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All eyes will be on Paris this weekend to see how sales go at FIAC after the Frieze freeze. Also not to miss this month - new work by Turner Prizewinner Steve McQueen, a huge exhibition in honour of Dennis Hopper, a show of young artists' work curated by Pierre Bismuth, a new film by American artist Carter and a series of new sculptures by Francois Curlet (below). ... read more...

Two heavy-duty humidifiers ram air from the ceiling into a direct intake on the gallery floor producing a column of blustery vapour. Amidst the rumble, at the centre of the room is a vision of a galloping horse, its hooves flurrying in the evanescence of a jet stream of condensation. The room is cool and dark, the ambient noise of the machinery is nothing short of the experience of standing in a wind tunnel. ... read more...

Not to be missed this summer - a retrospective of photographs by Miroslav Tichy at the Pompidou, a group show of up-and-coming Indian artists, an exhibition by the winner of the 2007 Marcel Duchamp prize, Tatiana Trouve, and a solo show by Virginie Yassef which confronts the high and low of the built environment (below).

Human organization, and the force humans apply to nature to create man-made order, obsess Michael Sailstorfer. With his small retrospective laid out over two rooms adjacent to Terence Koh's megalomaniacal installation - a blindingly white, nuclear fallout of cuddly effigies which includes a Peter Rabbit doll being sodomized by an umbrella frame - Sailstorfer is a comparably quiet wallflower. His works strike a soft, unfamiliar tone of art from a different era. From Land art to Fluxus, the line o... read more...

Were you to create the epitome of destruction that embodied the yin and yang of light and dark, cacophony and silence, what would it look like? Banks Violette's 'No Title (Throne)' offers a spectacular answer. A Baroque pendant chandelier, like a prop from a Gothic novel, has crashed to the gallery floor, its presumptive light extinguished. Like sediment-encrusted wreckage from a sunken ship, the chandelier is covered in salt crystals that seem to have grown organically on its lustrous metallic ... read more...

On in Paris this month are solo shows by Sam Durant, Alkis Boutlis, David Renggli (below), Valerie Belin, Alec Soth, Lothar Hempel and Kader Attia.

Bernhard Hildebrandt creates work at the centre of a conceptual duality between what is seen and what remains to be seen, between the static and streaming. In his Stereo series a painting and a photo of it, printed at an identical scale, are paired in diptych format. The viewer is caught stepping between the transient surface reflections playing out on polyurethane enamelled Plexiglas and the reflections captured in its alter-ego, the narcissistic photograph. ... read more...

Highlights in Paris through April are a new installation by Gregor Schneider, Loris Greaud's monumental show at the Palais de Tokyo, more typological photographs by Candida Hofer, Olivier Sévère's mundane objects made out of unlikely materials, Olivier Babin's On Kawara-esque exploration of time, anthropomorphic sculptures by Wilfrid Almendra and Xavier Veilhan's menagerie of animals (below). ... read more...

Entering the gallery a deliciously coloured array of what at first glance appears to be leftover Christmas baubles lies scattered on a stainless steel gurney. As if being offered hardboiled candies, we are in reality presented with opalescent bombs, casts of hand grenades that would break more than your jaw if they were live.

A native of Missouri, Lisa Sanditz has trawled the American Midwest, painting scenes of bucolic oddities from a chapel made of car parts to spelunking caves. In 2006 she made her first trip to China, an experience that has set her on a new path of work examining the relationship between the Chinese and American commercial landscape.

Donald Urquhart's stark black and white works on paper are nothing if not nostalgic. From Nina Simone to fonts seamlessly lifted from the credits of The Brady Bunch '52 Girls' is a punchy show of an undefined mid-century aesthetic. Urquhart is a dramaturge and draughtsman who, like Toulouse Lautrec and Aubrey Beardsley before him, has a brooding obsession for alluring women. In a critical manner, these artists are creators who never tire of the pleasure for dressing women up, a libidinous urge, ... read more...

With the Met in New York planning to display Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living from September, it's startling how quickly the bristling avant-garde becomes the banal picture-postcard.

This week Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull, 'For the Love of God', went on view, marking a new century of art making. The artist has created a sculpture without precedent in material cost: a human skull cast in over 2 kilograms of platinum and covered with 8,601 "perfect" diamonds, crowned with a gobstopper of "a flawless light fancy pink brilliant-cut pear-shaped" rock weighing 52.40 carats alone. Its single offsetting detail is the corn kernel-sized void of a missing tooth. Claiming insp... read more...

Claudia Drake's work culls the silent macabre of nineteenth-century visual culture to produce images of haunting pensiveness. Without the need for an exacto knife, she dusts off the banality of these fragments with a keen eye for editing in a digital process, coupling the playfulness of a Picabia collage with the black humour of the mid-century Italian painter and design impresario Piero Fornasetti. ... read more...

A newly published collection of essays tackles the subject of how to put on successful exhibitions, scrutinising in particular the role of the curator. As contributor Robert Storr (the commissioner of the Venice Biennale this year) concludes: 'The primary means for "explaining" an artist's work is to let it reveal itself. Showing is telling.'

Steve Pulimood reports on how a piece of Soviet memorabilia bought by critic A A Gill for no more than £300 ended up selling at Sotheby's this week for £140,000. Recognise the hand behind the red spot?

Just months before his death Kirk Varnedoe (below), who was for 13 years Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MOMA, New York before becoming Professor of the History of Art in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, delivered the 2003 Mellon Lectures in which he ruminated on his personal experiences with abstraction. Now published in book form, Varnedoe's compelling exploration of the question 'Why all these pictures of nothing?' is reviewed here ... read more...

Jamie Salmon works in a long tradition that extends from Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) to Ron Mueck (1958- ). Messerschmitt was born in the age of enlightenment where the physiognomy of the face, and its extreme expressions were a science. Salmon's bronze offers to the viewer a fragmented stoicism, a portrait bust of statuesque vulnerability.