You hardly expect to turn out for an exhibition of cutting-edge photography because of what the images are of. You go for the style, for the technique, for what’s being said about the medium and the, er, beauty. Yet at least one of the nominees for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – an event that seems to be emerging as a kind of Turner Prize for photography – belongs to the old, subject-oriented approach to the lens. A member of the legendary Magnum agency, American Jim Goldberg is a photojournalist, who travels the world looking for bad stuff – torture, refugees, human trafficking. And if he doesn’t find enough of it he doesn’t eat.

Bradford, once the worsted capital of the world, now employs fewer than 1,000 workers in the textile industry. Some of the disused mills have been transformed into tourist attractions – nearby Salts Mill has a huge collection of artwork by David Hockney and a posh bistro. Drummonds Mill has lain silent since closure, to be reopened temporarily for Freedom Studios’ production of The Mill – City of Dreams. Drummonds Mill is just north of the city centre. It’s a huge hulk of a building. You step carefully over the cobbles, and weeds, before being directed in through a back door by smiling security guards. The mill originally opened in 1862, closing for the last time in 2002. At the entrance, a huge banner announces that luxury flats are under development.

I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly.

I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps to my left, the Egyptian rooms. But then again… here are some sensual sculptures of curvaceous semi-clad women from India (main picture), while a little further on there’s a Chinese hand mirror and some boot buckles, the latter with Chinese dragons whose wings are of turquoise.

It is one of the enduring mysteries of Leon Kossoff’s art. How does someone who uses such thick, impastoed paint and such muddy, earth-toned colours make his work so light, so delicate, so filled with grace? The more you look, the more mysterious is becomes.

The unveiling of the Serpentine Pavilion (now in its 10th year) has become as much of a summer fixture as Henley. And yet it is not without controversy. Why, for instance, does the Serpentine Gallery in London insist on commissioning global stars such as Frank Gehry and now Jean Nouvel when it could be giving up-and-coming architects much needed exposure? Its original remit was to show architects who had not yet built on British soil, but though this has held true for eight of the 10 commissions, it certainly wasn't true of Gehry (who had built a cancer unit in Dundee), nor now of Nouvel: his One New Change, a shopping and office complex right next to St Paul's Cathedral, will be unveiled in the autumn. Other commissions have been by equally illustrious figures.

A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time,  not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country - jazz, music hall, Broadway, Cubism, Russian imperialism, folklore, classical piano studies, all soaked his personality and fed his imagination.