As one of the most eagerly anticipated releases of the summer, it has already taken more than $50m at the box office on its opening weekend in America.

The BBC's Arts Editor Will Gompertz looks at the latest film to try to bring F Scott Fitzgerald's book to life.

The night saw The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time receive the most honours with seven prizes.

The haul, which equals musical hit Matilda's record last year, includes best play and best actor for Luke Treadaway - who plays a 15-year-old aspiring detective with Asperger syndrome.

Will Gompertz reports.

This year's Turner exhibition will be held at Ebrington in Derry-Londonderry, 2013's UK City of Culture.

The winner - who will receive £25,000 - will be announced on 2 December.

Will Gompertz report

Picking a winner out of these four is something of a lottery.

If forced to do so, my head would say Tino Sehgal. But my heart would choose Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose simple, enigmatic portraits are surprisingly affecting.

That said, location changes art, and maybe when the exhibition opens in the autumn it will be Shrigley or Prouvost who respond best to the space and the place.

The arts budget will be cut come the next spending review; the Culture Secretary will not be pleading for special treatment. The sector as a whole has not made its case regarding the economic benefits it delivers to the country convincingly enough to the Treasury. Nor has the DCMS.

She talked enthusiastically about the success of the arts sector in helping drive the economy forward by supporting - and being part of - the creative industries, and by providing a valuable magnet for tourism.

I spoke to some attendees who wondered why, if she truly believed this to be the case, would she not argue for increased, not decreased investment in the sector in order to fully realise its potential?

The event at the Hilton Hotel on London's Park Lane is hoped - as the Man Booker has done for novels and the Turner Prize has done for contemporary art - to raise the discipline's profile.

Arts editor Will Gompertz talked to Sir George Christie, former chief executive of opera house Glyndebourne, about winning a lifetime achievement award.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday 22 April 2013.

The once-a-decade list often proves controversial but has a strong track record of elevating relatively unknown novelists into the literary spotlight.

The idea behind the Granta writers list is to identify emerging talents in the literary world. Previous names have included Louis De Bernieres and Zadie Smith.

Nadifa Mohamed is on this year's list, and here she speaks about why she thinks it is more relevant than ever.

He was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic collector of art, who acquired works on the basis that "No price is too high for an object of unquestioned beauty and known authenticity".

Judging by the quality of Cubist works donated by Leonard Lauder, he collected in a similar spirit. It is not the biggest donation, but it is one of the most significant.

We see an elderly and confused Baroness Thatcher in an inner-city supermarket, circa 2011. She is buying a carton of milk. As she walks toward the counter, a brash, middle-aged businessman rudely cuts in front of her. He is on the phone, haggling over a deal, oblivious to his surroundings. As he leaves and she takes her place at the counter, a young man in a rush queues behind her.

He stands a little too close, fidgeting impatiently, earphones in, music blaring. The day's newspaper headlines report: TERROR IN HOTEL BLAST. The message is clear. The once indomitable "Margaret Thatcher the milk snatcher" is now frail and bewildered by callous contemporary Britain: a culture she had a large hand in creating.

The irony is lost on the old lady portrayed by Meryl Streep, but not on the viewer. Thatcher's political children have not turned out as she thought they would, but to her bafflement, society has: There is no longer such a thing.

The scene is a subtle version of the artistic community's typical comment on Margaret Thatcher's legacy. From Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle to Jeremy Deller and Ken Loach, the prevailing view from the arts is that the first female British prime minister was not a good thing.

"You privatise away what is ours," sang Billy Bragg in the aptly-titled Thatcherites. "We'll take it back one day, mark my words, mark my words."

Perhaps her one and only redeeming feature was that she acted as a catalyst for creativity. As Gerald Scarfe, who famously lampooned Thatcher with his scathing caricatures, said: "I didn't agree with her values, but she was amazing material. I could turn her into anything acerbic or cutting, like a dagger or a knife, probing and vicious."

Has any other post-war politician provoked so much artistic output? Margaret Thatcher has been the subject of theatre, film and television productions, of books and poems, paintings and performances.

For the 1980s alternative comedy movement she was both the inspiration and butt of its jokes. And for many a post-modern political pop song she was the go-to figure.

The iconoclastic "living sculptures" Gilbert and George are the only artists I can recall that have openly come out as Margaret Thatcher fans. They once told the Daily Telegraph: "We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants everyone to be equal. We want to be different."

It's a comment that reveals another of the ex-prime minster's ironic legacies: in the arts world it is now radical to be Conservative.

To many, her attitude towards the arts was encapsulated in the notorious Saatchi & Saatchi ad campaign for the V&A, which carried the infamous tag line "An Ace Caff with Quite A Nice Museum Attached". This was Thatcherism applied to high culture. Market economics over intellectual curiosity, consumption over contemplation.

But there is a counter argument, an argument that says Margaret Thatcher was the instigator of Britain's recent artistic golden age of flourishing museums, packed playhouses and general creative confidence.

At the very least it could be argued that, by deregulating the markets. she helped turn London into the world's capital city, which has brought new money, ideas and peoples to the country. The once shabby capital became the place to be.

And then there is the man whose company was behind that V&A ad, Mr Charles Saatchi. When he opened up his eponymous Boundary Road gallery in north London he started a process that would lead to the UK becoming one of the most exciting, innovative and open places in the world for an artist to live and work.

Damien Hirst told me that it was Saatchi's gallery that jolted him into action. As a student, he had no interest in making work to be shown at The Tate. But when he went up to Boundary Road an exciting future became apparent. "I wanted to make pieces that would go in there," he said.

Margaret Thatcher might have dismissed Francis Bacon, Hirst's hero, as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures", but the YBA artist admits that part of his success is due to the enterprising culture she created.

And it was Michael Heseltine, a member of the Thatcher cabinet, who suggested to the prime minister after the 1981 Toxteth riots in Liverpool that the city needed investment, and not to be put into a state of "managed decline" as suggested by the then-Chancellor Geoffrey Howe.

Heseltine said that he had "no difficulties at all in persuading the prime minister to let me do what I wanted to do." And his plan included encouraging the Tate Gallery to create a north-western outpost, as part of his larger rejuvenation plan for Liverpool's Albert Docks.

A few years later the new Tate Liverpool, housed in an old industrial building, set about showing what art could do to help regenerate an area. It's a formula that has since been copied across the country, and one which created the blueprint for Tate Modern.

If Margaret Thatcher had backed her chancellor and not her secretary of state for the environment, the cultural landscape of the UK might look much bleaker.

But it was backing another chancellor that was perhaps her greatest contribution to the arts.

Listen to the programme

She gave John Major his big political break with a job in the cabinet and then supported his campaign to be prime minster. Once in post, Major created the National Lottery and its charitable framework, which included a commitment to spend money on the arts. Cue the so-called Golden Age.

The standard position on Margaret Thatcher's appreciation for the arts is that she didn't have any. But that is patronising. Listen to her 1978 Desert Island Discs interview and it is clear that she liked and participated in the arts. She played the piano, sang in the Bach Choir when at Oxford, and was knowledgeable about opera.

True, her tastes were classical and conservative and she found contemporary culture baffling, but then so did many in her generation - several of whom had run or sat on the boards of arts organisations.

Margaret Thatcher will always be a divisive figure. She oversaw some good, some bad, and some very ugly times. She certainly wasn't a champion of the arts but, whether she meant to or not, she probably did contribute more than she is credited for, albeit acting quite often as the grit in the oyster.

Renovation was delayed by flooding, asbestos and a dispute over access for cyclists.

Some 800 years of Dutch history are retold in more than 8,000 objects across the museum's 80 galleries.

Will Gompertz reports.

With exhibitions containing Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and works by Rembrandt, Hals and Van Dyck attracted visitors ahead of those in the US or the UK.

Speaking to Today presenter Sarah Montague, arts editor Will Gompertz discusses the annual survey and explains why, while the classics dominated the leading exhibitions in Japan, the leading ­museums of New York, London and Paris were all lead by contemporary and modern art.

That wouldn't have been the case a few years ago when Europe and America dominated. And with the Louvre and Guggenheim due to open branches in Abu Dhabi, Mexico's hatching of ambitious plans, and the rapid emergence of India as a major museum player, the league table of global exhibition powerhouses is likely to change further in the coming years.

It will be the world's big conurbations that will rise to the top, either through nation states building and/or modernising their museums, or increasingly, corporations with a keen eye for art and a nose for brand-building taking the lead. The Bank of Brasil is behind the South American country's recent exhibition successes, and the Korean electronics firm Samsung has built an extremely impressive museum complex in Seoul.

Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, showering volcanic ash on to the two cities on Italy's southern coast. Many clues about the lives and deaths of thousands of people were preserved.

Arts Editor Will Gompertz reports.

Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, showering volcanic ash on to the two cities on Italy's southern coast. Many clues about the lives and deaths of thousands of people were preserved.

Arts Editor Will Gompertz reports.

At the time it sounded fey and facetious, but as was often the way with him, it turned out to be smart and prophetic.

He was outing a vulgar truth from the closet, which is that most artists like to make money, and the way they do it is by making art - it is their product, it is a commodity.

As we know, Warhol's ideas caught on - and not just in the art world.

They inspired a 16 year old called David Jones from Bromley: a young man fed up with his job in advertising who had a yearning for fame. What, he thought, if I turned myself into a product? What if I became a commodity and the fans my consumers?

After a couple of false starts, he launched his first brand called…David Bowie.

Some time later, in a BBC interview, he rationalised what had been instinctive: "I thought, well here I am. I'm a bit sort of mixed up creatively.

"I've got all sorts of things going on, that I'm doing on stage or whatever. I'm not quite sure if I'm a mime or a songwriter or a singer - or do I want to go back to painting again. Why am I doing these things anyway? And I realised it was because I wanted to be well known, basically.

"And that I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn't want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives. And so I had to govern everything around that.

"So I pulled myself in, and decided to use the easiest medium to start off with - which was rock and roll - and to add bits and pieces to it over the years, so that by the end of it, I was my own medium. That's why I do it, to become a medium."

David Bowie is the Steve Jobs of rock, the Picasso of pop. He synthesises influences past and present, drops them into the Bowie Blender, and serves up something fresh and exciting. Jobs would come up with a new product, Picasso a new style; Bowie launches a new persona.

Take Ziggy Stardust for example. In his DNA you'll find Japanese Kabuki theatre, British rock and roll, and late 1960s dystopian sci-fi. Bowie turned pop art into post modernism, where superficiality and altered images were designed to question the certainty of past generations.

Here was a product wanted by British youth and by Young Americans. A pink-haired, cat-suit-wearing, androgynous-looking style leader - a new hero who dared a generation to be different. Or as those Apple ads would a quarter of a century later say, to think different.

While the Rolling Stones and Dylan were defined by their music and therefore to a certain extent trapped, Bowie was defined more as a character actor - a vaudevillian performer, which meant he was free to ring the ch…ch…changes whenever he wanted.

Here's what Bowie said about that in another BBC interview: "One painting isn't the painter's life. And often a painter will do a lot of paintings and he's only satisfied with a couple in his entire career, and that applies to me definitely.

"I'm only happy with a couple of albums. Occasionally I'll strike on something that's very good. But you can't set out and do a painting and say 'this is it', but it is it. You just hope and try and if it doesn't work, you put it to one side and try another one."

To paraphrase his mentor, Andy Warhol, Bowie's best art has been good for business. For an avant-garde artist his estimated fortune of £100m is impressive, especially as he has stepped off the lucrative touring circuit for most of this century. But it could have been a lot more.

His early publishing agreements and tour arrangements were not the sophisticated financial deals made by someone with a Harvard MBA, but with an A-level in art from a tech college in South London.

And his venture into the world of high finance in the mid-1990s is considered by some to have been part of the 'securitisation' craze that led to today's global financial crisis.

The infamous Bowie Bonds of 1997 saw the worlds of rock and stock merge in a deal in which bonds were issued against Bowie's future income.

But for once the musician's grasp of the zeitgeist had momentarily loosened, and he failed see the negative impact digital downloads was going to have on music sales.

Author Paul Trynka, who wrote the Bowie biography Starman, thinks he knows what led to this loss of trend-spotting form.

"When he got to the point where he realised he didn't own his own music, I believe that inspired a full-blown mental breakdown," he says.

"Everyone talks about his cocaine period - that came at the same time that he realised that his manager, Tony Defries, owned all of his music. Here's a guy who'd made all these massive sacrifices to make music, and he doesn't own it all.

"That really bothered him. He didn't talk about it - and in a way, that in itself is significant. The desire to control his music is what led to the creation of Bowie bonds.

"Ultimately, those bonds were classed as junk. It's something that didn't seem to benefit many artists in the long run - and there are some people who speculated that the notion of issuing bonds kicked off the crash of 2008. So they worked for him, but not for many other people."

What has worked is David Bowie's comeback album The Next Day. Without subjecting himself to any interviews, or taking on an exhausting tour, it has garnered praise, headlines and now a number one spot in the charts - the first time Bowie has enjoyed pole position for 20 years.

And with it comes the launch of a new image; that of a nostalgic legendary rock star called David Bowie. It's a brand he has reinforced by making his own back catalogue the album's subject.

Hence, perhaps, the no interviews policy and a career retrospective at the V&A in which he did not participate: this new persona wants us all to focus on his past, not his present.

Clever stuff. Worthy of Andy Warhol himself.

The event starred comedian Stewart Lee and Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed.

It was hosted by BBC Arts Editor, Will Gompertz, who explained on the Today programme how influential Duchamp's art has been on today's contemporary artists:

"Duchamp's idea that anything can be art still dominates artistic practice today, 45 years after he died".

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday 18 March 2013.

Initially it was thought to be by the Dutch master, then it was thought not to be by him, now it has once again been declared a Rembrandt, awaiting, in a few months time, further authentication.

Throughout the decades-long flim-flamming about its provenance, this fine picture has remained resolutely the same, there for us to judge and enjoy on its own artistic merits, regardless of who painted it.

That said, if the painting is verified as the work of Rembrandt, perhaps even more of us will make an effort to see this great work.

Watch a slideshow of 112 Rembrandt paintings

The new work, entitled Radio Rewrite, is based on two songs by the band Radiohead.

The Today programme's arts editor Will Gompertz discussed the project with the composer, prior to his short UK tour.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday 6 March 2013.

Six years after starring as the British monarch on film, Dame Helen is recreating the role in the stage production The Audience.

Peter Morgan's play depicts the weekly meetings between The Queen and some of the 12 Prime Ministers of her reign, among them Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Arts Editor Will Gompertz went to meet her.

The Mexican artist Diego Rivera became an art superstar with his left-wing, communist inclined wall paintings.

The initiative kept artists such as Willem De Kooning from poverty and it was to be the making of Jackson Pollock, who took what he learned from the muralists about throwing paint against a wall and turned it into a modern movement called abstract expressionism.