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Ai Weiwei has recovered something precious about art—its dangers. Yes, art is dangerous. I thought I would never say that again, for all the dead sharks, carnival rides, pretend shocks, and trashed galleries. It was dangerous enough to get the artist and human-rights activist arrested, although I realize that is a little easier in China. It is also physically dangerous, to the point that Tate Modern had to change plans for one exhibition to avert a health hazard. Now the artist scales that work down for Chelsea, but has it lost its danger?

Starting in October 2010, Ai carpeted the Tate with hand-painted sunflower seeds. He meant people to walk on them and to loll in them. He meant one to experience their transformation of the vast “turbine hall” into nature. Unfortunately, the museum decided, visitors might breathe China’s landscape and traditions a little too deeply, as human traffic crushed porcelain into dust. Instead of an intimate environment at one’s feet, they became a distant object of contemplation—an anti-Carl Andre. Instead of an installation, they became an enormously weighty sculpture.

Even on the scale of a gallery, Sunflower Seeds weighs more than five tons. At Mary Boone through February 4, it forms a strict rectangle a few inches thick, like an architectural plinth, with room to circulate by the walls. I was hoping that, now in private hands, one could enter at last, but no. One can lean closely to admire the precisely tapered edges and the artistry. Or one can stand back as the tiny traces blend into a drab floor covering of speckled gray. Just as likely, visitors may find themselves contemplating each other.

One can still appreciate the homage to tradition, coupled with a critique of capitalism’s “Chinese miracle.” The millions of black-and-white strokes share the anonymity of factory labor. . . . But wait, how does one know that it is not the other way around? Perhaps one is seeing a swipe at nature and a hymn to exploitation? Surely one should give the weight, the architecture, and so exclusive a gallery their due reverence. Almost a year ago, Terence Koh circulated a floor piece, like visitors to the same gallery now, only dressed as a Buddhist priest and on his knees.

Of course, one has the sheen, the craft, and the still-unfulfilled promise of shared experience, but mostly one just knows. One knows that the work’s heart is in the right place because of the artist—and one’s expectations for art. One knows because the very weight flatters one’s expectations. And that, too, is part of the problem. As with his Chinese zodiac last summer by the Plaza Hotel, Ai is at once a savvy artist, a surpriser, a survivor, and a natural-born crowd pleaser. He may court serious danger, but he always ends up with just a little too much safety, simplicity, and weight.

Speaking of danger, instead of industrial flooring, how about bringing in a wrecking ball? James Nares does just that, and one had better stand out of the way. Back in 1976, he swung an enormous pendulum from a pedestrian bridge over a Tribeca side street. Yet he leaves not just his New York surroundings intact, but constructs of light and steel. At Paul Kasmin (its second space) through February 11, the film comes with photographs, sketches, and Minimalist objects. A stately row of spheres ascends in size across the floor.

They also offer obvious insight into Nares today, better known as a painter. His huge brushstrokes appears calm and measured, like David Reed rendered in Chinese artistry, but they began with a human act. He swings happily between stasis and motion, just as the drawings and photos leave streaks of white across black. If they seem close to Serra drawings, Richard Serra in performance inspired the pendulum by flinging molten lead. Nares, too, speaks of danger, but less to the architecture than to the artist—or to art. On film, the ball becomes the protagonist, like an acrobat, and one can only marvel at how high he flies.

Only a cynic could resist looking to the new year for new beginnings, and what better place to look than Bushwick? That is just where I found myself on New Year’s Day—and in a new gallery to boot, Storefront Bushwick. The abstract painters there might even be said to live on border lines. Only some of the most promising signs were quite familiar, and so was the tension between change and tradition.

In a sense, art in Bushwick is all about new beginnings, especially in its own eyes. It has seemed downright determined not to become one more entry point to gentrification and the art world, like Williamsburg before it to the west. Where even East Village art grew out of a reasonably small but determined circle, Bushwick has made anything but a scene. It has been all about sprawl, in everything from geography to equally outsize group shows. If it has a hub, that has emerged not on mixed-race residential strips but converted manufacturing spaces, wide empty avenues, and narrow dead ends. On a cold evening, without coordinated openings, it can seem dark indeed.

Could this have been another kind of beginning? On a sunny, warm winter afternoon, one even had a choice of beginnings. Three quarters of a mile further out, Norte Maar epitomized the neighborhood’s “do-it-yourself” esthetic. Curated by “Guilty / (NOT) Guilty” has only four talented artists—Ellen Letcher, Francesco Masci, Alfred Steiner, and Pablo Tauler—but one might never guess from the flurry of sketches and images in painting, ballpoint drawing, and photos ripped from everywhere. They spill across the Bushwick pioneer’s ground-floor apartment, through January 29, as if the dealer had asked thirty or forty of his nearest and dearest friends to contribute a work and stick it anywhere on the walls. And that, too often for my taste, is still exactly what Brooklyn group shows tend to do.

Back at Storefront, through February 5, one could make quite the opposite mistake. It has three artists, but one could easily imagine just one or two. Each works with flat but layered surfaces, completely covered with paint—and each uses geometry to play against the symmetry of the ground. They would not look out of place around 1970, when critics and aspiring artists worried ever so much about pure painting. Only instead of an epistemological question, about the true or proper nature of art, formalism here becomes an entirely practical question about art and illusion: however is that done?

For Gary Peterson, for starters, how could such off-kilter compositions seem so deliberate? His paintings, on a small scale, seem assembled from strips of colored tape on an off-white ground, in slightly off-kilter and incomplete squares and diamonds. But no, he has built those hard edges and abrasions the hard way, in paint. Halsey Hathaway carries the hard edges to a larger and more voluptuous scale, with curved fields whose muted colors clash ever so softly. Some soak into the canvas, becoming brighter close up. Others retain brush marks in a flat but palpable finish, almost the texture of a fabric collage.

Rob de Oude’s edges are even more painstaking, but freehand—and, when it comes down to it, an illusion. His thin, mostly diagonal lines run nearly the breadth of his small paintings, most often in bright primary colors. Wider diagonals and bursts of light ripple outward from the sheer overlap and juxtaposition. Imagine if Georges Seurat decided to copy Frank Stella and Agnes Martin. The results make an intriguing contrast with Robert Sagerman’s dense, leaf-like splotches in Chelsea, at Margaret Thatcher through February 11. His colors look squeezed right out of the tube, into Day-Glo autumn foliage.

Then again, as new beginnings go, everything here seems awfully familiar right now, starting with the very revival of abstraction and its “geometric days.” Even Hathaway comes close to so many others, like Suzan Frecon. And that, too, is part of Bushwick’s open question. One subway stop at last holds at least half a dozen galleries and the largest concentration of studio buildings, not to mention the neighborhood’s one famous restaurant, Roberta’s. Then again, NURTUREart has merely moved closer, its block looked bleak as ever that New Year’s Day, and Deborah Brown has simply reopened Storefront after her partner chose to concentrate full time on, yes, Norte Maar. Still, with luck, Bushwick could learn something from her focus, at a time when art everywhere is mixing up past, present, and future.

Note: at least for now, I have made this a postscript to my two past reports on the neighborhood. I apologize that this coverage of Bushwick has itself become a bit of urban sprawl. To help, I have moved a review of Sarah Baley to go with others who have turned instead to the waterfront.

In 1989, Maurizio Cattelan vacated the premises. He simply closed the gallery and put up a sign: Torno subito, or “Be back soon.” Now, twelve years later, he has a promise to make. After his Guggenheim retrospective, “All,” this is it. No more art for him. He will give up art once and for all, and it is the subject of a much longer review of what I call slacker art—in my latest upload, which also gathers in an earlier review of another slacker, Francis Alÿs.

Oh, and did I say that in between Cattelan has left his share of art objects? And I mean a lot of objects. Well over a hundred were suspended in midair, through January 22, from scaffolding hung from the Frank Lloyd Wright oculus itself (and I should have told you about it in time for you to go, but this had first to appear in different form in Artillery magazine). They include the life-size wax figures that earned him outrage, admiration, and above all attention—like a boyish Hitler (yes, him) kneeling in prayer or supplication, President Kennedy in an open coffin, and the pope felled by a meteorite. And why not? “All” comes as close as physically possible to everything that he has ever exhibited (and I would have told you about it sooner, but portions of this review had first to appear in Artillery magazine).

Cattelan has made a career of flattering people, by reminding them of their piety or their wit. It assures him of proper outsider status, as a one-man assault on the establishment and on art. It assures them of proper insider status, as guardians of both institutions and art. Not a bad recipe for success, just as for the Young British Artists or for Jeff Koons in curating another wealthy collector’s cavemen and car wrecks. Cattelan is good at the mind games, too, and I mean that as a compliment. Take the mind games of his retrospective now.

On the one hand, he has already given up making art. The curators, Nancy Spector and Katherine Brinson, need not exhibit new work for the occasion or even make selections. The ramps and ordinary exhibition spaces lie empty, except for wall text at the start and a few hard but elegant benches. On the other hand, he has created an installation—a brand new and thoroughly site-specific work of art. It ascends the rotunda like nothing since Matthew Barney did so as performance, and it appeals to the same people who saw Barney’s ego and excess as liberating. It wrenches old work out of context, whether in chronology or in space, while also giving it a new and changing context as viewers ascend the ramp themselves.

Make no mistake: the wow factor is real, in the dozens of large objects, obvious jokes, and insider references. They include a sprawling photo of the Hollywood sign, just in case one missed the point. Cattelan has a special fondness for taxidermy, like the pigeons perched on the scaffolding or the horse bearing the sign INRI. Mostly, though, this is still the kid from the streets of Padua playing with toys. He who retires from art with the most toys wins.

The air of death in the toy store says something regardless. Museums are giving trashy spectacle its due, just as mainstream critics like Roberta Smith are turning against it and Europe is coping, badly, with its economy. Maybe this time Cattelan will keep his promise, although I doubt it. Part of me hopes he will. Either way, though, installations like his will still have a place, but their central moment will have passed, and a Harlem gallery has already faked his passing. That marble slab could serve as a final scoreboard and a memorial.

It makes sense somehow to think of a dancer as a visual artist. It suggests the affinity of modern dance with performance art, both so often silent except perhaps for music. Make that often plotless as well. It gives new meaning to that old phrase for sculptors like David Smith, drawing in space. It captures the tricky qualities of some great painting—the tactile and the visual. And that combination surely applies to Trisha Brown, a dancer who can make one think of works on paper as painting or as choreography.

And I mean large works on paper. At Sikkema Jenkins through January 25, they stretch nearly eleven feet tall and wider than a human body. Identification with the body only grows, too, the more time one spends with them. Most sheets have a vertical format, like a person standing. Step back from the spare black marks, and hints of a figure or two appear—perhaps to vanish and then to appear again. One could be crouching, an arm raised high to pierce the air. Others could have backs, breasts, or buttocks thrust forward, and I could swear that I made out two faces kissing amid the swirl of black.

If one has any doubts, a back room has a video of, lo and behold, dancers. They move slowly and portentously but fluidly and constantly. They may touch, but barely, as if to insist not so much on communication or mutual desire as solitude and sensation. On paper, bodily sensation arises from texture, too. The sole small work, by the entrance, introduces the vocabulary of smudges and traces. Brown uses graphite and oil pastel, the lines close to breaking apart as she stretches or presses them across the the white expanse of paper.

Historically, seemingly opposed terms like tactile and visual have often described art its most classical. Giotto gave the Renaissance what Bernard Berenson called “tactile values,” but also a formal and visual unity. The sculptural form and symmetry of High Renaissance painting seemed their logical extension. The opposition returned with a vengeance in late Modernism, in Clement Greenberg’s calls for “flatness” and Harold Rosenberg’s for “action painting.” These critics wanted “pure painting,” but also an extension of the living and breathing painter. One can picture Jackson Pollock circling a drip painting as a dance.

In fact, Brown’s designs, all from 2002 and 2003, look like nothing so much as late Pollock, when the canvas all but emptied out, color vanished, and the human figure almost emerged. A painter of Pollock’s time only wished that he had sheets of paper this large and, compared to stretched canvas, this close to the wall. Her ten large drawings are not identical in size, but they can easily look it, and they make the gallery a kind of theater. Yet Brown is of quite another generation, a postmodern dancer born in 1936 who collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg. Perhaps one should picture the collective dance rather than Pollock’s brooding loner. Perhaps one should sense the visual comedy of Pop Art—or those diagrams for where to place one’s feet in dance class (already the subject of a “performances score” for Clifford Owens).

Perhaps, but if anything she trumps Pollock’s high seriousness and detachment, but without the high tension. How can you know the dancer from the dance—especially when neither is smiling? It may say something that the show looks bland and arbitrary in jpg rather than in person. Now, people long disdained Pollock’s late retreat from abstraction, too, not to mention the sweeping gestures of a late de Kooning, which these works also resemble a bit. For all three, though, the tactile values are there all the same, and (come to think of it) late Pollock and de Kooning are looking better all the time. Maybe one can start to see them, too, as postmodern.

Remember when a museum was a loved and fearsome place? Sherrie Levine surely felt it as one, and she is still getting over her love and her fear. In her museum retrospective, at the Whitney through January 29, she wants others to get over it as well.

She is smart enough to know that it will take some doing. And she hardly minds if it means that others will not exactly love or fear her art. Still, is outsmarting her audience enough? For better or worse, Levine makes protest cool and elegant. It is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. (I include a review of “Crazy Lady,” some months ago at Schroeder Romero & Shredder, that first appeared in this space in an earlier form, for some feminist madness along with the mayhem.)

Levine might have heard that story on coming east with her MFA from Wisconsin, and it is the story she tells to this day. It helps explain why “MAYHEM” both is and is not a retrospective—and is and is not mayhem. It opens with a wall of reproductions or, as she helped redefine them, rephotography. She exhibited her photographs of Depression-era photographs as her own, and the complete set after Walker Evans from 1981 is still her, well, signature work. Beyond it, she displays a full career, but hardly in chronological order. In fact, it looks like nothing so much as a high-end showroom.

It is the showroom of her imagination, where art, money, and death are always in the air. It has ample room for her latest work—twelve crystal skulls, each in its own display case—and one may not walk among them. They leave no doubt how one is to see two abstract heads from 1993 and 1994, each on a baby-grand piano. They leave no doubt, too, how one must see half a dozen more abstract casts from 1991. One can see them in False God of 2008, a golden calf reduced to a cast bronze skeleton. One can see them in the hush surrounding four mahogany pool tables from 1990, identical down to the positions of their three billiard balls.

Levine is ever the skeptic with no room for doubts. The skepticism turns first and foremost on men, starting with Evans. The more cryptic fragments in their “vitrines” look like body armor, and Levine calls them Bachelors. She adds subtitles in French after suitably masculine occupations, from an undertaker’s assistant to the police as “guardians of the peace.” Gilded urinals from 1991, too, are wrenched from a man’s world—or at least from a room that women cannot enter. Figures after Krazy Kat slink off into that world in shame.

Of course, she has cast her cold eye on art along the men who made it. Obviously the urinal preserves Duchamp’s Fountain. Less obviously, Bachelors copies the Cubist architecture of his Nude Descending a Staircase. Each postcard crotch appropriates Gustave Courbet, each absinthe drinker Edgar Degas. The pool tables play off Man Ray, from a painting in the Whitney’s “Real/Surreal” right downstairs, and the black pianos mimic a collector’s display of Constantin Brancusi. And if you did not know all that, go immediately to the rear of the class.

Levine does not easily run out of lessons, and the 1980s were full of them—all, like my opening, at least partly a fiction. She came up with the “Pictures” generation, but without the heat of Barbara Kruger, the swagger of Richard Prince, or the humor of either one. Levine never really tolerated mayhem anyway. She was always too smart for her own good, and she is smart enough to know it, too. She knows that, on a Web page like this one, her Walker Evans is indiscernible from the original. Some days I have had enough of the art scene and the mayhem myself, but this once I would just as soon learn my lesson on my own.

“United with its frame,” they offer something more than “the modern idea of . . . imaginary space.” Like a “tangible piece of luminous matter,” they “confront us with a reconstruction rather than a mere representation of the visible world.” Erwin Panofsky was writing about a double portrait of Arnolfini and his wife by Jan van Eyck, and it suggests the combination of magic and blunt facts in art that I wish I could evoke here every time myself.

Last time I tried a word not only in self-defense, but also in defense of criticism. Words need not stand in the way of art, but rather open new loves, new doubts, and new understandings. And of course I meant a specific model of criticism, defended here often before—one that refuses to disentangle theory and practice, description and interpretation. It can share enthusiasms and questions, but it may not offer the last word. That, in the end, is up to you.

As a follow-up (and to get another start on the relatively new year), then, may I link to a longer review on this site about that very painting? It is about one of my favorites —and about a whole history of interpretation. I wrote it in early 1996, when this was site was not four years old and had at most a couple of dozen reviews. (It now has well over a thousand.) It tried to embody that model of what criticism can be. Yet an excerpt has never appeared in this blog before.

That is because I did not have a blog and had not even heard of one. I think I can safely boast that this was the first site devoted to art criticism. Still, I thought of it as a “webzine” and, like most of the site even now, it was in static html. (Well, technically I soon migrated to xhtml, I added the blog in 2002, and it in turn migrated to WordPress some years later.) The home page was then a game I had written in javascript, and one had to win merely to enter. The idea that someone might actually want to read this—or that I should be seeking out rather than discouraging readers—never occurred to me, and if it had I might be a bit more successful now!

An artist friend’s teacher had just finished a book on the painting, in the National Gallery in London, and I had just seen another. I found a third recent book almost immediately, and I had been nurturing thoughts on quite a few famous interpreters for a long time. They allowed me to write about the book that first turned me on to art history, by Panofsky, as well as about changes since then thanks to the “new” art history and deconstruction. Even within his own time, as I started off, Jan van Eyck was the stuff of legend. He did not really invent the Renaissance or oil painting, but already a portrait is about presences and reflections in a painted mirror.

In fact, Panofsky argued, they also sanctify the visible world, by witnessing and completing a marriage. A book about van Eyck thus walks straight into questions about artistic origins, boundaries, meaning, documentation, and truth. In the discipline today, artistic truth makes sense only as part of a broader social history, and I try to take that into account, too. Yet art like this can still take your breath away, and I mean to show you why.

I have to warn you that this runs long, to over ten thousand words. I like that this site allows me to go into more depth than ordinary magazines, but I am talking about maybe five times that usual length. I doubt that I shall ever be this ambitious again, but at least I tried once. If you do not get to the end, fine with me, but do have a taste to see what I am about (and I got to edit a few things, like the Biblical references and more recent source notes, after sixteen years). Next time I can cut you a break by “getting real,” not to mention getting back to contemporary art. And with luck I will still have in mind an ideal that does not fit so easily into blogging.