Journeys With The Waste Land review – ‘If only they’d picked Cats instead!’

This attempt to connect TS Eliot’s great modernist poem with paintings by Hopper, Twombly and more ends up feeling like a stilted stagger through the shards of a masterpiece

Chris Floyd’s best photograph: the Verve meet Dorothy, the Tin Man and Scarecrow

‘I was following the band round Vegas for a week and we ended up in this tacky casino with a Land of Oz in its foyer. Richard’s not afraid to ham things up’

TS Eliot returns to Margate with art exhibition

The Waste Land inspires art exhibition in seaside town where TS Eliot wrote his poem

The Meyerowitz Stories is an excruciating watch if you aspire to make great art

The Meyerowitz Stories and Maudie offer two portraits of an artist. I know which I’d rather hang on my wall

On my radar: Jon McGregor’s cultural highlights

The novelist and short-story writer on grime music, a play about the Falklands conflict, and the educational benefits of coffee

Let no one tell you that Manchester is a long way from Sicily

‘Come on our patch playing Greensleeves again and you’ll end up in a wafer,’ I was warned by an Italian ice-cream family in the 50s

From Picasso at his mightiest to gods of American cool: the hottest art shows of 2018

Picasso reveals his most erotic year, Andreas Gursky predicts the post-truth era, O’Keeffe and Hopper hit Oxford – and the only way is Sussex for William Blake in our exhibitions preview

The 10 best things to do this week: Raymond Briggs’ The Bear and the Turner prize

Top up on festive cheer with Pins and Needles’ enchanting production and catch 2017’s best contemporary art before the exhibition closes

Ivan Chermayeff obituary

One of the leading graphic designers of his generation

Ian Langford obituary

Ornithologist, conservationist and publisher with a special interest in wildlife art

You may confer: test your knowledge of literature, music and art – Christmas quiz

What food did Samuel Pepys bury in his backyard? Which dystopian novelist had a ‘hopeless’ love affair with cricket? And how many words did Enid Blyton write per day?

Big-nosed Jesus and God as a second-rate Santa: the worst Christian art

An upside-down apostle, a puff-cheeked baby Jesus, a sub-Santa God … our writer revels in Wonder Beyond Belief, a new book celebrating the glorious weirdness of revered Christian art

Chaotic capitalism: the human sculptures of Nigeria’s sprawling Balogun market

It is one of the biggest street markets in the world, a sprawling, dazzling city within a city that is frequented by tens of thousands of people every day. Photographer Lorenzo Vitturi reveals how he captured Balogun’s vivid drama for his book, Money Must Be Made

Poem of the week – Walter Osborne: Apple Gathering, Quimperlé by Frank Ormsby

A richly described Victorian painting of a harvest scene is full of innocent joy, shadowed by what history would soon bring to the fields of northern France

On my radar: Craig Charles’s cultural highlights

The actor and DJ on Jean-Michel Basquiat, horror film Mother!, John Bishop’s chatshow, the magic of Altrincham Market and rising funksters the Allergies