When in 2004 Frida Kahlo’s bedroom – sealed on the command of her husband Diego Rivera for 50 years from her death – was opened, a trove of clothes and personal items was discovered.

The daily car ferry from Newhaven in Sussex to Dieppe in Normandy is an unlikely phenomenon. Neither port is very large; neither region very populous, and the journey sways you along for four contemplative hours. It enjoys the custom of truckers, school parties, and retired caravan-owners. But it also caters for art lovers with time on their hands.

It’s not as immersive as New York’s The Gates, 2005, nor as magnificent as Floating Piers, 2016, in Italy’s Lake Iseo – it has also, according to Hyde Park regular Kay, “scared away the ducks,” – but superstar artist Christo’s The London Mastaba looks quite absurdly unreal and is totally free for the public.

In just five years, what the team behind Hidden Door Festival has achieved is quite remarkable. Having sprung up in 2014, taking over a group of disused vaults behind Waverley train station, the festival’s mission to transform redundant spaces in Edinburgh has left an immovable, and much needed, creative footprint on the city.

Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims.

As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary.

“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” was a vision of the American flag, that star-spangled banner, riding proud from Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem of 1814 based on an episode in the War of 1812. His sentiments were decades later rather improbably set to the tune of a popular drinking song from a London gentlemen’s club, metamorphosing into the official American national anthem by Act of Congress in 1931 – you couldn’t make it up.

Photo London seems much better this year, mainly because I am at last able to find my way around the labyrinthine Somerset House without getting lost in photography. Things got off to a good start when I bumped into Annie Leibovitz in reception. Actually "bumped into" isn’t quite the right expression – she and her entourage went through like an express train.

This weekend the Royal Academy (R.A) celebrates its 250th anniversary with the opening of 6 Burlington Gardens (main picture), duly refurbished for the occasion. When it was dirty the Palladian facade felt coldly overbearing, but cleaning it has highlighted the bands of sandstone and brown marble columns that lend warmth to the Portland stone. Originally built in the garden of Burlington House as the HQ for the University of London, this Victorian edifice turns out to be rather handsome. 

In his 1991 novel Mao II, Don DeLillo called the literary medium “a democratic shout”. His oft-quoted claim is that any man or woman on the street could strike it lucky, find their voice, and write a great book. Not only does everyone carry round a novel, but those novels are potentially brilliant. Well, it’s not a Pulitzer nomination but in Brighton right now, any ordinary Joe can walk in off the street and find their art put on the wall at the city’s foremost gallery.