Serbian performance artist tells Pyramid stage crowd to confront cyclical violence in thousands-strong ‘collaboration’

It’s been home to some of the UK’s loudest singalongs, most propulsive rap lyrics and most cacophonous guitar solos. But the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury experienced something almost unprecedented in its history on Friday: total silence.

The Serbian artist Marina Abramović, invited by festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, led the audience in what she called a “collaboration” called Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, to “see how we can feel positive energy in the entire universe” and act as a bulwark against the horrors of war and violence.

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A former dairy business now hosts a thriving artistic community – and a spectacular converted barn

Suzanne Blank Redstone and her husband, Peter Redstone, have lived on the same Devon farm, nestled in a tree-fringed valley a mile from the sea, for 50 years. The couple’s current home was once their cowshed, a simple, functional structure that they built in 1979 to shelter their herd of Jerseys over winter.

Today, it’s an architectural statement, albeit a very livable one. It was shortlisted for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ house of the year in 2023 and bagged a prestigious Manser medal, too, while a photograph of the property was selected for this year’s Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, which runs in London until 18 August.

Serbian artist hopes Friday’s ‘public intervention’ will make festival goers reflect on the current state of the world

Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage has played host to some of the loudest rock bands in the world and mass sing-alongs with thousands of participants, but on Friday the artist Marina Abramović will step out and ask the crowd to do something different: remain silent for seven minutes.

“I am terrified,” said Abramović, whose performance pieces have made her one of the most famous artists in the world. “I don’t know any visual artists who have done something like this in front of 175,000 to 200,000 people. The largest audience I ever had was 6,000 people in a stadium and I was thinking ‘wow’, but this is really beyond anything I’ve done.”

Watercolour drawing for first book’s cover becomes most expensive item from the series ever sold at auction

A watercolour drawing for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has fetched a record amount at auction.

The artwork for the cover of the first book in the JK Rowling series fetched $1.9m (£1.5m) at a sale by Sotheby’s auction house in New York on Wednesday.

Invoking philosophy, womanhood and religion, the Delhi- and London-based artist turns material objects into something truly human

When Bharti Kher talks about her sculptures, she gives them pronouns. For two decades, the British-born artist, who lives between Delhi and London, has been making the most startling works to investigate the female body and all of them have become characters in their own right. As she puts it, “my sculptures are alive – they run around the gallery at night when we’re all asleep.”

“I am an animist,” Kher tells me. Central to her work is the ancient belief in universal consciousness and in the potential of all material. This openness to the beyond infuses the survey show – part retrospective, part new commission – she has opened at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) near Wakefield. Taken as a whole, the exhibition describes a most restless mind.

Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Mike Abrahams travelled the country photographing National Front marches, prison life and people’s everyday struggles