Street art – or graffiti to give the old-money name by which many still know it – gets people going. Worthless or priceless? Criminal or cultural? Earlier this week theartsdesk carried a review of the Channel 4 documentary Graffiti Wars about the street rivalry between Banksy and Robbo. Rarely has a television review prompted so many readers to write in and comment on the site. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a vagabond art form whose practitioners are used to dodging the law and shrouding their ID behind a nom de guerre. This new set of photographs captures something of the danger and the clandestine thrill associated with street art and graffiti.

Street art – or graffiti to give the old-money name by which many still know it – gets people going. Worthless or priceless? Criminal or cultural? Earlier this week theartsdesk carried a review of the Channel 4 documentary Graffiti Wars about the street rivalry between Banksy and Robbo. Rarely has a television review prompted so many readers to write in and comment on the site. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a vagabond art form whose practitioners are used to dodging the law and shrouding their ID behind a nom de guerre. This new set of photographs captures something of the danger and the clandestine thrill associated with street art and graffiti.

Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were for books by other authors. For grotesque satiric humour and Gothic sensibility he found a perfect match in Dickens, as his rather creepy illustrations for Bleak House beautifully attest.

An article in this week's New Yorker bemoans the death of drawing in art. Why has the emphasis on craft, Adam Gopnik writes, been replaced by concept? He has evidently not seen the fantastic noirish drawings of Marcel van Eeden at Sprueth Magers in Mayfair.

As well as a new album, Destroyed, Moby is putting out a book of photographic prints under the same title. The idea of the book is to capture the essence of being on a global tour, from the mundanity of waiting in airports to the majesty of landscapes and cities, from the explosive excitement of stadium-sized crowds to the solitude of hotel rooms at night. The images will also be on display in the Proud Gallery in Camden Town, north London. theartsdesk showcases a selection below.

It’s been 17 years since apartheid came to an end in South Africa, and the transition to democracy has not been an easy one, for while political systems may change, social attitudes may prove yet more difficult to shift. The Victoria and Albert Museum brings together 17 South African photographers whose work responds to the cultural and social changes their country has undergone. This major survey looks at photography from the last decade: exploring issues of identity across race, gender, class and politics, it provides a vivid snapshot of what it means to be a South African today.

There have been exhibitions, indeed even a whole museum, dedicated to cleanliness: the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, for instance (image 9), which was founded for the purpose of public education in hygiene and health, but which later embraced and diffused racist theories during the Nazi era. Yet there haven’t been many – or any, as far as I’m aware – devoted entirely to dirt. It’s all around us, yet historically we seem to have considered the subject unworthy of serious cultural examination. And the reasons for avoidance are just as interesting as the filthy matter currently under the microscope at the Wellcome Collection (see theartsdesk's review).

From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great guitarists is no less an attribute of the craftsmen who design and build the instruments they play.

"There's a similarity between being a soldier and a photographer. They are both looking intensely for the moment." Bran Symondson would know. He served with the British Army in Afghanistan before returning to document the world of the Afghan National Police. A less sensitive photographer might have alighted on the parallel between the action of a rifle barrel and a camera lens. But Symondson's pictures visit a perilous environment where, like that tiny butterfly in All Quiet on the Western Front, a fragile beauty survives and even prospers.

Rudy and Margot do intensely serious barre in an Italian garden, Lynn Seymour enjoys a "Loyal Ballet" poster on a 1962 Japanese tour, in Glasgow two ballet girls snatch some rest in uncomfortable chairs. The real world of ballet, as shot by the insider who became a world photographer, Colin Jones. Read the interview with him, describing the friendships and tragic dramas behind the exhibition of 50 years of his ballet pictures at Proud Chelsea Gallery - events as turbulent as anything onstage.