate the artistry behind them, entitled Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore’s Forgotten Movie Theaters

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The collection of Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith is like a visual autobiography. It’s also the first thing they see when they leave their office.

The Melbourne-based, Iranian-born artist Hoda Afshar has taken out the 2018 Bowness photography prize with the image Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island. Here is a selection of the finalists which you can view at the Monash Gallery of Art until the 18th of November

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From eight centuries of the art now called Surrealist to startling new takes on assemblage from Port-au-Prince, our critic finds a heady mix of old and modern, sex and politics in these powerhouse gallery shows.

The star is revisiting her role in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” at Madison Square Park, in a costume by Arlene Shechet, whose art is on display there.

The nearly 200-year-old magazine has a new website with a digital archive of its pages and more than 3,500 covers.

Noah Purifoy’s first solo on the East Coast; Henning Christiansen’s first survey in America; Charles White’s “Truth and Beauty”; and Storm King’s climate-change show.

‘After a delicious lunch of brain, liver and lung stew, we drove around – and spotted these guys just hanging out in a car’

I went to South Africa with my girlfriend in the autumn of 2016 for a friend’s wedding. We had a six-hour layover in Johannesburg airport before flying back to New York, so we decided to take one last trip before we boarded the plane.

Some friends who lived in Johannesburg said it wasn’t the safest of cities – they told us to do some shopping to kill time. Five hours in a mall sounded awful, so we got chatting to one of the tour guides that hang around the airport and he agreed to take us to Soweto, the township south of the city.

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A rounded rocky outcrop covered in metal shacks, Migingo Island rises out of the waters of Lake Victoria like an iron-plated turtle. The densely populated area covers barely a quarter of a hectare. Its residents are crammed into a hodge-podge of corrugated-iron homes, bars, brothels and a tiny port

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Donald Niebyl crossed the Balkans in search of spomenik – abstract memorials built in Tito’s Yugoslavia to celebrate the defeat of Axis forces in the second world war

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Hollywood luminaries once cavorted in this pool designed for a media tycoon, and regular people recently got a chance to dive in, too, for a price.

Five fragments once associated with the famous scrolls were shown to have “characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin” according to a statement from the museum in Washington this week.

Preparing to test the art market — and young buyers — with “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy.”

Photographers showcase different sides of the Chinese American experience in a new exhibition, combatting stereotypes and bringing unseen stories to the forefront

In New York, there is a seasoned florist in Chinatown who puts on red rubber gloves when handling the exotic flowers in his dark storefront. Chinese newspapers hang behind him and down below, a cat walks towards him. This simple, charming photograph details the life of one Chinese immigrant – who has a hint of loneliness on his face.

“New York City is a place where there’s millions of things happening, everyone lives their own story,” said An Rong Xu, the photographer. “Even when there are so many people around you, it could feel like the loneliest place.”

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Most UK tenancy agreements continue the Victorian practice of restricting or prohibiting home-based work, writes Dr Frances Holliss

Gary Porter’s idea to transform council housing (Self-build plan ‘could put 100,000 homes on council list’, 22 October) is a good one, but it needs to go beyond the colour of the bricks. Fundamental change is needed in how we conceive and manage housing, in the context of a steadily growing global home-based workforce; 80% of the 700 homes built at Dutch architect MVRDV’s self-build scheme at Nieuw Leyden, for example, include an office, workshop or studio. However, most UK standard tenancy agreements continue the Victorian practice of restricting or even prohibiting home-based work, despite its well-documented social, economic and environmental benefits – and positive impact on the city. This results in covert practice – which leads to widespread frustration, inefficiency and stress – and housing poorly designed to meet the needs of occupants. It needs to change.
Dr Frances Holliss
Emeritus reader in architecture, Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture & Design, London Metropolitan University

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Marc Quinn hopes ‘first migrating artwork’ will also raise $30m for charities

For Aghiad Malik, a refugee from Syria, blood had only ever symbolised one thing: death. “It was a nightmare, seeing red on the streets,” he says. “Even to think about blood was horrific.”

But soon it will have another meaning. He is one of around 5,000 people whose blood will be used to create Odyssey, a new work by British artist Marc Quinn that will be displayed outside the New York Public Library from next September . The not-for-profit work intends to shine a spotlight on the refugee crisis while raising $30m (£23m) for charities working to alleviate it.

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Humber Street Gallery, Hull
The Sex Pistols artist continues to unpick the normal order with a cacophony of ideologies, kaleidoscopic paintings and British history in his 50-year retrospective

Jamie Reid’s name might not be familiar, but his work will be. The fluorescent Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols album cover was not dreamt up by a clever marketing agency but created by Reid, who suits both the title of “artist” and “anarchist” quite comfortably. In fact, Reid’s newspaper clipping text and photomontage style of work came to define the punk era and his portrait of Queen Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her lip still stands as an emblem of rebellion today.

Ironically, Reid’s anti-establishment album cover is now emblazoned across mugs, T-shirts and posters. The intent behind the cut out ransom note inspired lettering was to enable political groups access to cheap print. He explains this in notes plastered on the wall at Humber Street Gallery in Hull for his 50-year retrospective. Suitably titled Jamie Reid XXXXX: Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit, the exhibition unites his varied output of painting, photography, drawing, collage and print, acknowledging his dual interests in protest and spirituality in the process.

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With pinball machine interiors and animal-shaped facades, Mamani’s wild venues have transformed Bolivian architecture. Now the former bricklayer is taking ‘neo-Andean’ style to Paris

A bright green sunburst rises above the entrance to a building in El Alto, Bolivia, its mirror-glass rays tapering out to meet a yellow ziggurat-shaped pediment, beneath a momentous circular window. Polka-dot pilasters climb either side, zig-zagging this way and that, before terminating in an elaborate cornice, the whole ripe confection crowned with a surreal pitch-roofed chalet.

It looks like a one-off party palace, but turn the corner and you see several more of these things marching down the street in eye-searing palettes of reds, pinks, blues and greens, as if an army of building-sized slot-machines had taken over the city.

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A multimedia exhibition aims to capture the spirit of creative chaos that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Atlanta is known as a city where they would knock down a historic building to put up a parking lot. We look at what’s gone and what might be next

“We really are a tear down city,” says Boyd Coons, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center. “It’s not difficult for people to knock down a historic building in Atlanta. In fact, it’s quite easy.”

We’re talking in the restored rooms of an 1856 Italianate mansion built for railroad magnate Lemuel P Grant. One of only three pre-Civil War structures to survive General Sherman’s burning of Atlanta, it had been neglected for decades and was scheduled for demolition when the APC bought it in 2001. They saved the first floor and it is now their headquarters.

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In homage to the early 80s, when graffiti and rapping were inextricably linked, British photographer Janette Beckman asked some of the world’s most important street artists to reinterpret her archive photographs of hip-hop legends

• Janette Beckman: The Mash-Up is at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, until 24 November

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