Autumn arts: our critics pick the best shows, film, music, books and TV

The world of culture is raring to go … from Steve McQueen’s first TV drama to Tracey Emin and Munch, here’s our pick of the season

Everyday Heroes: key workers celebrated at Southbank, where hundreds face sack

Artists’ heartfelt tributes to friends and relatives who battled through the Covid pandemic make a striking outdoor portrait show, even as the arts centre’s own workers face redundancies

Judith Black’s best photograph: an intense time with my family on Father’s Day

‘I took group shots of my children whenever they were about to go away on holiday. I’d use them as bookmarks. It meant I still had them with me’

German library pays £2.5m for ‘friendship book’, 400 years after it first tried to buy it

Philipp Hainhofer’s Das Große Stammbuch, signed by influential 17th-century Europeans, acquired by Herzog August Bibliothek

JJ Gonson’s best photograph: a smile from Elliott Smith

‘There was this cult of personality around him – the dark, tortured figure – but this shows the tip of the hat, the sideways glance: that’s the actual person’

The big picture: a tender family moment with JFK

A candid shot of the young senator by Life magazine’s Ed Clark portrayed him as a man to lead a new generation into a new decade

Giles Andreae: ‘Every creative thing I’ve done was rejected before it was accepted’

The writer and illustrator, 54, talks about cruel teasing of redheads, defeating cancer, being remembered as a radiator and his slightly superior identical twin

Yorkshire church to be adorned with Chronicles of Narnia statues

St Mary’s church in Beverley commissions sculptures of CS Lewis characters to replace medieval carvings

A mushroom-related brush with mortality: how John Cage fell for fungi

Despite one foraging trip landing him in hospital, the avant garde composer held a lifelong passion for mycology

‘You’ll have to die to get these texts’: Ocean Vuong’s next manuscript to be unveiled in 2114

Vietnamese-American author and poet joins Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Karl Ove Knausgård to lock away work in Norway to be published in 94 years’ time

‘If you’re a dude, you may be tensing up’: the woman making art out of mansplainers

Comedy writer Nicole Tersigni got fed up of men explaining her own jokes back to her. So she paired their patronising comments with classical art – and went viral

The Jonathan Cape/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize 2020 – enter now!

The annual award for aspiring cartoonists offers the chance to be published and win a cheque for £1,000, with past winners going on to land film and book deals

My father, Picasso: secret daughter tells of posing in pink bootees

A new book of family memories paints the artist as doting dad, rather than the callous, ageing womaniser of other recent depictions

Looted landmarks: how Notre-Dame, Big Ben and St Mark’s were stolen from the east

They are beacons of western civilisation. But, says an explosive new book, the designs of Europe’s greatest buildings were plundered from the Islamic world – twin towers, rose windows, vaulted ceilings and all

Sex, lies and text messages: the photographer snapping New Yorkers’ private thoughts

Drug deals, hook-ups, break-ups and secret code – Jeff Mermelstein’s snatched photographs of New Yorkers’ texts reveal that the city still has its wild side