Yesterday I fell in love with a black boy less than half my age and half my size – or, rather, a sculpture of a black boy. At just over two feet tall, Ron Mueck’s Youth is utterly beguiling. His silken skin, slender fingers, low-slung jeans and paisley patterned underpants are seductive enough; what made me lose my head, though, was the suggestion of dirt under his neatly clipped toenails. This beautifully observed detail made me want to kiss his exquisitely modelled feet.

I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself. The shame is that it's all a hoax, and not in the manner of Shovlin's earlier projects concerned with fictional people: the maths is cod, the belief absent - even the pauses for thought are artificial.

Oh yes, I remember it well. Luise Kimme, a German sculptor who shared my flat in the early 1970s, used to buy plaster copies of Michelangelo’s David, paint them garish colours and give them to friend as presents. More a conceptualist than a lover of kitsch, I meanwhile set projects for my students requiring them to photograph every item of clothing in their wardrobes or to empty their bags and present the contents as self-portraits.

The first and most unusual aspect of Caro at Chatsworth is that it is there: 15 outstanding sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, placed in an irregular pattern around the formal 950ft early-18th-century Canal Pond, situated facing the southern vista of the great Baroque house. For these sculptures are tough, the antithesis of any sentimental attachment to a rural Arcadia, almost relentlessly urban and even architectural. Caro once used the term "archisculpture" for his ambitious work.

The mind is a beautiful mystery. We think, therefore we are. But how is the mind and physical body related? How does a lump of matter give rise to consciousness? Naturally, it’s a question that’s exercised great minds over many centuries, and will, I’m sure, continue to do so for another few. Unsurprisingly, you won’t find any answers in the Wellcome Collection’s spectacular exhibition, Brains: The Mind as Matter.

Remote Control and its accompanying series of events, Television Delivers People, coincides with the analogue to digital switch-over, marking a shift in the history of a medium which will soon be eclipsed by on-demand content. While this may sound mundane on paper, the humble light-emitting box has been the elephant in the room for the last half-century, profoundly transforming living habits and shaping political discourse.

The V&A has played a blinder. This extraordinary, exciting and unexpected exhibition provides endless trips down memory lane for many and will be a revelation for others. Ignore the clunky title, moving us from the postwar Olympics of 1948 to Olympic year 2012, and just go.

How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien Hirst, who some now imagine has been conning us all for years, but of the execrable Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga must be “exposed”! For is pap in pop really any lesser crime than art pap? You might think it is, even though, through the Nineties, both Britpop and Britart bobbed along on the crest of a Cool Britannia wave. They woz soulmates.

The Jerwood Gallery on Stade beach in Hastings has so far had a fraught if very short history. Local opposition, largely from the neighbouring fishing community, have campaigned relentlessly against the gallery, fearing that it would ruin the Stade's rustic charm and bring little or no benefit to most locals. There's negative graffiti among the huts surrounding the Jerwood and a bright orange "NO to Jerwood" banner still hangs on one of the iconic black “net shop” towers beside the gallery, fully visible from the gallery's foyer.

The first major retrospective of the videos, photographs and sculptures of Gillian Wearing is a deeply disturbing experience. Her videos can be just a few minutes, or as long as an hour, but are not sequential narratives. They can be dipped in and out of - unlike many video artists you do not have to acquiesce to her time scale. But take a lot of time: they are more than worth it, and repay repeated viewings.