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Romans, Nazis, Victorian-era Brits, noughties cat-burglars – they have all stolen priceless works. Here are the most shocking art thefts of the last two millennia, writes Ivan Lindsay
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Oliver Wainwright: As the Lego-loving, mountain-making hero of Danish architecture descends on London for the first time, take a look at his most outlandish projects
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Earthquake tours in China, Nazi massacre villages in France and genocide memorials from Rwanda to Cambodia ... Ambroise Tézenas’s unsettling images show the people drawn to honeypot dark tourism sites around the world
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Jonathan Jones: Photographs can be powerful, beautiful, and capture the immediacy of a moment like nothing else. But they make poor art when hung on a wall like paintings
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Lost for more than 50 years since they were featured in Life magazine, Gordon Parks’s stunning images show daily life for one Alabama family in the shadow of race riots, bus boycotts and the fight for civil rights
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To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the National Museum of the American Indian is displaying 300 pieces of jewellery made by one Native American family in New Mexico. The show explores the jewellery’s historical, commercial, artistic and cultural significance and explores the meanings behind its symbolism
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‘Living in the East End then was a nightmare. People had a better time during the war’
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‘I like sausages and I like Germany,’ the Glasgow-based artist tells Oliver Milman of a 400m-long coiled sausage (called Beginning, Middle and End) he has brought to Melbourne
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American artist Nick Cave’s vast practice spans performance, fashion, music, dance and these human-sized wearable sculptures on show at Sydney’s Carriageworks
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Bruce Munro returns for third year to create sculptural installations through National Trust property’s gardens
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At first glance you might be forgiven for thinking that these images are supersized art work. But look a little closer and you’ll see incredible contortionists covered with intricate body art
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News: By donating his Picasso-riffing piece Gazing Ball (Charity), Koons has helped raise money for vaccination and education programmes – and he’s part of an art world increasingly given to donations of valuable work
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Painting of lost Italianate garden in Wales has been in same family since owner Mutton Davies commissioned it in 1665
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Artist says he had forgotten all about series of kaleidoscopic artworks made in Wiltshire in early 1990s and inspired by India
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Final pieces of scaffolding are being removed from Jesse Window after three-year restoration project
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Artist’s personal archive containing unseen images and home movies is hailed as ‘a revelation’
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Revival for photo format joins other analogue passions endorsed by new celebrity generation, writes Tess Reidy
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Works by Monet, Degas, Picasso and other artists among largest gift ever made to Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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Ceramic artist Paul Cummins says he didn't realise how popular the idea would be after an estimated four million people visited his poppies installation at the Tower of London
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New annual Somerset House event aims to become the best photography fair in the world
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Life-sized iron figures will be installed at five waterside sites including charity’s buildings in Suffolk and Bristol Channel
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Australia’s top architecture awards dominated by projects that provided community benefits, including a refurbished toilet block
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Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red display will close, despite political appeals
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Sale of impressionist and modern art took in a total of $422.1m
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The Abelló Collection on display at CentroCentro Cibeles includes pieces by Picasso, Dali, Matisse and Miro
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As Margaret Tuckson, artist’s wife and unlikely life model for his work, bequeaths 22 paintings to galleries across Australia, David Marr remembers her
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Although NYPD reports 24% increase in complaints about graffiti, proponents of street art say police and gentrifiers are resisting a growing art form
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The Triumph of the Eucharist reveals four of the artist’s tapestries and the newly restored paintings they were taken from, in a landmark exhibition
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To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the National Museum of the American Indian is displaying 300 pieces of jewellery made by one Native American family in New Mexico. The show explores the jewellery’s historical, commercial, artistic and cultural significance and explores the meanings behind its symbolism
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American artist Nick Cave’s vast practice spans performance, fashion, music, dance and these human-sized wearable sculptures on show at Sydney’s Carriageworks
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Gallery: Photographer Tod Papageorge documented the beautiful people he found inside glittering New York disco club Studio 54 – in all their debauchery, glamour and cool
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This year’s Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize 2014 has been won by David Titlow – see his work here along with the other shortlisted images, plus highlights from the rest of the exhibition – including some by Guardian photographers
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The Hungarian artist who pioneered photojournalism, influencing Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï, is back in the spotlight with an auction of his most moving images
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The eco apartment block One Central Park in Sydney has been named best tall building in the world, topping a list dominated by the Asia-Pacific region
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In Japan, like most other countries, funeral arrangements tend to left to loved ones – but the latest trend in the land of the rising sun is for the elderly to prepare their own funerals and graves
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Gallery: Drawn from 500 years of archives in the library at the American Museum of Natural History, this book documents the often fantastical creatures that were believed to be living in the depths of the sea – be they horses with webbed feet or stunningly rendered octopuses
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The winners of this year’s Take a View landscape photographer of the year awards have been announced. An exhibition will run for nine weeks starting 1 December on the mezzanine level of Waterloo station in London
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If a collection of boxes doesn’t sound like art, meet artist Sean Rafferty, whose part project, part exhibition Cartonography, shows there’s more to fruit and veg cartons than meets the eye
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In 1964, Andy Warhol’s studio was transformed by Billy Name, a lighting designer who became the artist’s lover and photographer of the Factory’s glory years
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For this week’s photography assignment in the Observer New Review we asked you to share your photos on the theme of ‘close’ via GuardianWitness. Here’s a selection of our favouritesShare your photos on this week’s theme: ‘chill’
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Table tennis and pop art come together in The Art of Ping Pong, writes Kathryn Bromwich
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The anniversary of Typhoon Haiyan, the continuing crisis on the Turkish-Syrian border, the murmurations of starlings – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week
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Gallery: A new exhibition documents the work of royal photographer Francis Bedford from the Middle East in 1862, showing the dignitaries, landscapes and classical ruins from a time untouched by modernity
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Gallery: Portrait Salon was founded in 2011 by Carole Evans and James O Jenkins to showcase the best of the rejected images from the Taylor Wessing photography prize, which is organised annually by the National Portrait Gallery in London – here are the best of this year’s selection
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Gallery: The standup comedian and sitcom star has amassed a remarkable collection of African art, from Senegalese sculpture to South African street photography. Some of its fabulous works go on show in Washington DC
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By weighing down the characters and distorting similar letters, this new typeface pins words firmly to the page
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Diana Matar’s poetic photographs taken on a visit to her husband’s homeland trace the missing and murdered opponents of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime – including her father-in-law, writes Sean O’Hagan
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Jonathan Jones: Philosemitism – the appreciation of Jewish culture – has been hotly debated of late, in the wake of a new book by Julie Burchill and against a backdrop of Middle Eastern conflict. We should look to Rembrandt and Michelangelo to celebrate its true spirit
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Design futures: Microsoft’s GPS-enabled navigation headset provides directions and live transport information, and ‘paints a picture of the world through sound’
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Jonathan Jones: As the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall arrives, a British Museum exhibition is a reminder of the incredible richness of German arts and crafts – and shows us how history can have a happy ending
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Pop art’s most controversial figure explores fantasy and fetish at the Royal Academy, and we celebrate a masterpiece of peversity that’s more than 450 years old
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Jonathan Jones: The self-righteousnessness of British museums stops them from returning masterpieces pillaged long ago to their rightful owners. It’s time they stopped hogging the world’s treasures
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It’s been 20 years since the national lottery first began providing funding for public building in the UK. Here, Rowan Moore reflects on the legacy of a venture responsible for the Eden Project, Tate Modern – and the Millennium Dome
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Jonathan Jones: The debate over the Tower of London’s poppy sculpture hots up, as northern England gets its first Andy Warhol solo show – all in your favourite weekly art roundup
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Jonathan Jones: 3D ‘experiences’ cannot replace seeing Michelangelo’s wonderful art in the flesh. Does Italy just hate tourists?
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Oliver Wainwright: Viktor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities contains skeletons, pickled genitals, giant eggs and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. The eccentric collector says he’s “trying to get the whole world in here”
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Jonathan Jones: Four million people will flock to see the 888,246 ceramic poppies deposited in the Tower’s moat to mark Remembrance Day. It’s disturbing that, 100 years on, we can only mark this terrible war as a nationalistic tragedy
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The photographer, who has died aged 60, had a dramatically contrasting style to his great friend Nan Goldin, but their subjects were intertwined, writes Sean O’Hagan
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Jonathan Jones: The woman behind Ally Sloper, the feckless rogue who became a hero for a fusty age, is finally getting the attention her husband may have stolen
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Vandals took centre-stage this week, with Paul McCarthy’s Tree sculpture targeted for its resemblance to a butt plug, and Banksy and Jeff Koons art spray-painted
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Jonathan Jones: The scathing satirist William Hogarth put Britain’s painters on the map, but on the 250th anniversary of his death you’ll have a hard time seeing his work
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The first UK exhibition devoted to the eerie mystery of this 19th-century master shows just how precociously modern he was, writes Jonathan Jones
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His collaborations with Kanye West and Louis Vuitton have made him rich and famous, but the Japanese artist’s new works, inspired by Fukushima, are more than gaudy trinkets for the super rich
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Zoe Williams goes among the women as fetish furniture at the RA’s new show to find out
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Compelling and strangely modern, the Met’s 400th anniversary show demonstrates that El Greco saw painting as more than just a craft. It was a philosophical, intellectual and religious undertaking
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Tate Liverpool does Warhol proud by focusing on the fine distinctions between the multiple versions of his art for all, writes Laura Cumming
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Transmitting Andy Warhol review – white light and black angels in an immersive explosion
5 / 5 starsThe first major Andy Warhol exhibition in the north of England recreates the world of the Factory and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – and Warhol is revealed in all his compassion and searing insight -
A new show of UK artists’ responses to the Spanish civil war is dominated by Picasso’s emotive works, but British artists also realised Spain was an ominous testing ground for future conflict, writes Jonathan Jones
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A summer blockbuster exhibition reveals the role Australian art played in the most influential art movement of our time, writes Andrew Frost
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A new tribute to those who died in northern France during the first world war brings a fresh view to a land heavy with monuments, writes Rowan Moore
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Emily Carr captured the wild landscapes of early 1900s British Columbia in paintings so vivid you can almost hear them, writes Laura Cumming
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Once notorious for his paintings encrusted with elephant ordure, Chris Ofili has blossomed into a complex, confident artist whose best work is his most recent
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Nudes by everyone from Warhol to Emin are enticing, disturbing, distorting, masturbatory but ultimately most revealing of us as viewers, writes Adrian Searle
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With such a vague focus on ‘the human condition’, it’s no wonder the 10 artists at the UK’s biggest art prize exhibition have conjured such a disparate show, writes Adrian Searle
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Half of 16th-century Bergamo has turned out for Giovanni Battista Moroni’s riveting show at the Royal Academy, writes Laura Cumming
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From copulating plastic dinosaurs to crucified Ronald McDonalds and the severed feet of God, the arch-provocateurs’ teeming macabre landscapes offer a powerful vision of modern brutality, writes Jonathan Jones
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The Austrian artist’s passionate love of women is illuminated in one of the most important – and sexy – exhibitions of the year, writes Jonathan Jones
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Giovanni Battista Moroni at the Royal Academy review – quietly magical and erotically charged
4 / 5 starsThe little known 16th-century Italian painter loved to paint exquisite clothing and craftsmen, but it was lavish portraits of men that really inspired him, writes Jonathan Jones -
This astonishing show reveals Rembrandt at his most profoundly original and compassionate, writes Laura Cumming
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As an absorbing new show reveals, William Morris’s belief that everyone should make art had a huge impact on the 20th century, writes Rachel Cooke
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Frank Gehry’s new art museum for Louis Vuitton needed a smaller budget, writes Rowan Moore
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Ceramic artist Paul Cummins says he didn't realise how popular the idea would be after an estimated four million people visited his poppies installation at the Tower of London
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Fashion duo Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales – better known as Romance Was Born – discuss the NGV's new gallery show for kids
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Artist Jeff Makin climbs aboard as eight decorated art trams brighten up Melbourne's streets for the second year running
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Highlights from the 13th Alternative Miss World competition held at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on London's South Bank
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A 60-ft tall green inflatable sculpture has caused a stir among Parisians for its resemblance to a sex toy
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Mega art fair Frieze London is about to swing its doors wide – but just how many kilos of coffee will the art world consume this week, and what's the biggest bargain ever bagged there? Our animation spills its secrets
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Duncan Campbell was nominated for a film, It For Others, which draws on a huge library of archive footage to look at a host of complex histories: the IRA, African art, and the language of advertising. He shows how his work came together
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Ciara Phillips set up a workshop and invited artists to come and collaborate – the result is a series of bright screenprints, but also a sense of shared inspiration. She explains how the project came together
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Using the precarious analogue technology of slide projectors, paired with his own recorded voice, Tris Vonna-Michell creates poignantly fractured travelogues that have won him a Turner prize nomination. Here he explains his work in more detail
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In the first of a series following 2014's Turner prize nominees at work in their studios, James Richards talks us through his 'abstract sculpture' which takes in film, sound and photography in a disquieting whole – from sources like submerged cameras and censored Japanese library books
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The Turner prize, launched 30 years ago, remains a focal point for British art and all its invention, vision and public outrage. Tate director Nicholas Serota and The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones consider its legacy, ahead of 2014's exhibition opening this week
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Chinese artist Ai Weiwei talks about his newest exhibition at the Alcatraz prison. Take a tour of his large scale installations using Lego, traditional kites and porcelain flowers at the famous San Francisco penitentiary
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You're probably familiar with Milton Glaser's work, even if you don't know it. The graphic artist is the man responsible for creating the ubiquitous 'I love NY' logo that adorns T-shirts, coffee cups, bags and caps across the world
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In this exclusive video for the Guardian, philosopher Alain de Botton gives his top five reasons why art is such a vital force for humanity. Are we wrong to like pretty pictures? Watch and find out
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A super-sized rubber duck arrives in the Californian harbour to take part in the Tall Ships Festival
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From Lloyds to Leadenhall: architect Graham Stirk gives a guided tour of the tallest office skyscraper in the UK
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It's not a hi-tech art heist, but a brand new way to explore art galleries by night. Design team The Workers have created four robots that will roam Tate Britain for five nights. Oliver Wainwright gets the first glimpse of the robots' eye view
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Mark Neville spent two months as a war artist with British troops in Afghanistan in 2011. In this silent, slow-motion film shot in Lashkar Gah from a Husky armoured vehicle, he records Afghans' reactions to the troops – some warm, some hostile
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Ever wondered what a wave looks like in extreme closeup? For Waves, the artist and programmer Memo Akten has mapped the motion of the ocean in digital images. In other words, don't click if you get seasick
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A small-format Francis Bacon triptych of his lover George Dyer sells for £26.7m at a London auction