‘We put a cow in the video, to signify reality. It peed everywhere’

‘We put a cow in the video, to signify reality. It peed everywhere’
The most prestigious award in architecture goes to three-person Spanish company who avoid the international limelight and ‘flee from fashions’
Muralist JR has cast a spell over the Paris museum’s glass canopy in a work that recalls the Renaissance’s eye-fooling tricks. Now can we have one for the Shard?
In her best buildings the laws of physics appear suspended, while other designs struggle when forced to meet reality
Was Beuys’s art – moulded out of everyday objects from VW vans to sausages – utopian drivel or full of remarkable foresight? Thirty years after his death, it’s time to reassesses the reputation of a sculptor, teacher, activist and shaman
A genre-breaking war story, a widow uncovering the secret life of her dead husband, the comic fortunes of a young woman trying to find a dream job… just a few of the subjects chosen by our pick of 2016’s debut novelists
Ai Weiwei enthralled you, the Victorians made you weep, and the Eameses took the chair. You read our critics’ top picks of 2015, and now here are your best-loved exhibitions of the year
A show in Strasbourg explores the life of the influential 20th century poet, art writer and collector
Photographer Pierre Gonnord on how he captured the last gasps of a dying industry
The novelist talks about nearly packing it in after his first book was rejected 78 times, growing up listening to Eurythmics and Pet Shop Boys – and A Brief History of Seven Killings, his multi-voiced epic about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley
Collector billionaires arriving by super-yacht will be greeted by a team of performers reading Das Kapital every day for the next six months. Charlotte Higgins talks to the Venicle Biennale director Okwui Enwezor about revolution, racism and the small matter of Rolls-Royce sponsorship