The Jerwood Gallery on Stade beach in Hastings has so far had a fraught if very short history. Local opposition, largely from the neighbouring fishing community, have campaigned relentlessly against the gallery, fearing that it would ruin the Stade's rustic charm and bring little or no benefit to most locals. There's negative graffiti among the huts surrounding the Jerwood and a bright orange "NO to Jerwood" banner still hangs on one of the iconic black “net shop” towers beside the gallery, fully visible from the gallery's foyer.

The first major retrospective of the videos, photographs and sculptures of Gillian Wearing is a deeply disturbing experience. Her videos can be just a few minutes, or as long as an hour, but are not sequential narratives. They can be dipped in and out of - unlike many video artists you do not have to acquiesce to her time scale. But take a lot of time: they are more than worth it, and repay repeated viewings.

The British grand tourists not only fell in love with Italy. They fell in love with the landscapes of 17^th-century ex-pat artist Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682), depicting the Roman campagna in which the gods disported themselves. JMW Turner (1775-1851) also fell for the Frenchman, whose work he had seen in significant stately homes while visiting his patrons. Turner studied and copied, and it is the anatomy of this artistic love affair over two centuries that is exposed, to enchanting effect, in the National Gallery’s spring exhibition.

Louise Bourgeois tirelessly, obsessively documented her 32 years of psychoanalysis. Before the discovery of her secret cache of personal musings – sheaves of hand-written notes outlining dreams and psychic burdens, doodles and self-excoriating lists – nobody had any idea that the celebrated French-American artist, who’s often been associated with Surrealism, had undergone such protracted, intensive therapy, even though it’s really all there in her work in terms of its feverish Freudian symbolism.

Royal families and royal academies. Aristocrats at ease in exquisitely landscaped gardens or inside in gorgeous drawings rooms. Actors emoting, notably Sir David Garrick and his troupe. Nabobs in India. All are depicted in Johan Zoffany’s rivetingly detailed paintings of Georgian society.

It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film.

Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an emphasis on the varied materials in use today, a capacious but not unlimited mission. The other reason is that the work is just damned good.

Two superb exhibitions at Tate Modern bring into public view the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and Italian conceptualist Alighiero Boetti; their work is not in any way connected except that, with their singular voices, each deserves much broader recognition.

A show about lines: my tiny minimalist heart goes pitter-patter. And with good cause. Lines can be a bit blah – a quick scribble, and you’re on to the next thing. But they can also by their very simplicity, their irreduceability, lay bare some fundamentals, can draw a line under (yes, lots of “line” jokes available: line right up!) what really matters.

A remarkably tidy parade of thousands upon thousands of objects, neatly grouped into their categories – soap, plastic bottles, cooking pots and utensils, empty cardboard boxes, shoes, flower pots, gloves, string, to name but a few – Waste Not is a deeply disturbing yet affecting display of the obsessive accumulation of sheer stuff. These are the household goods of Zhao Xiang Yuan, the mother of the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong, collected over five decades of family life.