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Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire
The Italian art prankster redecorates Churchill’s birthplace with an 18-carat loo, hideous union jacks and Hitler himself. What a fitting show for a country unravelling into madness

At a time when Britain is slipping further down the toilet day by day, it is curious to visit Blenheim Palace, a colossal monument to our finest hours. The Battle of Blenheim in 1704 may not be remembered as one of those now, but John Churchill’s victory over Louis XIV’s France was so significant in its day that a grateful nation paid for this jaw-droppingly spectacular baroque palace. What kind of child might be born among its triumphant martial memories? Winston Churchill, that’s who. A set of memorabilia-crowded rooms commemorate the cigar-chomping hero’s childhood here.

Related: Your chance to feel very flush: the 18-carat golden toilet hits Britain

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The Scottish painter constructs a darkly sexual scene of cultural appropriation

Peter Doig’s paintings have the heightened feel of dreams and movie stills, meshing the landscape and people of his adopted home of Trinidad with personal history and pop culture.

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The Mexican capital was founded by Aztecs on an island in a vast lake. No wonder water flows through so many of its unbuilt projects

Ever since Mexico City was founded on an island in the lake of Texcoco its inhabitants have dreamed of water: containing it, draining it and now retaining it.

Nezahualcoyotl, the illustrious lord of Texcoco, made his name constructing a dyke shielding Mexico City’s Aztec predecessor city of Tenochtitlan from flooding. The gravest threat to Mexico City’s existence came from a five-year flood starting in 1629, almost causing the city to be abandoned. Ironically now its surrounding lake system has been drained, the greatest threat to the city’s existence is probably the rapid decline of its overstressed aquifers.

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Abandoned Queensbury tunnel is in Victorian Society’s list of most endangered buildings

An abandoned and flooded Victorian railway tunnel hundreds of feet under the Pennines could be restored for use by cyclists and tourists but instead faces being filled with concrete and allowed to collapse.

The Victorian Society on Friday threw its weight behind a campaign to bring new life to the 1.4-mile (2.3km) Queensbury tunnel.

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Sarah Sze’s enchanting installations; Peter Voulkos’s monumental stacks; Andrew Ohanesian’s hidden show; and Guadalupe Maravilla’s shrine-sculpture.

Separating the fictive Longfellow poem from fact, a new show reveals that the rebel messenger was also a peerless networker, propagandist and proto-industrialist.

Three Mel Bochner pieces remind the family’s children to watch their language.

Is it a painting or a sculpture? It’s both. The octogenarian artist keeps surprising.

“Russ & Daughters: An Appetizing Story,” from the American Jewish Historical Society, offers a taste of New York’s rich food and cultural history.

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

I WAS A TOUCH DISPIRITED, then thwacked by nausea—and that was before fashion week started. It was not an auspicious beginning to what’s supposed to be the most. . .perhaps not wonderful, but certainly

Mr. Frank, best known for his groundbreaking book, “The Americans,” had a visually raw and personally expressive style that made him one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.

Tate Modern is expanding the curatorial team of its international art department with three new hires: Nabila Abdel Nabi, who will focus specifically on art from the Middle East and North Africa; Osei

Swedish curator Fatima Hellberg, who has served as artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart since 2015, has been named the next director of the Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn, Germany. Hellberg takes

This exhibition of work by thirteen artists belongs to a larger long-term inquiry by Ujazdowski Castle that confronts, without cynicism, both Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity” and, as curator

The California African American Museum (CAAM) announced that curator, writer, and editor Cameron Shaw has been appointed as its new deputy director and chief curator. The Los Angeles native most recently

HOW WILL ANYONE fill the void Ronald Jones leaves behind? The spaces he created could only be inhabited by him. Ron was an interdisciplinary experimentalist, a perverse conceptualist, a virtuoso

The 2020 Biennale of Sydney has released the list of the ninety-eight artists and collectives-including several hailing from Afghanistan, Ecuador, Georgia, Nepal, and Sudan-that will be featured in its

In 2017, ten years on from the death of the great Guardian photographer, we gave readers the chance to buy three limited edition prints of his work.

Don McPhee’s picture of a picketing miner facing up to an officer is one of the abiding images of the 1984 coal strike and is now available again in a second limited edition run, in two sizes.

Produced on premium heavyweight Hahnemüele Photorag paper, the prints are supplied with a Guardian Archive certificate of authenticity.

• Order your limited edition Don McPhee print here

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Shirin Neshat’s work touches on topics like exile, political revolution and Iran’s past and future.

Gamblers wait for the wheel of fortune to stop spinning. Ice creams start to drip. A family photo in mid-burn. What do these shots of the moments inbetween tell us about the world?

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‘This is my partner breastfeeding in our loft, which was one step up from a squat in an area full of painters and sculptors. It’s a luxury condo now’

This image was made in a loft in Brooklyn, New York, where I lived with Marion, my partner and now my wife, and where we started our family. It’s where I came of age, I guess, and where I photographed most of the pictures for my book Son. It represents youth and love and home, and it’s also particular to a place where we lived, and Brooklyn as a community.

That loft had a lot to do with my development as a photographer, particularly my use of light and colour, because it was bathed in bright sunlight most of the day. Though it was one step up from a squat, it was one of the important nodes of the creative community of Williamsburg. Many photographers lived there – including Tim Hetherington, Alex Majoli, Stanley Greene and Thomas Dworzak – and all these well-known sculptors and painters. Then it was bought by developers and we were all evicted in 2016. It was the end of an era. Now it’s luxury condos.

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More than 450 artists from around the world have work on show at Carriageworks but, with a potential recession on the way, who’s buying it?

What a difference two years make. The first time we checked in on Sydney Contemporary in 2017 the event had consolidated its position as Australia’s largest and most commercially successful art fair.

That event was marked by both its ambition and scope, and in total the fair sold just over $16m worth of art. That record was topped in 2018 with $21m in sales. At the press launch on Wednesday for the 2019 outing, Tim Etchells, director of Art Fairs Australia – the company that stages the event – speculated that they would see perhaps $26m in sales if the upward trend continued.

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He redefined the expressive potential of documentary photography — until he gave it up.

Members of the Sackler family associated with Purdue Pharma, the Stamford, Connecticut–based pharmaceutical company that manufactures OxyContin, will hand over $3 billion in cash over the next seven

The transformation of Helene Schjerfbeck from an accomplished if unremarkable salon painter at the end of the nineteenth century to a radical modernist from the 1900s onward is so abrupt that it could

The American painter Mary Abbott, who used bold colors and gestural brushstrokes “to draw the imagination,” died on August 23 at ninety-eight years old. Abbott, whose influence permeated the circle of

“The Ocean Between”—the Atlantic—connects Ireland and the Caribbean, two territories here explored by Marianne Keating in a group of films. Keating built Landlessness, 2017, the exhibition’s key work,

Owning a Louis XV-era chateau means deciding whether to honor the past or completely upend it. But for Jean-Louis Tapiau, the solution was somewhere in the middle.

The painter is moving to France due to a mistaken belief he can smoke in its restaurants. But there are plenty of other reasons for Brits to envy our friends across the Channel – from French working hours to La Marseillaise

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, David Hockney announced he is moving to France. Enthusing about €13 lunches and claiming “the French know how to live”, Hockney expresses the traditional British belief that – with its charming village markets, sexy public intellectuals, endless cheese and lunchtime wine – France does things better.

As a fellow Francophile, I applaud his decision, but not his reasoning (his apparent belief that he can smoke in restaurants is wrong for a start). France is superior, but not because they don’t shed Pret crumbs over their keyboards. These are the real reasons.

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His stark masterpiece The Americans changed photography. Yet there was more to this countercultural hero who captured the debauchery of the Stones – and his own personal tragedies

• Robert Frank dies aged 94

‘People want to know so much,” Robert Frank answered wearily when I asked him back in 2004 about the lasting resonance of his classic photobook, The Americans. “All the time, this wanting to know. Where does it lead? Nowhere.”

We were sitting in the spartanly furnished kitchen of his apartment on Manhattan’s Bleecker Street, my tape recorder resting on a rickety table between a large brick of a mobile phone and a single bread roll. He was, it strikes me now, a man for whom fame and its comforts meant very little, whose sadness seemed more palpable than his genius. Almost 80 then, he seemed ineffably world-weary.

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The giant of 20th-century photography, who has died aged 94, captured singular, candid moments of the 1950s and helped free picture-taking from the boundaries of clean lighting and linear composition

• Robert Frank, revolutionary American photographer

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On the streets of La Paz, the Bolivian capital, a tribe wearing ski masks go about their work buffing up shoes. The disguises are to keep their identities secret – and avoid discrimination

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Untitled (Red) and In wake donated by Valeria Napoleone, who only collects art by women

An art gallery has unveiled two new works in an attempt to address its gender imbalance, where less than 10% of its permanent collection are by women. The self-portraits by the Cape Town-based visual artist Berni Searle have been added to the permanent collection at Manchester Art Gallery, in a move to extend “the discourse around representation and identity”.

Untitled (Red) and In wake were donated by the art collector and philanthropist Valeria Napoleone, who only collects art by women, as part of a scheme to redress criticisms of a historical lack of female representation.

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Those without disabilities might not notice the innovations, but a museum in London is winning plaudits for its design and content.

Performance art has never been so popular. But at a fair devoted to it in Brussels, some collectors wondered exactly what they were buying.

Curator, writer, and educator Vasıf Kortun has been named the director of the Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum (IHRM),  http://www.artasiapacific.com/News/VasifKortunToLeadIstanbulPaintingAndSculptureMuseum

OH THAT VOICE, that hoarse, insinuating whisper, which simultaneously sucks you in and spits you out. It was Vito Acconci’s stock in trade during the first two decades of his career, when he was what

Interdisciplinary Philadelphia-based artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden has won the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Bucksbaum Award, which was founded in 2000 by the Bucksbaum Family Foundation to recognize

Art Basel has announced that it is launching a new initiative that will bring together around three hundred thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and creatives from various industries, including technology,

This powerful documentary, about a UN investigator travelling the planet to get to the bottom of the global housing crisis, lays bare a $217 trillion scandal

‘I don’t believe that capitalism itself is hugely problematic,” says Leilani Farha, as she marches along a pavement in Harlem, New York. The UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing is on her way to visit a sprawling low-income housing project that was recently acquired by a private equity fund, leading to massive rent hikes and probable evictions. “Is unbridled capitalism in an area that is a human right problematic? Yes.”

The conflict between rights and profits lies at the heart of a thought-provoking documentary, Push, which follows Farha’s forays into the bleak depths of the global housing crisis, as she attempts to unpick exactly how we got here. In the Harlem estate she meets a man who already spends 90% of his income on his rent. Soon, his two-bedroom flat will cost $3,600 (£,2920) a month, and he will be forced to move.

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The monumental Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, whose artistic vision served as a seven-decade-long journey through the American vernacular landscape, has died. He was ninety-four

Photographer whose work captured the lives of ordinary people and those on the margins

Robert Frank, who has died aged 94, was to the photography of 1950s America what Walker Evans was to the 30s and Robert Mapplethorpe to the 70s. His black-and-white images captured the ignored and rejected lives of individuals existing on the edge.

In 1957, Frank met the beat writer Jack Kerouac at a party in New York and showed him a sheaf of photos he had recently taken on road trips around the US. Kerouac offered to write an introduction for what became Frank’s best known book, The Americans, published in Paris in 1958 and in New York the following year. Kerouac noted the coffins and jukeboxes that litter the work until “you end up not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin”. He concluded: “To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.”

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Hans-Dieter Lutz’s home is a lasting tribute to German neo-Modernism — and to the fanciful but functional legacy of one of its leading architects.

Many of Mona Hatoum’s installations employ just one or two materials (barbed wire, cement and rebar, steel, hair) to transform recognizable symbols and forms (maps, globes, spheres, cubes) into portentous

Nourished by Kenyan culture, the transnational artist is filling the niches on the Fifth Avenue facade, for the first time in the Met’s history. It’s a step on the museum’s rocky road toward diversity.

Frank’s seminal book The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac, helped to change the direction of photography

Robert Frank, the American artist whose photographs captured the lives of everyday people and influenced a generation with his raw and evocative style, has died aged 94.

The Swiss-born photographer’s seminal book The Americans, which had an introduction from Jack Kerouac, beat generation author of On the Road, helped to change the direction of photography with its 83 pictures rejecting many conventions of the art form up to that point.

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Pop art pioneer was a friend and contemporary of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg

Surreal, innovative and political paintings by an American artist worshipped by Andy Warhol have gone on display in London.

James Rosenquist was a pop art pioneer whose name is well known in America and parts of Europe, but far less so in the UK.

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In Britain in the 1980s, the Black Country’s metal industry was hit hard and a landscape that had been formed by the Industrial Revolution disappeared. John Myers’ book The End of Industry captures that time

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The Sedition festival is celebrating the underground art and music subculture that challenged the government, society and the mainstream media in Sydney in the 1970s. Alongside performances by some bands of the era, more than 200 works – including posters, films and art – are being exhibited. For Guardian Australia, the co-curator and former Rolling Stone editor Toby Creswell has selected some of the posters that inspired the festival. ‘Before social media, the best way to get your message out there was with paper and flour and water and a creative expression of your ideas,’ he says. ‘They are angry, amusing, funny and provocative’

• Sedition 2019 runs until 1 December across various locations in Sydney

• ‘We need to do something’: the poster art of a new political era

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