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A collection of images from Rachel Whiteread's new show at Tate Britain

From the Pre-Raphaelites in Oxford to Postwar American Art in Dublin, find out what's happening in art around the country

Art bad boy's sculptures clash with formal French palace setting as show goes ahead

If Marie Antoinette were to be reincarnated as a 21st century pop art icon, it would quite feasibly be as Miss ko2 – a statuesque sex symbol with a bow in her hair standing, doe-eyed yet dominant, amid the finery of Versailles.

But there are many who fail to see the link between the splendour of France's royal palace and the manga-inspired work of Takashi Murakami and, as the Japanese provocateur prepares to unveil a controversial exhibition of his sculptures, the stately calm of the chateau has been disrupted by an unseemly row over contemporary art.

Ahead of next week's opening, which will feature 22 of Murakami's eye-catching works go on show in the salons and gardens of Versailles, more than 11,000 people have signed petitions claiming the show is degrading and disrespectful. Royalist activists, convinced it is also illegal, have protested outside the palace gates.

On Tuesday, the first day of the three-month show, the critics plan a demonstration mocking contemporary art. Protesters have been asked to take with them a painting of a cat's penis, a urinal or bidet on a shopping trolley, or "any other object of your invention".

"Let your imagination run wild," wrote the Save the Chateau of Versailles collective. "Be just as provocative as the 'artists' we are forced to admire."

The objections to the exhibition, which comes two years after a similar venture by US artist Jeff Koons sparked a torrent of criticism, are rooted in the supposed incongruity of inviting Murakami's outlandish – some say pornographic – art into the 17th century surroundings of the Sun King's palace.

"The little boy with pointed genitals whose jet of sperm forms a lasso, the big-breasted little girl whose jet of milk forms a skipping rope have no place in the royal chambers," said Anne Brassié, one of the authors of the Versailles Mon Amour petition.

Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the palace director, pointed out that neither of the two works to which Brassie was referring – My Lonesome Cowboy and Hiropon, both prime examples of Murakami's more erotic art – will be on show because the curators feel they are too explosive.

Most of the work featured, including the golden oval Buddah in the gardens and a 23ft frog gesturing at a ceiling painted by 18th century court artist Francois Lemoyne, is brash and bizarre rather than deliberately sexual or shocking, say some art critics.

Murakami, whose work has produced similar outrage in his native Japan, is undeterred by the criticism. "When someone scores a goal, someone is going to be unhappy," he said. He hoped the Versailles exhibition would "create in visitors a sort of shock, an aesthetic feeling".

He claimed the exhibition was a "face-off between the baroque period and postwar Japan". Far from being sex-obsessed, he was just a normal artist, he said, attempting to depict the "social monster".

Aillagon, a former culture minister, dismissed accusations that he was sullying the chateau with modern-day filth. "This coexistence makes sense," he said. It was his "duty" to open the palace to the "artistic creation of our times".

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami has filled 15 rooms at the Palace of Versailles with his first major retrospective in France

The real-life wreckage from a Baghdad car bomb, on display at the Imperial War Museum, ponders dismemberment and death

Jeremy Deller is an artist of the real. The power of his work does not come from elegance or style – though some might disagree – but a ruthless and sometimes miraculous ability to make us look at real life. With his new work, Baghdad, 5 March 2007, at the Imperial War Museum, he makes us see real death. It is the closest he could get, within the parameters of public display, to laying out the bodies of Iraq's killed on the floor of the gallery.

A dismembered body is what you immediately think of when you come into the museum and see a car destroyed in a 2007 truck bomb attack among the book stalls of Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, an attack that killed 38 people. Lying among the missiles, tanks and war planes in the museum's main hall is the eviscerated corpse of what was once a car. It is more than wrecked. It appears to have been flung in the air, crushed, then burned in an inferno. It suggests a human body in a deeply perturbing way. First, because it is so flattened, with viscera of pipes and tanks sticking out. Then again it is scorched by fire to a colour that evokes dried blood. It looks curiously like Lindow Man in the British Museum.

That visual suggestiveness is not the work of a sculptor in a studio. Deller did not make this. He had the idea of exhibiting a car from a Baghdad bombing, was able to get his hands on one, and toured it around America as an object of curiosity before the Imperial War Museum made the brave decision to show it in their displays. The horrible sculptural quality of this relic is accidental, and it forces you to confront the real suffering of the people killed and wounded in Baghdad on that particular day. It is a simple enough thought: if the bomb did this to metal, what did it do to flesh?

The truth stares you in the face, while gleaming machines of death loom above. It makes you imagine not just this reality, but all the realities those weapons created, from a burned-out Panzer on the eastern front to a London street just hit by a V1. Deller has often created works of populist social theatre, but here he achieves something new: the most serious and thoughtful response to the Iraq war by any British artist.

London museum hopes Jeremy Deller's piece will serve as reminder of impact of war on civilians

A rusting, crumpled car was today placed in the main atrium of the Imperial War Museum in London surrounded by some of the most powerful military hardware of the last 100 years. It's message was simple – this is what war does.

Called simply 5 March 2007, the car is a piece by artist Jeremy Deller. Before it was salvaged, the vehicle was mangled in a street bombing that killed 38 people and wounded many more at Baghdad's Al-Mutanabbi book market, a place at the heart of the city's cultural and intellectual life. No-one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The museum hopes the car will serve as a sobering reminder of the impact of war on civilians. Deller said he could not think of a better home for it in the UK: "I'm very happy that the Imperial War Museum has taken this object into its collections and is putting it on such prominent display."

Diane Lees, the museum's director-general, said: "It's a privilege to work with an artist like Jeremy Deller and we are incredibly grateful for the insight and effort he's invested in the acquisition and installation of this remarkable exhibit.

"We hope it will prove a thought-provoking addition to our permanent collections and encourage visitors to consider not just this car, but all our exhibits, in a new light." The car will go on display at IWM North in Manchester in April. It was donated by the New Museum in New York, where it was part of Deller's It Is What It Is project.

Deller, who won the Turner prize in 2004, is perhaps best known for recreating the battle of Orgreave from the miners' strike. The car was beaten for a place on the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square by Antony Gormley's One and Other idea, in which members of the public occupied it for an hour at a time.

In pictures: The Turner prize winner unveils his latest piece: a car salvaged from a fatal Baghdad bombing

Catalan artist's first big London exhibition for 50 years

Tate Modern is to mount the first big retrospective of Miró to be held in London for 50 years, it announced today, admitting that it was something of a surprise that it had been so long since the last full-scale show for the artist.

"This is the first retrospective since 1964," said Sheena Wagstaff, Tate Modern's chief curator, as she revealed plans that will bring together more than 150 works by the Catalan artist, who died in 1983 after a long career that put him in the top rank of the century's greatest artists – and on the bedroom walls, in poster form, of so many students.

The announcement was made about the exhibition, opening in April next year, as Tate released its annual report which showed that the organisation had lent more of its works than ever before, sending out 887 works in the UK, and 443 to places elsewhere.

It also acquired 293 works, ranging from Patrick Caulfield's last painting to Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs.

Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of the Tate trustees, said it had been a year of great success despite the difficult economic environment; 7 million people had visited one of the four Tate buildings over the year, making the organisation the second most visited of its kind in the world after the Louvre. And, in money terms, nearly 60% of its entire budget was self-generated. "That's a higher proportion than any other major UK museum or gallery," he said.

The figures are even more important this year as all museums and galleries wait to see how much their budgets will be cut in the October spending review.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director, said: "I don't think we've disguised the fact that any severe and indeed rapid cut will have an impact on what we're able to do. But it's premature to talk about the effect of any given cut."

Serota also revealed that they were now halfway towards raising the £200m cost of Tate Modern's ambitious 11-floor extension, although an announcement would be made next year on whether the extension would be fully open by 2012. At Tate Britain they were two-thirds of the way towards raising the £45m needed for the renovation plans. None of this was public money.

Today the four Tate buildings – Tate Britain, Tate Modern, and the sites in Liverpool and St Ives, Cornwall – also released their exhibition programmes.

As well as showing Joan Miró, Tate Modern will stage a retrospective of the work of the Mexican and experimental artist Gabriel Orozco, and a show devoted to the work of Gerhard Richter, the German artist who turns 80 in 2012.

Over the Thames, at Tate Britain, a show dedicated to watercolours, covering 800 years and including the works of amateur colourists, will run for six months from next February.

Other shows include one dedicated to the architect James Stirling, who designed Tate Britain's Clore gallery, and from June to September an exhibition examining the Vorticists, the British modernist movement from 100 years ago, which had among its number Wyndham-Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein.

Tate Liverpool's highlights will be a fresh look at the work of the Belgian surrealist Magritte, the first big exhibition of his work in England for 20 years, and a display on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

The fourth part of the Tate empire, at St Ives, will stage a show dedicated to the work of 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling and his interest in the relationship between nature and culture. In October there will be a group show examining the history and legacy of modernist abstract painting.

Artist satirises roadside adverts by nailing his poetry to traffic lights and streetlamps across the city

Artist John Morse has been peppering Atlanta's road intersections with haikus, nailing his poetry to traffic lights and streetlamps in an attempt to provide commuters with "poetic snapshots of the urban condition".

Mimicking the usual advertisements for weight loss and health insurance, Morse's poems began appearing throughout the city last month. From an exhortation to "Lose ugly weight fast!!/ Feel Happier! Healthier!/ Dump your bigotry" to "Meet local singles!!/ Easy: stand near others/ Hang up your cell phone" and "Free debt counselling/ Take the important first step/ Beware signs like these", the artist has written 10 different haikus, printed 50 copies of each and placed them at 500 locations across Atlanta.

"People read these bandit signs. They'll read them if it's about an electrician or they'll read them if it's about anything," explained Morse. "So if they read it and they like it, great, if they read it and they don't like it, great. But the fact is they'll read it, they're going to read your poetry and that's my goal.

"There's a great deal of bad in the world, and one of the few things that ameliorates the cruelties of the world is art," he said. "A little bit of art can do a great deal of good. And I want to spend my life doing something good ... Will it be good? I don't know. But I'm going to try."

Backed by artist support group Flux Projects, which says the signs offer "compact observations and commentary on modern life", the Roadside Haiku initiative is scheduled to run until the end of October. The haikus haven't been welcomed by everyone, however: Peggy Denby of Keep Atlanta Beautiful described them as "litter on a stick" and told local news site wsbtv.com there would be fines if they weren't taken down.

Tracey Emin and her fellow writers (Letters, 8 September) appear to feel there is something inappropriate about the Tate Modern hosting the now-cancelled launch party for Tony Blair's memoirs. Given that the former prime minister headed a government which oversaw unprecedented investment in culture and the arts, and – through free museums and galleries – widened access to them, his presence there would seem to be rather fitting. By contrast, with her reported support for a Conservative party that has signalled its intent to slash spending at the culture department, Emin has somewhat forfeited the right to dictate who should and shouldn't appear at galleries which were the recipients of the department's soon-to-be-decimated grants.

Robert Philpot

Brighton, East Sussex

• Who are these members of the Tate Modern Gang to pontificate about Blair's "war crimes and lies". The first signatory is famous only for her lewdness of the highest artistic quality. Blair, like Churchill, took us to war on the courage of his convictions. If they do not want Churchill to face a war crimes tribunal over the bombing of Dresden, they should leave Blair alone and vent their spleen on war criminals sensu stricto. I'm sure they could find plenty of those if they stepped out of their Tate Modern tower.

Martin Litherland

Loughborough, Leicestershire

• I imagine Tony Blair is furious that footage of the anti-war protesters at his Dublin book signing might be seen in the US. Is this why he cancelled his London dates?

Jackie Robertson

London