An exhibition dedicated to the career of Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall is to open in Liverpool next month.

Fifteen years after the last major retrospective of his work in the UK, and 27 years after his death at the age of 97, Tate Liverpool is to remind art-lovers of the modernist painter's genius.

The Tate Modern's current retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's pop art includes a series of 1960s paintings called "brushstrokes". In these paintings, the Jewish artist parodies abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning who freely expressed their feelings through "action painting" by throwing, smearing or dripping paint on canvas.

The benefits of the arts cannot always be measured in economic terms, leading figures in the Jewish cultural sphere warned this week.

Howard Brenton’s play is based on the artist Ai Weiwei’s account of 81 days of detention by the Chinese authorities, as described in journalist Barnaby Martin’s book The Hanging Man. Director James Macdonald presents it as a piece of modern art. The theatre’s stage has been stripped back to whitewashed walls.

At first glance, Gil Shani’s 2006 painting Untitled appears completely abstract, a black expanse with white shapes scattered across it in a seemingly random fashion. But, after a while, your eyes begin to identify the shapes — camels passing through a rocky, desert landscape.

An artist whose giant sculpture of an upside-down figure was erected in central London this week, says the work was inspired by his grandfather’s experience as a Jewish refugee to the UK.

This is the tender little acoustic romance that kicked the hell out of bigger, brasher shows at New York’s Tony awards. And it is easy to see why. Once is based on the Oscar-winning Dublin-set film and uses the same, sometimes devastatingly beautiful soundtrack composed by Glen Hansard, of the indie band, Frames, and Marketa Irglová.

Any play that conjures the line, “I’ve got a kitchen full of prostitutes and Nazis”, has to have something going for it.