‘People are picking the dumbest fights’: the tortured history of America’s culture wars

In a new book, Isaac Butler goes back to the 1980s to trace how battles started against the arts, from Piss Christ to Mapplethorpe, and looks at what we can learn for today

Beth McKillop obituary

Museum curator and scholar with a special focus on Korean art

Depraved by Daisy Dixon review – a history of dark and dangerous art

From classical painting to video games, this survey of the taboo and the twisted won’t let you look away

Game of stones: how paintings of marble reveal a world of magical medieval mysticism

From trippy swirls to blood-soaked slabs, a new book mines gothic and renaissance art for the supernatural significance of the precious rock

Pass the sick bag! Why I published a book on the art of the airline essential

One evoked a hellish trip from Delhi after passengers had drunk unsanitary water. Another conjoured up an era when planes were thick with cigarette smoke. And one man collected them all …

From a Shakespeare First Folio to Bowie’s handwriting: inside Mona’s new $100m library of 30,000 books

After 10 years of planning, four years of construction and a budget that blew out almost 10 times over, Phrontisterion is finally open in Hobart

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing audiobook review – solitude and creativity in Manhattan

Tilda Swinton narrates this landmark study of how New York artists from Edward Hopper to Andy Warhol have lived with loneliness

From Bloomsbury to Whitehall: new play reimagines life of John Maynard Keynes

The Standard of Living by James Graham traces economist’s influence on British politics and culture

Photographer Don McCullin to focus on Vietnam for his final book

Exclusive: The work will feature some of the photographer’s most powerful images from his 70-year career

‘Wear something that makes you feel silly!’ Can Austin Kleon’s tips put the spark back in my life?

If you’re in a rut, kids can show you the way out. That’s the latest message from the author of the bestselling Steal Like an Artist. I asked him to help me rediscover my playful, creative side …

Ruth Artmonsky obituary

Other lives: Co-founder of the psychometric testing consultancy SHL who went to write books about art and design

The Guardian view on the UK’s first centre for illustration: visual literacy, and the sheer joy of images, matter

Editorial: A national institution for this overlooked artform shows it is finally getting the recognition it deserves

How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’

A new book looks back at the work of artist and journalist Garry Trudeau and how he told the story of a country’s highs and lows through a comic strip

‘Writing is exactly like love – you need to do it in the dark’: novelist Leila Slimani on starting a new chapter in her life

Now in residence at the Madrid Prado, the author talks about its dark, inspirational Goyas, the clandestine nature of her writing – and why she finally wrote about her jailed then posthumously exonerated father

Stripteases, ecstatic embraces and a dog in a dress: the full-on photos celebrating queer dancefloors worldwide

A thrillingly unsanitised new photo book captures the liberating power of queer clubs in all their sexy, messy, kinky, cacophonous glory. ‘I wanted it to feel like a night out,’ says the woman behind it