Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17^th century.

Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortality

Paul Delvaux, the subject of a modest exhibition at the Blain Di Donna gallery in Mayfair, was JG Ballard’s favourite painter. The writer prized him for the creation of a complete world. Ballard found that world curious and inviting. He said he could spend hours gazing at the pictures wishing he could escape into their alternate reality. Ballard was made of sterner stuff than me. The places Delvaux paints seem quiet but harsh, not much happens but they feel menacing. They are sparsely populated and lonely.

It’s part of the Lowry myth – the myth of many famous artists, in fact, whether or not it actually happens to be true – that he’s never been taken seriously as an artist by critics or by cognoscenti. Even the co-curator of this exhibition, T.J Clark says more or less the same. Lowry isn’t taken seriously, Clark has said, because anyone dealing with working-class life in class-ridden Britain can’t be taken seriously. Perhaps we might qualify this by adding that anyone dealing with working-class life from within it can’t be taken that seriously. Perhaps.

Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries.

One of this summer’s seaside attractions in Margate is an overstuffed walrus, but day-trippers won’t find it in the town’s Museum of Monstrosities. The taxidermic freak, on loan from the Horniman Museum, is the star exhibit in the new show at Turner Contemporary. Against the backdrop of a North Sea painted by Turner, the adipose Arctic mammal is out of its element.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is famous for its collection of antiquities: Egyptian carvings, Greek statues and Roman sculpture form the heart of its collection. Indeed, its collection of Roman portrait busts are among the finest in the world. But the 19^th century also has a strong sculptural presence. The double-bust of the founder of the museum Carl Jacobsen and his by then dead wife, Otillia – her ghostly arm placed protectively on his shoulder as she hovers behind him – might well be the most disconcerting.

One is increasingly struck by the oddity of an annual portrait prize, or at least I am. Imagine an annual still life award or an open competition for a major prize for abstract art. And imagine how formulaic and stale that would soon become. How many variations of a photorealist table laden with grapes or half drunk glasses of wine could you put up with? Or just think of all those coolly two-tone geometric canvases that’ll come pouring in.

The very tall, skeletal and formidable Henry Tonks (1862-1937), surgeon and anatomist, became one of the most decisive, influential, scathing and inspirational teachers in the history of visual education. At the Slade, in his second career as artist and teacher, he presided over several generations of London-based artists who formed the bedrock of modernism, from the absorption of Impressionism to the various isms of the turn of the last century. He referred to this cohort of his students, here being celebrated, as “a crisis of brilliance”.

I can’t wait to check out Istanbul’s galleries in a couple of years. Already endowed with an exploding arts and design scene, with Istanbul Modern in its unique location hanging over the Bosphorus, the retrospectively-looking Santral half integrated into an Ottoman power plant, and the area around Tophane sprouting art boutiques and design outlets like nobody’s business, its creative output has just been given a huge boost.

The Alternative Guide to the Universe, an exhibition of work mainly by self-taught practitioners, encourages one to speculate on the merits of orthodox art and science compared with the wild schemes pursued by these eccentrics and visionaries, some of whom are inspirational while others bludgeon you with their offbeat ideas.