Each Thursday, I am going to round up the main arts stories of the week. Here's the first instalment.
• It was Turner prize shortlist week. Here's Adrian Searle's verdict on Spartacus Chetwynd, Paul Noble, Elizabeth Price, and Luke Fowler. Fowler is yet another Glaswegian – or, rather Glasgow-based artist. He studied in Dundee. (Trivia: Elizabeth Price was in the 1980s indie band Talulah Gosh, as was the philosophy editor of Oxford University Press and the chief economist and director of mergers at the Office of Fair Trading.)
• Arts Council England/the BBC launched the Space. The reports mostly focused on the fact that John Peel's record collection will gradually be made available to rifle through online, but perhaps you should think of it as a "YouTube for the arts" as Ben Hoyle of the Times put it (£). Available online, or as an app for tablets, or on "The Space" Channel on TV (channel 117 Freeview HD), it aims to be a place where great performances are captured and made available to view. There will be live and archive material. At the moment, you can see early films by Ken Russell et al, and, as they are performed and filmed, all 37 of the Shakespeare plays at the Globe this summer. David Shrigley and David Fennessy's Pass the Spoon will be streamed live this weekend. It is hoped that this six-month pilot will become a permanent project. It could have significant ramifications for the way the arts are consumed in Britain and their availability to a broad audience.
• Munch's pastel The Scream sells for $120m (£74m) in New York: the highest price for a work of art ever sold at auction. What The Scream means and why it matters: essay from Peter Aspden in the FT.
• The Mary Beard saga, amazingly, continues. This was the week that Mary Beard stopped being "just" a classics professor and entered the realms of showbiz (I hope only briefly, for her own sanity). The latest iteration is a Telegraph piece saying she won't lose any sleep over the latest round of insults.
• The big literary review of the week has been James Wood on Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies by James Wood in the New Yorker. Stuart Kelly responded to his remarks on historical fiction (a "gimcrack genre") on the Guardian books blog.
• Lucian Freud left £96m in his will, but didn't seem to mention the grandchildren. His assistant, David Dawson, was left £2.5m and the house in Holland Park. Story in the Sunday Times (£).
Long read: Tom Morton on Olympo-art in Frieze.
What's coming up? The winners of Arts Council England/DCMS Catalyst awards to help arts organisations establish endowments are expected to be announced soon. Add your own irony at will.
