Video thought to show Louvre thieves escaping in a mechanical lift before fleeing on scooters. They are still at large

• Louvre director acknowledges ‘terrible failure’ after heist

• The Louvre’s new must-see? The broken window smashed by thieves

Shadow puppets, otherworldly masks, taxidermy dioramas, from Greek epics to the Brothers Grimm: a new exhibition celebrates the fantastical tales that have passed through countries and cultures

Marina Warner has spent her life studying the cultural and psychological uses of imaginative tales, be they of fairies, ghosts or saints’ lives. It’s perhaps no surprise then that The Shelter of Stories, a new exhibition curated by the leading mythographer, contains much to tingle spines as well as tickle fancies.

There are artworks drawing on alternative folkloric worlds by top contemporary artists such as Paula Rego or Kiki Smith, while old master paintings confront spiritual or social horrors. It boasts a wealth of offbeat ephemera too, including Red Riding Hood as an early kids’ board game and taxidermy dioramas with a rodent fortune teller and avian peddler of love potions. The curator’s own collection of Mexican Ex Voto paintings shows how ordinary people have recorded and given thanks for overcoming their own dramas, be it fire or an inconvenient spouse.

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Famed impressionist painter’s lesser-seen drawings are the focus of a major new exhibition that invites us into the stages of his artistic process

His luminous colours and sensual brushwork adorn countless mugs, posters and tote bags as well as blockbuster exhibitions. But the commodification of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his fellow impressionist painters has been missing something.

Renoir was an accomplished draftsman who produced a distinguished but largely unheralded collection of drawings, pastels, watercolours and prints.

This year’s edition, a statewide juggernaut spanning more than 30 exhibitions and events and a major show at the Art Gallery of South Australia, celebrates the past and present while looking to the future

Walking through the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) alongside Nici Cumpston, it’s as if the Barkandji artist and curator is surrounded by old friends.

For the past 10 years, Cumpston’s role as artistic director of Tarnanthi festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art – which this week celebrates a decade with a supersized statewide iteration spanning more than 30 exhibitions and events, including a major exhibition at AGSA – has seen her travel widely and listen deeply to bring these canvases, sculptures and video works to Kaurna country.

Readers respond to Jonathan Jones’s Tate Modern review, including the charge that the artworks ‘fail to impose themselves on the venue’s vast space’

Jonathan Jones’s review of Máret Ánne Sara’s installation at Tate Modern in London completely misses the point (13 October). The land the Sámi live in is “quite big”, just as the Turbine Hall is in Jones’s words, but the Sámi do not take over the entirety of their landscape. They live within it.

The “fort” is not a place to “hide”. That is a city-boy reading rather than a deeper understanding of the ancient methods that Sámi families use for herding reindeer in the vastness of their lands, combined with the political realities that surround them. Jones is too close to playgrounds and not close enough to the realities of the Sámi and northern political history.

Small worlds go under the microscope, botanical art is investigated, and renegades come in for a reckoning – all in your weekly dispatch

The Singh Twins and Flora Indica
A look at the colonial history behind British botany, plus a survey of Indian botanical art in the age of the East India Company.
• Kew Gardens, London, until 12 April

The revered 83-year-old Mexican photographer talks about her groundbreaking career as she celebrates her first ever retrospective in New York

If you’re at all familiar with contemporary Latin American photography, you’ve probably encountered the unforgettable image of a Zapotec woman crowned with live iguanas, radiating quiet, unshakable dignity. Captured in 1979 by Graciela Iturbide, Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán was neither planned nor staged. It was taken on impulse, guided by the artist’s instinct and deep respect for her subject, and has since become a touchstone of Mexican visual culture and feminist photography.

“What drives my work is surprise, wonder, dreams, and imagination,” Iturbide recently told the Guardian.

Still Life with Guitar, worth €600,000, noticed missing after van arrives in Granada from Madrid

Police in Spain are investigating the disappearance of a tiny Picasso painting, worth €600,000 (£520,000), which vanished en route from Madrid to an exhibition in the southern city of Granada.

The gouache and pencil work, Naturaleza muerta con guitarra (Still Life with Guitar), was due to go on show at a new exhibition at the CajaGranada foundation, which opened last week.

Tyler Mitchell takes inspiration from skateboarding, art history and British style mags to show how beauty, intimacy and empowerment are at the heart of the Black experience

The uniquely irreverent artist, whose work includes everyone from Mozart to Sonic Youth, has a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art

On a recent Friday night in the vast atrium space of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, six string players took their place in a semi-circle and began performing the first movement of one of Mozart’s most sanctified sonatas. For the first five minutes or so, the musicians played his String Quartet No 15 in D Minor exactly as it was written until, suddenly, the conductor began acting like the host of a bingo game by throwing a six-sided die, with each side representing a particular player.

“Two,” the conductor cried, before pointing at the second violinist, who immediately stopped what she was performing and began to play her part in the piece back from the start, while the others soldiered on through the score. “Four,” the conductor called after his next toss, pointing at the cellist who, likewise, went back to the beginning of his part, in the process establishing a pattern of calls and restarts that continued for the next 25 minutes. Amid the unfolding drama, one of the world’s most well-worn classical works was twisted into something strangely fresh, resulting in not so much a deconstruction of Mozart’s work as a reformation of it, with each component treated like a separate piece in a bold new puzzle.

Inspired by Gustav Klimt’s ‘golden phase’ and the religious icons of medieval Europe, US photographer Tawny Chatmon reimagines Black identity by upturning art history

180 Studios, London
CGI sea creatures ‘queer evolution’, ravers rave on, Wonder Woman goes disco … none of it makes any sense but these legendary video works from Warhol and Jarman to Nan Goldin and beyond may still just blow you away

Do exhibitions have to make sense? The people in charge at the vast, subterranean video art wonderland at 180 the Strand sure don’t seem to think so. In the past they have been masters of immersive art exhibitions in London. Their major debut, The Infinite Mix, in 2016, set a standard that all video art shows since have tried – and largely failed – to reach. This time, down in the bowels of this enormous concrete behemoth, they’ve chucked a whole bunch of video art at the walls and hoped that some of it would stick. But not much does.

It starts with Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All and Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham – three of the most important works of video art of the 1990s. Leckey’s film, a paean to rave, youth culture and getting pinged off your nut, still has an impact almost 30 years later. Wearing’s endearingly awkward silent solo danceathon in a Peckham shopping centre is one of the definitive works of its era. And if you’re looking for contemporary influence, then Rist’s video, following a smiling woman down the street as she smashes car windows with a flower, was ripped off by Beyoncé in her video for Hold Up in 2016.

Pinball, boomboxes and vintage cars! Victor Wedderburn’s photographs capture the joys – and struggles – of the era for the city’s immigrant communities

To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stage

Some primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.

And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context. The effect of the works created by the Zaria Art Society, the generation that congregated in Lagos and exhibited all over the world, was profound. Their work helped the nation to reconnect with its ancient ways, but adapted to modern times. It was a new art, brooding and celebratory. Often it was an art that hinted at the many dimensions of Nigerian mythology; often it drew upon daily realities. Spirits, ancestral presences, rituals, masquerades featured prominently, alongside popular subjects of dancing figures, portraits and landscapes, but rendered in a unique light, with a palette that was utterly unlike anything in the western tradition.

How author researched his plots and letters from Alec Guinness feature in Oxford exhibition

Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters – they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition, with the title Tradecraft, reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters’ real creator, David Cornwell.

As you enter the exhibition in Oxford University’s Bodleian library you are greeted with a large portrait of Cornwell, wearing a black bucket cap, looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his gently clasped hands. Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. “I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world,” one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: “What is loyalty – to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual’s relationship to the institutions he services?”

They may not have called themselves artists but, as a new exhibition explores, the mostly anonymous painters, sculptors and craftspeople working under the pharaohs still made their mark in distinctive style

The earliest creator in world history whose name is known to us today was Egyptian. The priest Imhotep is credited with designing the step pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara about 4,700 years ago, and so starting the sublime aesthetic achievements of the ancient state that straddled the Nile.

Yet ancient Egyptians did not imagine creativity as an individual achievement or see artists as celebrities – unless they were literally gods. Imhotep was believed to be the son of the creator god Ptah and was deified as a god of wisdom and knowledge, patron of scribes. Most Egyptian artists were no more likely to be remembered by name than Stonehenge’s builders. “Art” was not an idea. Golden mummy masks and statues of spear-wielding pharaohs were not made to be admired but to help dead people on their journeys through the afterlife. As for individual creativity, there wasn’t much place for it in art that conserved the same style, with only superficial changes, for 3,000 years.

Peter Doig soundtracks his new show, the latest Turbine Hall commission is unveiled and Frieze opens for super-rich shoppers – all in your weekly dispatch

Máret Ánne Sara
Expect an earthy, and earth-conscious, installation on a grand immersive scale from the latest commission in the Tate Turbine Hall.
• Tate Modern, London, 14 October-6 April

From an eye-opening shot of David Byrne to footballers from a bygone era, a new exhibition focuses on portraits taken before the digital age

National Portrait Gallery, London
The ‘King of Vogue’ was a desperate social climber and the world on view here seems constricted and parochial. Still, his backdrops are fabulous – usually more interesting than his subjects

At the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery’s new Cecil Beaton exhibition, there’s a wall-sized reproduction of a 1948 colour transparency, originally printed in Vogue. In it, eight coiffed white women wear elegant evening gowns by designer Charles James, chatting and preening in an 18th-century style French-panelled room. They engage only with each other, uninterested in the camera, looming larger-than-life above us. The effect on the viewer is of being excluded, unseen. This feeling only mounts as you proceed through Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, a show that presents the photographer as a sharp-tongued socialite obsessed with high society, beauty – and himself.

Beaton’s first exhibition at the NPG was in 1968. It was then the first ever solo show by a photographer at a British museum. Sixteen surviving silver gelatin prints from it are presented in the show’s first room. They are lavish, theatrical portraits of brooding beauties with dark-painted lips, a swansong to the age of elegance.

From Amazon warehouses to Olympic skiers and the crowd at a Madonna gig, his pictures have made him one of the world’s most feted photographers. So why did the German artist want to postpone his new show?

Andreas Gursky started out shooting mostly black and white landscapes on a handheld camera, but in the 1990s he switched, taking the pictures that he has now become famous for. Out went analogue and in came epic panoramas that were digitally stitched together, capturing in intricate detail and colour stock exchanges, factories, Amazon warehouses, 99 cent stores, Olympic skiers and the crowd at a Madonna concert.

“My works,” he recalls, “were selling for more and more.” In fact, his rising status in the art world was reflected in his photographs inside Prada and Gucci stores – the former was taken while he was waiting for his wife, who was shopping there. Then, in 2011, Gursky’s 1999 colour photograph Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river flowing across flat fields near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it fetched $4.3m (£2.7m), almost double its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. “How do you deal with a thing like that?” he says. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d’Ingres, which went for $12.4 million.