For three months in the spring of 2010, New Yorkers were gripped by Abramovic fever. The mania owed its origins to a somewhat unlikely source – a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of a 63-year-old Serbian performance artist.

Performance art is not exactly mainstream entertainment and Marina Abramovic is scarcely a household name, yet such was the enthusiasm generated by her exhibition that 750,000 people visited it in three months; many of whom queued all night for an audience with the artist.

Edvard Munch strikes a heroic pose. Buck naked, he’s pointing a sword at the sky – or perhaps that’s just a stick he’s picked up in the garden, where he’s surrounded by dense greenery as he stands with his arm raised in a taut diagonal. Perhaps he is dreaming of Gram, the Norse Excalibur,  and himself as Sigurd. 

The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh. I'm a Warhol fan - 10 glowing Marilyns in a darkened room at the National Portrait Gallery is the closest I've come to a religious experience - but is there anything new to say about these overly familiar works?

The Eurozone is in crisis and the American economy stagnating; Syria is self-destructing, the Arab Spring has stalled and climate change threatens the whole planet, yet Yoko Ono believes that “the world, now, is really turning towards the light”.

They’re all here - well, most of them - the superstars of official art history. You would never get all these artists in one show if it were a painting exhibition, and it’s thrilling to see them cheek-by-jowl on the gallery walls. Drawing is widely seen as a secondary art, relegated to preparation and research for bigger works. So, of course, the majority of works in the show are studies for bigger projects from paintings to architecture.

What a mismatch of ambitions was unearthed in this Culture Show special on the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Boris Johnson admitted that he’d wanted slides on it, joking heartily that “there’s nothing too vulgar for me”, whilst Anish Kapoor wished for it to be “up there with the gods”, and mused that it had moments that were meditative and contemplative. Meanwhile, the artist expressed sheer horror that the Olympic Authorities where keen to call it “an attraction”, despite the public’s insistence on calling it a helter-skelter.

In May 1958, Yves Klein invited the Parisian art world to the Galerie Iris Clert for the opening of his latest exhibition, which was entitled The Specialisation of the Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility. Driven by ample press coverage, large crowds eagerly awaited the unveiling of the artist’s latest creation, only to be met with nothing. The gallery was empty and the artist best known for his eponymous shade of blue had left colour far behind and painted the entire space white.

Taste and class – there’s really no separating them. So when Grayson Perry decided to go "on safari through the taste tribes of Britain” he did so through the lens of class, and he started from the “bottom up”: he went to Sunderland, where big hair, big heels, short skirts and fake tans rule among the women, and the local footie team, the gym, tattoos and pimping your car does it for the men.

Thomas Heatherwick, a boyish looking 42, is a creative polymath whose inventive and innovative approach to commissions ranges from bridges to lavatory doors, town planning to beach cafes, handbags to benches, staircases to transport (notably three new buses – the first new versions of the Routemaster for years - on the #38 route from Victoria to south London.) You may have been in a Heatherwick without knowing. Another five buses are turning up for the Olympics.

“I realise how lucky I am coming from Margate. It’s a most romantic, sexy, fucking weird place to come from. I didn’t come from the suburbs.” Tracey Emin’s relationship to her hometown mirrors a familiar trajectory. Like all difficult relationships, it has chipped away at her psyche for years. Not surprisingly, we’ve sensed it played out in her work: first defiance and rejection, then a kind of ambivalent reconciliation, and finally a deep affection.