Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries.

One of this summer’s seaside attractions in Margate is an overstuffed walrus, but day-trippers won’t find it in the town’s Museum of Monstrosities. The taxidermic freak, on loan from the Horniman Museum, is the star exhibit in the new show at Turner Contemporary. Against the backdrop of a North Sea painted by Turner, the adipose Arctic mammal is out of its element.

One is increasingly struck by the oddity of an annual portrait prize, or at least I am. Imagine an annual still life award or an open competition for a major prize for abstract art. And imagine how formulaic and stale that would soon become. How many variations of a photorealist table laden with grapes or half drunk glasses of wine could you put up with? Or just think of all those coolly two-tone geometric canvases that’ll come pouring in.

The very tall, skeletal and formidable Henry Tonks (1862-1937), surgeon and anatomist, became one of the most decisive, influential, scathing and inspirational teachers in the history of visual education. At the Slade, in his second career as artist and teacher, he presided over several generations of London-based artists who formed the bedrock of modernism, from the absorption of Impressionism to the various isms of the turn of the last century. He referred to this cohort of his students, here being celebrated, as “a crisis of brilliance”.

The Alternative Guide to the Universe, an exhibition of work mainly by self-taught practitioners, encourages one to speculate on the merits of orthodox art and science compared with the wild schemes pursued by these eccentrics and visionaries, some of whom are inspirational while others bludgeon you with their offbeat ideas. 

“Charming” is undoubtedly a double-edged word. Along with its perfumed allure, it carries a whiff of insincerity, of something slick and not quite earned. Add “whimsical” and you know you’re in danger of saccharine overload.  Chagall is both, plus he’s one of the most popular artists of the 20^th century. Does it get any worse?

How writers change their tune. When Robert Capa died in Vietnam in 1954, having trodden on a landmine, Ernest Hemingway was chief among those paying tribute. “It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him,” he wrote. “It is especially bad for Capa. He was so much alive that it is a hard long day to think of him as dead.” Spool back, however, to Omaha Beach, 69 years ago to the month, when they came under enemy fire.

Sir Anthony Caro, OM, is wowing them in Venice with his masterly retrospective, but for those of us who can’t get there, there is a generous helping of his characteristic late work in his first show in Gagosian’s airy large gallery. Late Caro (he’s 89, a titan of sculpture) is a revelation in the irresistible vitality with which he imaginatively and consistently finds new things to say using one of his favourite materials: rusted mild steel.

There is a palpable communication of the artist’s own enjoyment, his intelligence and his delight

Cornelia Parker came to prominence with various acts of destruction/resurrection. Some of the most famous examples include a blown-up garden shed in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, the charred remains of churches in Mass (Colder Darker Matter),1997 and Anti-Mass, 2005, and pearls fired through a shotgun in Suit, Shot by a Pearl Necklace, 1995. But within the ambiguity of creation by destruction, there is also the artist as archeologist.

It’s the centenary of the birth of William Scott, once considered to be in the pantheon of British postwar artists. But where’s the hoopla and fanfare? Like so many British painters who had their glory years in the Fifties – before the explosion of Pop art and all that – his name no longer carries much weight. Having represented Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1958, he was left out of the Royal Academy’s ambitious survey British Art of the 20^th Century some 30 years later. To what do we owe so much neglect?