We know (we have the analytics) that quite a few TAD readers are not averse to a bit of arty burlesque – our candid interview with striptease artist Ursula Martinez was read by many thousands. The latest contenders in the burgeoning titillation-as-art scene are Cabaret New Burlesque who finished a three night run last night at the Charing Cross Theatre in London (it will be back, they promise).

Waiting for Woody Allen to turn in a half-decent movie is bit like inching through a recession. The green shoots of recovery are constantly hoped for, but slow to show. Now and then the new one will come along and seem marginally less dire, but prove all too chimerical. How many of the films in the last decade does anyone remember for the right reasons? And don't say Vicky Cristina Barcelona with its atrocious voiceover and pervy lesbo snog.

William Glock once claimed that Pierre Boulez could literally vomit at music he believed to be substandard. I wonder what he would have made of my friend, who fled at the interval of the opening concert of the Southbank festival on Friday blaming Boulez's Domaines for setting off a panic attack. Her physical response was certainly a welcome corrective to the nonchalance with which the critical world increasingly greets Boulez's language, many of whom still insist that the days of serialism provoking anger or revulsion are in the distant past. Boulez can still upset.

The star ballerina Sylvie Guillem was rehearsing in London when she heard about the cataclysmic Japanese earthquake last spring, and the devastating tsunami in its aftermath. It was an apocalyptic blow that she felt personally. Since her first visit there as a teenager, the internationally renowned dancer has been drawn back to Japan year after year, winning legions of friends and supporters, the culture’s aesthetic clarity and spareness influencing her taste, and complementing her own evolution from classical ballerina assoluta into contemporary dancer stupenda.

A beguiling shadow play greets and enchants on arrival: the silhouettes of three ballerinas, each performing an arabesque, are cast upon the wall as you enter. The effect, as their softly delineated forms dip and slowly rotate, is mesmerising. It’s also an apt opener to an exhibition devoted to exploring how Degas strove to achieve a sense of fluidity and movement in his paintings of dancers, a subject for which he is chiefly known.

Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than a main by way of welcome. Sound unfair?

Street art – or graffiti to give the old-money name by which many still know it – gets people going. Worthless or priceless? Criminal or cultural? Earlier this week theartsdesk carried a review of the Channel 4 documentary Graffiti Wars about the street rivalry between Banksy and Robbo. Rarely has a television review prompted so many readers to write in and comment on the site. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a vagabond art form whose practitioners are used to dodging the law and shrouding their ID behind a nom de guerre. This new set of photographs captures something of the danger and the clandestine thrill associated with street art and graffiti.

Street art – or graffiti to give the old-money name by which many still know it – gets people going. Worthless or priceless? Criminal or cultural? Earlier this week theartsdesk carried a review of the Channel 4 documentary Graffiti Wars about the street rivalry between Banksy and Robbo. Rarely has a television review prompted so many readers to write in and comment on the site. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a vagabond art form whose practitioners are used to dodging the law and shrouding their ID behind a nom de guerre. This new set of photographs captures something of the danger and the clandestine thrill associated with street art and graffiti.

There’s a strand of electro-assisted, dance-leaning French pop that’s captured the international consciousness. Phoenix and Justice are Grammy winners, while Air exemplify the cooler, more reflective end of it. The bands come from chi-chi burbs like Versailles or towns south of Paris, south of the Seine. And so it is for Housse de Racket, an outfit from Chaville, between Versailles and Paris. On the evidence of their second album, they’re potential border breakers.

When Jean Renoir returned to France at the end of 1953 after 13 years of exile, he felt as if he were beginning his career from scratch. His Hollywood films were not highly regarded, and neither The River (1951) nor The Golden Coach (1953), shot in India and Italy respectively, were successful enough to redeem his international standing among reviewers or at the box office. The critical consensus declared that he was an artist in decline. There were exceptions, of course, one of the most important being Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine founded in 1951.

Who could argue that television isn’t a great medium for learning about art? In its pared-down, visually literate way it delivers what dull, theory-laden extrapolations often can’t (if only because artists don’t think that way when they make things, and we don’t think that way when we look at things). It can breathe renewed life and vigour into a subject we think we know well, and, as a medium for simplified, pocket-sized information, it can get straight to the heart of a matter. Perfect. Possibly. And so we come to The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution.