This year, the Billy Apple® brand turns 50. The artist formerly known as Barrie Bates talked to Anthony Byrt about a career of collaborations and controversies that has consistently redefined art’s relationships with advertising, science and technology

My practice is ...

From Oskar Schlemmer and Cindy Sherman to Seth Price, Michael Portnoy and K8 Hardy, generations of artists have employed the codes of fashion and costume design. Vivian Sky Rehberg takes stock of the traffic between the worlds of art and dress

How do artists respond to current events?

The rise and fall of biennials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and South Africa

Do we live in a time of ‘patho-politics’?

Star Gallery, Beijing, China

A letter to the visionary architect Yona Friedman

The first mainstream R&B star to come out instead of remaining a question mark has initiated an honest discussion, but there is still some distance to go

Measuring success in community design projects, from Dakar to Newfoundland

The new wave of social-realist storytelling in American cinema

Some highlights from the year's exhibitions

Some highlights

Arts and letters

The unsettling installations of Rabih Mroué

The growth of public institutions in Mexico City

The little things that stood out in 2012

Biennials, new commercial galleries and the reopening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Journals, poems, biography and ‘direct implication’– the year in books

Looking at art from different angles

Anti-Japanese protests and the 18th National Congress have meant a rocky year in China

Arts after the revolution

Confidence and resolve in the Brazilian art scene

There is a resurgence of interest in the essay, with collections by Jonathan Lethem, John Jeremiah Sullivan and the first biography of David Foster Wallace all published this year. Is it possible to define a form that stretches from Michel de Montaigne to Wayne Koestenbaum, from Virginia Woolf to Chris Marker? Brian Dillon surveys this enigmatic field, and asks whether this centuries-old tradition might be the genre of the future

Tramway, Glasgow, UK

To coincide with the long-delayed reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, which closed its doors in 2003, frieze commissioned three reports from the Dutch capital. Nick Aikens reviews the renovated museum, Maxine Kopsa takes stock of last year’s cuts to cultural budgets, and Timotheus Vermeulen considers the impact of the recent national elections

Contemplating recent events at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Changes in historical perspective that are shaping art being made today