Trisha Brown Dance Company, Tate Modern & Queen Elizabeth Hall

Magical dance takes flight among the sculptures - and Q&A with Brown

A snaky conga of women in white pantsuits snuggling their loins together in a Spanish dance, and wiggling their way along a wall behind a Joseph Beuys installation may well be one of the indelible sights of my dance year. Mine, and that of only a few dozen other people, who happened to be in the right Tate Modern gallery at the right moment when this extraordinary little event took place.

Film: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Is modern art more fun to do than look at?

Action-movie season ain't over quite yet, folks. Sure. OK. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow isn't exactly your conventional salute to Armageddon. No guns, no baddies, no hot babes, no long-haired hunks. The pace is slow. The dialogue's pretty non-existent - and mostly European. The setting is pastoral. The soundtrack is Ligeti. It is, in fact, mostly pure, unadulterated arthouse. But still Sophie Fiennes's documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer, I would contend, could also be seen as one of the finest action movies ever made. Certainly, it's got to be the only one to feature a leading man who cycles around his Ardèche studio in roomy linen slacks and sandals.

theartsdesk in Monte Carlo: Nouveau Musée Nationale de Monaco

A new cutting-edge museum may provide a culture shock for the land of bling

Famous for its fast cars, casino, and stashing away Sir Philip Green’s gazillions, the principality of Monaco certainly isn’t a destination short on bling, nor a sense of faded, somewhat seedy glamour. So it probably isn’t high on anyone’s list for culture, least of all for contemporary art. But things are definitely on the turn: a new museum offering a genuinely challenging programme of international contemporary art has recently opened.

Art Gallery: Pordenone Montanari, An Italian Discovery

A reclusive painter comes out into the light. Is he a lost genius?

Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.

Herb Alpert, Tijuana Brass and Other Delights, BBC Four

Tijuana Brass trumpeter revealed as man of multiple parts

I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily, this excellent documentary proved that I was right all along by building a watertight case for regarding him as something of a neglected legend.

Rachel Whiteread: Drawings, Tate Britain & Gagosian Gallery

The art of the thinker: drawings show the art behind the art

Rachel Whiteread is best known for her exploration of space, of presence and absence, of how we look at what is present – and absent – in the textures of our lives. House, her life-sized cast of a house in a derelict street in East London, first brought her to fame, and more recently Untitled (Plinth), her mockingly affectionate take on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, a resin-cast replica of the plinth itself, literally shaped a new viewpoint of that absence in the heart of the West End.

Art Gallery: Fourth Plinth Commission

A playfully subversive mood dominates this strong shortlist

A playful, subversive mood dominates the shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Most of the six proposals, in what is a very strong shortlist, play on notions of British identity, probing themes of heroism, heritage and conquest. The models, which include a cock (the winged variety), a cake and a kid on a rocking horse, were unveiled yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson. Two winners will be selected next spring, with the first appearing on the Plinth at the end of next year. The six are:

Antony Gormley: Test Sites, White Cube

A 'glow-in-the-dark' grid and human-shaped figures that feel more like works in progress

Many people use that weaselly phrase about Antony Gormley, saying he “divides the critics”. For the most part this is not true: for the most part the critics loathe Gormley’s work. They suggest he is either a bad figurative sculptor masquerading as a conceptual artist, or a bad conceptual artist masquerading as a figurative sculptor. This is really just a whinge that he doesn’t fit in a box, but so what?

Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery

It's a bit like the Royal Academy Summer Show trying to do 'edgy'

These days, it seems that approaching any new Saatchi exhibition, especially one that promises to be even bigger than all the previous ones held at the multi-galleried, three-storey Chelsea venue, makes the heart fairly sink. How much bigger, you want to ask, and why use size as a measure of anything?  Surely there isn’t enough headspace to accommodate all those loud, clamorous, “look-at-me” artworks favoured by Saatchi all in one go? And this is just Part One. Part Two will be something to look forward to in late October.

David Nash, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

A spellbinding 40-year career retrospective of the sculptor who works in wood

Wood is a mysterious substance. We do not make it, it makes itself. It is useful to us, alive and dead. Without it, our history would not be the same. But it is so ever-present, so much a part of that history, that we rarely see the wood for the trees. David Nash has seen both the wood and the trees for years. To him, wood is life.

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