The artist Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was way ahead of her time. A Swedish mystic who believed that spirits were guiding her hand, she was a contemporary of Kandinsky and Mondrian but her abstract art remained unrecognised. She didn’t fit in to the male-dominated art world.

Alejandra Ghersi – Arca – is one of the most influential musicians on the planet in the last decade. Even aside from working with huge names like Björk and Kanye West, her ultra-detailed, high drama, electronic abstractions have set the pace for a legion of artists from very underground to ultra-pop.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp gave her work titles like Movement of Lines, yet there’s nothing dull about her drawings and paintings. In her hands, the simplest compositions sizzle with tension and dance with implied motion. Animated Circles 1934 (main picture), consists of blue, grey and black circles on a white ground. The off-kilter design makes them appear to shuffle, nudge, float or bounce; you feel light-hearted and light-headed just looking at them.

They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by conical horns that emanate a gentle angelic howling or lower end drone-hums. Eyes closed – and being music-geeky about it – this carefully calibrated tonal concerto assails the ears somewhere between US mystic Laraaji’s processed gong experiments and the final ethereal works of Spacemen 3.

Arguably one of the most poignant effects of the lockdown has been to simultaneously draw attention to the connections between the arts and the distinct ways they have evolved into their own forms.

The national treasure that is Grayson Perry, CBE, RA, is hosting a six-episode national art club on Channel 4 for professional artists, amateur artists and the public. Since Perry came to national attention when he won the Turner Prize he has been happily ubiquitous. He may well be the country’s most effective proponent of the visual arts, as well as its most famous transvestite.

This is a book about experiences that go beyond reading about art. Martin Gayford’s 20 short essays about press trips and self-motivated travel concern meetings – in the flesh, in real time and space – with art that includes murals, sculptures and glacier waters, and with artists through interviews and studio visits. For a book whose title is a riff on Nancy Mitford’s touching novel, The Pursuit of Love, it is also a subtle paean to the enormous variety of objects, buildings and paintings that we deem art, as well as its history and practitioners.

In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is somewhat formal but decidedly casual — trousers loose enough to bend in, a striped jumper with the sleeves rolled up, workman-like, and a shirt which looks like it has several top buttons undone.

It doesn’t get better than this! Phyllida Barlow has transformed the Royal Academy’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries into a euphoric delight. Entering the space, you have to turn right and process through the three galleries; but by closing the end door to create the cul-de-sac of the title, Barlow has turned this somewhat prescriptive lay-out into a theatrical experience.