Haber's Art Reviews: Browse by Artist (V-Z and Group Shows)

Pick from More Artists

John Haber
in New York City

Preceding names!

Vallayer-Coster

Before the French Revolution, could a woman break through as an artist? Her still life may seem chillier today than postmodern cool, but Anne Vallayer-Coster showed daring in simply playing the game.

VanDerBeek

Can Jason Tomme, Scott Lyall, and "American ReConstruction" find a space between painting, prints, models, and abstraction? Sara VanDerBeek reminds new and old media "To Think of Time."

van Eyck

Who is that couple in a famous painting by Jan van Eyck, face front and hands joined, as if for a solemn ceremony? Three books seek the origins of his art and the truth in painting.

Could Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling have painted just for you? "Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych" shows the private side of the Renaissance.

Does realism stand for representational truth, a style and a means of representation, or a period or two in art history? A tour from Giotto and Jan van Eyck to the American Realism of Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, and John Sloan leaves open the puzzles that Bo Bartlett and others are solving today.

From Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel, can such shimmering, personal art have emerged from a shared workshop? When a museum opens its own back rooms, two institutions come under the spotlight.

What if history ran backward—from Mannerism to the High Renaissance and then to Jan van Eyck? For Jan Gossart, that history shaped Mannerism after all.

van Gogh

When drawings allow one to see past the clichés, to the very origins of a great artist? The drawings of Vincent van Gogh may instead help dispel the myth of origins, but they still pack a punch.

Can Gustave Courbet's gravity and those manic highs of Vincent van Gogh trace a single path to Modernism? van Gogh's final patron and a sometime painter, Dr. Gachet, shows what their admirers often missed.

What are Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse doing in the Met's nineteenth-century galleries along with Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh? Perhaps the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman collection can fill their place.

I also enter into his gorgeous chain of voices surrounding two enigmatic shoes. Are they and their painter, Vincent van Gogh, really two of a kind, and what kind of art history does that leave?

Vaux

Which is the true garden community, the suburbs or the city? "The Romantic Garden" follows their origins from Alexander Pope and the picturesque to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, while Mike and Doug Starn create their own forest overlooking Central Park.

Velázquez

Tired of centennials for modern art? Diego Velázquez portraits, together with Jean Antoine Watteau drawings, may make the best birthday celebration of them all.

The Met upgrades a portrait to Diego Velázquez, the Frick cleans house, and Thomas Hoving dies. Have museums lost their magic?

Can video aspire to Old Master painting? Eve Sussman evokes the slippery time and space of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, and Bill Viola tries to transcend time through Jacopo da Pontormo, but Pontormo's portraits can take care of themselves.

When Napoleon turned his cannons on Spain, he also stirred up art, with a new taste for the Spanish Baroque. What happens when art history rolls out the canon, from Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya all the way to Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent?

Vermeer

When science speaks, should the connoisseur listen, and should others care? Thanks to new tests, more and more art historians, reports say, are backing a disputed attribution to Jan Vermeer, but doubts about Young Woman Seated at the Virginals may not easily go away.

He is the abstract artist's artist. Why is it so natural not to ask about Jan Vermeer and his women?

Jan Vermeer offered a patient window on a quiet world. Is the revelation about him, his scenes, or his viewers—or are all alike caught in his art's illusion?

Does The Milkmaid stand for purity or pleasure—or nothing at all? For Jan Vermeer, a serving girl may hold dreams of love or a steady resolve.

Did Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch see the same street in Delft? In "Vermeer and the Delft School," the art of painting takes on a city's dreams.

Can a film capture Jan Vermeer's light—or his muse? Girl with a Pearl Earring claims to find a narrative that even he carefully withholds, and it makes one remember the elusiveness of an artist's world-view.

Veronese

Jean-Étienne Liotard played the Turkish painter, but what did the refined Swiss artist learn from the East? Earlier, Paolo Veronese serves Renaissance Venice's Mediterranean empire.

Did Leonardo and Paolo Veronese anticipate Beethoven, the discovery of Pluto, and Jean Baudrillard? With Peter Greenaway, the society of the spectacle has a hungering for the real.

Vialu

In "Headlines," such artists as Jonathan Allen, Carlo Vialu, and Amy Wilson confront, appropriate, and literally make headlines. When art and politics intersect, why must they meet on such contested ground? A second part looks at controversy surrounding the show itself.

Victoria

Should Michael Fried have meant "Art as Objecthood" as a compliment to Minimalism? Ted Victoria, Hu Bing, Bill Jenkins, and Bill Walton look to ordinary objects for drama and realism.

Vieira

Must big gestures be macho and empty installations be empty of meaning? Allyson Vieira, David Brooks (with help from Mark Dion), and John von Bergen see Minimalism as urban history.

Viola

For all their grand style, nothing seems more postmodern than video installations. So is Bill Viola a romantic at heart, or is it time to deconstruct Romanticism?

Can genius be seen only with a fish-eye lens? Bill Viola looks through the camera and find a human hand.

Violette

Has the avant-garde fallen to academics, politics, celebrities, or niche markets? Roger Kimball roots out liberalism at the CCS Hessel Museum, but Banks Violette just wants to rock and roll.

Vitale

Do "December" and the solstice stand for a promise or for dark nights? Marianne Vitale poses much the same question to Minimalism and Melissa Gordon to Piet Mondrian.

Vitiello

"What, then, is time?" Saint Augustine wondered, but for Stephen Vitiello, Christian Marclay in The Clock, and Leslie Thornton, time is on their side.

Viveros-Fauné

Amid the swirl of big bucks at the 2008 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs, does it even make sense to probe for conflict of interest? Tyler Green complains, but one writer, dealer, curator, and organizer—Christian Viveros-Fauné—argues that a creative mind can have it all.

von Bergen

Must big gestures be macho and empty installations be empty of meaning? John von Bergen, David Brooks (with help from Mark Dion), and Allyson Vieira see Minimalism as urban history.

Vonna-Michell

Can video art mean more than a dark, empty room? The X-Initiative strands Keren Cytter, Luke Fowler, and Tris Vonna-Michell in Chelsea, while Aernout Mik shoots up eight floors of a museum on video.

Vuillard

Nabis means prophets in Hebrew, but the movement stopped short of Modernism. With Edouard Vuillard, did love or reserve shape his art?

Kara Walker

How can a black artist who refuses to deal in ghetto stereotypes make people angry? Kara Walker traces a connection between slavery, popular culture, and Katrina.

High costs of living and the art-world carnival make postmodern artist and viewer alike pressed for time. For artists like John Coplans, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Joao Onofre, Hiro Yamagata, and Kara Walker, does that mean more choices, more extravagance, or plainer tales?

Kelley Walker

Splat! Does that sound mean that abstraction lives on, thanks to Robert S. Neuman and Thomas Nozkowski, or that Kurt Lightner and Kelley Walker are using it to bury familiar images in paint and chocolate syrup?

Is all the world a stage? On the path from "Creating the Modern Stage" to installation art, Guyton/Walker and Jacqueline Humphries find abstraction.

W. Walker

Can art, as Dave Hickey demands, still "civilize us"? The enormous futon that Klaus Biesenbach and Wendall Walker call Volume, SHoP's manic sculpture garden by the name of Dunescape, and "Around 1984" with its look at the 1980s do their best, but Barbara Kruger wittily refuses to try.

Wall

Jeff Wall manipulates every large photograph down to the smallest detail, even when that includes people and trash. Does that make him a Postmodernist or a connoisseur of chaos?

Wallach

Did museums create the whole idea of originality? Alan Wallach traces the modern museum to a shift from plaster casts, while "The Philippe de Montebello Years" gives acquisitions the look of gift-shop reproductions.

Walton

Should Michael Fried have meant "Art as Objecthood" as a compliment to Minimalism? Bill Walton, Hu Bing, Bill Jenkins, and Ted Victoria look to ordinary objects for drama and realism.

Ward

Is art in a state of emergency? Nari Ward calls an ambulance to Harlem, Sterling Ruby parks a prison in Chelsea, Brian Conley stages war games in Brooklyn, and David Maisel photographs the ashes.

Warhol

I came to New York to look at modern art, only to watch it fall apart. Early David Salle and late Andy Warhol were both painting the death of painting.

Did Andy Warhol decline from artist into celebrity, or was he asking for it all along? Two films—one with David Bowie as Warhol—make an eerie backdrop for yet more of his late work.

What was left behind from the Factory's fifteen minutes of fame? Andy Warhol, for one, with his Screen Tests and other motion pictures—and his part in "The Talent Show."

When Joseph Masheck collects his Texts on (Texts on) Art, has art and criticism given way to an obsessive chain of influence? Not when Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, Andy Warhol, Arthur C. Danto, and others embraced the dangers.

Is modern sculpture too grand and too full of private influence to be modern? "The Nasher Collection" beautifully spotlights the nature of the art world, and the Nasher Museum hosts Polaroids by the old master of complicity, Andy Warhol.

With Minimalism, does art surrender to experience, or does the viewer surrender to the art? With a factory redesign by Robert Irwin, 300,000 square feet, and big shows for Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, and many more, Dia:Beacon assumes control.

Washburn

Traditionally, a man got to play the artist, finding his inspiration in a woman and in nature. What happens, then, when a young woman plays with art and images of nature, as in the work of Ana Mendieta and Phoebe Washburn?

Wasmuht

After traditional representation and abstraction, can painters still map space? Corinne Wasmuht, Tom McGrath, and "Inside Out, Outside In" negotiate the panoramas of airports and cities at night.

Watteau

Tired of centennials for modern art? Diego Velázquez portraits, together with Jean Antoine Watteau drawings, may make the best birthday celebration of them all.

Should one call Antoine Watteau a revolutionary or a man of the theater? "Watteau to Degas" and "Rococo to Revolution" contrast changing styles and the eye of a connoisseur.

Waugh

Through words or photos, one can imagine oneself a traveler in exotic lands. Do Michael Waugh, Joan Jonas, Simon Lee, and Michael Rakowitz make one a tourist or a voyeur?

Wearing

Gillian Wearing shows the stages of a woman's life as wrought with guilt, Robin Hill places art in a hospital, and Laurie Simmons moves in with a love doll. How can manufactured bodies suffer anxiety and decay.

Webster

After five years in Iraq, can art have mere intimations of disaster? Meg Webster, Deborah Brown, Paul Chan, Joy Garnett, and Lucien Samaha reveal the anxious artist.

Wegman

What defines conservative art—an accessible artist, an academy of fine art, or a sober realist at home in one? William Wegman and his dog emerge from the calendars, the 2006 National Academy Annual from 181 years of torpor, and Bo Bartlett from the American tradition.

Wegner

How did so much earth and the dark corners of New York streets get inside? Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset create an underground End Station, Peter Wegner a paper labyrinth, and Mike Bouchet a pungent alternative to Walter de Maria, while emerging artists "Make It Now."

Can art leap tall buildings in a single bound? Unlike typical summer sculpture, Peter Wegner, Andreas Gursky, and "Tall Buildings" take the great outdoors inside.

Weiner

Lawrence Weiner makes conceptual art, in block letters on bare walls. What then accounts for the mental and even sensual overload?

Welish

If art is going to cut through the market's chaos and complicity, it needs a map. Could abstraction from Marjorie Welish, Larry Silver, or the 2008 National Academy Annual supply one?

Welliver

Artists never truly paint like their influences, right? Yet the influence of Abstract Expressionism lingers on, not just with Jules Olitski and the late Neil Welliver, but in younger artists who seem almost to channel them—including Makoto Fujimura, Ronnie Landfield, Peter Reginato, Duston Spear, and Joseph Stashkevetch.

Westfall

Can Soho recover memories of modernity? Stephen Westfall, Wendell McRae, Tim Hawkinson, and Donald Baechler take on the construction job—with everything from abstract painting and photography to machine parts.

Is there more to abstraction than Generation Blank? Mark Grotjahn, Stephan Westfall, and summer group shows try the formulas, and they break down.

Whistler

James McNeill Whistler went in and out of fashion, but he never lost his interest in clothes. Does that make his female portraits complacent, daring, or even postmodern?

Do images of Asia always amount to "orientalism"? From James McNeill Whistler to Ann Hamilton and Paul Kos, "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia" looks to the East and finds only religion.

White and Oleksiak

If a photograph never lies, how can it quote Magritte, Duchamp, and Freud? Agata Olek Oleksiak and Naomi White, "Strange Magic," and Peggy Preheim dream up their own answers.

Whiteread

When Rachel Whiteread casts common objects, does she leave monuments or their absence? She flirts with grandeur, but Sydney Blum restores sculpture to kitchen duty.

Wiley

If there is a post-black identity, does it allow a photographer to pose his subject? Kori Newkirk finds it in hair gel and curtains, Kehinde Wiley in pop musicians and Africa, and Demetrius Oliver in his own studio, but the emerging artists in "New Intuitions" discretely look away.

Williams

At the end of 1996, did "in" New Yorkers still never travel north of 14th Street? I check out the new Chelsea galleries and dear old 57th Street, with the most space to Leonardo Drew, Christian Haub, Garry Hill, Ellsworth Kelly, Jodi Manasevit, and Sue Williams—a feminist who is not joining Women Against Pornography.

A. Wilson

Amy Wilson does not make art for the farsighted. What, then, are her little girls doing in a gallery or near Ground Zero, rather than in the Iraq war?

Does art belong at Ground Zero, as part of an International Freedom Center? The tabloids slam Amy Wilson and the Drawing Center, just when New York needs art to revitalize lower Manhattan and politics alike as a public space.

J. and L. Wilson

Jane and Louise Wilson, Julianne Swartz, and Sam Taylor-Wood, are back, Jonathan Cramer channels Jackson Pollock, and Bjorn Melhus changes the channels on Jerry Springer. Is Chelsea truly over the top?

Winkleman

Can dealers survive the recession and even the Web? Edward Winkleman asks How to Start and Run a Commercial Gallery.

When people talk about art after the end of art, do they mean that conceptual art has outlived the art object? Edward Winkleman, Catherine Spaeth, Carol Diehl, and "The Shallow Curator" make the virtual case against the anti-esthetic.

Roberta Smith asks why artists trade up to new galleries, while Edward Winkleman asks why a gallery like his own cuts artists. When Elizabeth Peyton paints American royals, has she figured out what it takes to play insider?

Winters

When Terry Winters paints his Knotted Graphs, is he doing math or illustrating it? "Measure for Measure," Alyson Shotz, and Winters raise questions about art and mathematics.

Wodiczko

As plans for culture at Ground Zero stagnate, can political art respond? The backlash definitely is setting in, with exhibitions of the key architects, plus Luc Tuymans, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Sam Durant.

Wogan

Art cries out for a great alternative space, but as alternative to what? I find out at the reopened P.S 1, especially in rooms by Marina Abramovic, John Coplans, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Robert Wogan—who creates a tunnel to the sky and a window on the space's interior.

Wojnarowicz

If outrage sells, why does David Wojnarowicz still face censorship? After the outrage, "Hide/Seek" finds gay lives from the AIDS epidemic to the very origins of American Modernism.

Is there more to David Wojnarowicz and Paul Thek than abjection? Peter Hujar captures their moments away from the furor.

Did David Wojnarowicz and other artists of the 1980s sell out, get forced out, or aspire to move out all along? "East Village USA" evokes a scene of experiment and entrepreneurship, like a trial run for art today.

Woodman

Francesca Woodman takes herself as subject in empty interiors, while Anne Collier leaves herself just outside the frame. Are they asserting a place for women in photography or looking for a place to hide?

Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright built midwestern homes and hated big cities. Can the Guggenheim Museum in New York still be his true legacy?

Wyeth

The Whitney puts up scaffolding for some serious remodeling, just in time to display Arthur Dove, Andrew Wyeth, and a new look at its permanent collection. Is the museum getting back to America's roots or retreating into the bunker?

X-Initiative

Can video art mean more than a dark, empty room? The X-Initiative strands Keren Cytter, Luke Fowler, and Tris Vonna-Michell in Chelsea, while Aernout Mik shoots up eight floors of a museum on video.

Yamagata

High costs of living and the art-world carnival make postmodern artist and viewer alike pressed for time. For artists like John Coplans, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Joao Onofre, Kara Walker, and Hiro Yamagata, does that mean more choices, more extravagance, or plainer tales?

Yan

When does a work on paper become wallpaper? With Lin Yan, Dawn Clements, Wei Ja, and Claire Pentecost, it may well become the wall.

Yasinsky

When women artists play against stereotype, are they getting hysterical? Karen Yasinsky, Zoe Beloff, Nathalie Djurberg, Mika Rottenberg, and Carolee Schneeman improve on Freud's studies in hysteria.

Yass

Symmetry is back, but are artists opening or shutting doors? Catherine Yass, Ron Gorchov, Mark Grotjahn, Ellsworth Kelly, and Fred Sandback start knocking.

Young

In the late 1960s, one might have called Richard Pousette-Dart and Peter Young both pattern and decoration. What, then, makes the first an Abstract Expressionist and the latter an attempt at a new beginning?

Yuskavage

Like Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin takes realism seriously. Does it mean more than exposing the female body to mass marketing and other threatening eyes?

Is anything left of Modernism's daring except nudity and nostalgia? In the cold winter of 2001, I take a quick gallery tour, with most space to Leonardo Drew, Nan Goldin, Robert Longo, and Lisa Yuskavage, who also has a rather early retrospective.

Zittel

Can one call a trailer park America's home-grown utopian community or another commercial wasteland? Andrea Zittel and her "A-Z Administrative Services" have made plans for your future, but Rob Fischer turns them on their side.

Zmijewski

Can political art be numbingly obvious and obscure at the same time? Artur Zmijewski, Emory Douglas, Claire Fontaine, and Hans Haacke give it their best shot.

Zurbarán

How can five paintings from the Norton Simon Museum include three dogs, three mothers, and at least twice as many angels? Jacopo Bassano, Peter Paul Rubens, Guercino, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo chart the parallel development of painting in oil and a new secularism.

GROUP SHOWS

I gave up looking for a pattern here and have these alphabetized by exhibition title, so scroll on down.

Are Sam Moyer and others in ". . ." haunted by abstraction, including their own? Trisha Brown remembers abstraction's collective dance, while Lilly Ludlow finds it a century ago on the Lower East Side.

MOMA has rooms for Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko but not for Willem de Kooning. What defines "Abstract Expressionist New York"?

For the Guggenheim, "Abstraction in the 20th Century" may well be what modern art is all about. Is the result definitive or just old-fashioned?

How many critics does it take to screw up Abstract Expressionism? In "Action/Abstraction," Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg face off, but Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning get along just fine.

With "Africa: The Art of a Continent," the Guggenheim responds to MOMA's infamous display of "primitivism." But is it once again Modernism in blackface?

Can art recover the spiritual or only a degraded ritual? "After Nature" and "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith" try to save a multicultural humanity, but only after plenty of suffering.

Is abstraction dead, or was that last year? "After the Fall," a huge survey of "Abstract Art Since 1970," is at least a provocative funeral.

With Rhapsody, Jennifer Bartlett took painting apart, but could all the king's horses after Modernism put it together again? With "Against the Grain," the Edward R. Broida collection tries to fill a gap, both in the Modern's permanent collection and contemporary art's history.

Only the Met would celebrate Rembrandt's birthday by celebrating itself. What does the history of its Dutch collection say about "The Age of Rembrandt"?

Should one trace motion in painting and new media to illusion, vision, or physical sensation? "<Alt> Digital Media" and "Video Acts" get one thinking, with heavy lifting from Marina Abramovic, Bruce Nauman, and others.

Is there still room for alternative spaces and an alternative art? Consider some "Alternative Histories."

Just whose century was this anyway? In Part I of "The American Century: Art and Culture" the Whitney finds modern art and culture a little too comfortingly American, but Part II leaves American art curiously self-involved after all.

Even modern art can play victim of imperialism. When artists seek the primitive in New York, can one call it "The American Effect"?

The revisionists are at it yet again, this time with "American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life." Does it help to shift the debate to America?

Can Jason Tomme, Scott Lyall, and "American ReConstruction" find a space between painting, prints, models, and abstraction? Sara VanDerBeek reminds new and old media "To Think of Time."

From George Caleb Bingham past Winslow Homer, painters have been telling "American Stories." But are they stories of individualism or community, of race or merit?

Edouard Manet took on a revolution, with The Execution of Maximilian, and "Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde," witnessed one, in his dealings with artists from Paul Cézanne to Pablo Picasso. Why, then, do "Americans in Paris" seem so tame?

Is there more to American art than the Hudson River School and Washington Crossing the Delaware? With its new American wing, the Met finds an evolving story.

Can physics or biology be an art? "Anatomical/Microbial/Microcosms" and "Attract/Repel" seek connections between science, books, and art.

Can painting this lavish play postmodern games with film culture? David Reed has P.S. 1 showing motion pictures, alongside group shows of "Animal.Animus.Anima" and contemporary Irish art in Britain.

How did participatory art and "relational esthetics" become installations by celebrity artists? Rirkrit Tiravanija, Douglas Gordon, and "theanyspacewhatever" take over the Guggenheim.

Can any modern and contemporary art not fall into the themes of irony and space? Such summer group shows as "Ardor and Irony," "a point in space is the place for an argument," and "The Shapes of Space" can handle anything.

Does contemporary art offer an endless, impersonal shopping mall or that special moment of intimacy with the artist, the work, and oneself? Try the extremes of the 2004 and 2006 Armory Show and "One on One in Video," including Shannon Plumb.

Amid the swirl of big bucks at the 2008 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs, does it even make sense to probe for conflict of interest? One writer, dealer, curator, and organizer—Christian Viveros-Fauné—argues that a creative mind can have it all.

I went to the 2009 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs in search of a beer. Did that show me the fate of art in a recession?

Does the Independent depend on other art fairs? The 2010 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs are getting competitive again.

What happens when the 2011 Armory Show absorbs Volta, Pulse and a competitor switch places, and even the Independent spawns a parody? Better look for Moving Image.

Is there a market for defiance? The 2012 Armory Show, Volta, Moving Image, the Independent, and other fairs offer competing visions of where the action is.

With its reopened "Art of the Arab Lands," the Met welcomes the Islamic galleries back to the museum and the public to Islamic art. Can a mere show also do justice to "Master Painters of India"?

Should artists approaching "The Art of 9/11" feel angry, guilty, or both? Arthur C. Danto curates a measured response, and Chang-Jin Lee offers the comforts of a "Homeland Security Garden," but anger wells up with "A Knock at the Door. . . .

After ten years of haberarts.com, what have I learned, and have I still not joined the art world? The 2006 Dumbo "Art Under the Bridge" festival, with work by Mary Temple, makes critical judgment harder than ever.

Could the 2007 Dumbo "Art Under the Bridge" festival, with work by Roger Hines, mark the end of an era? Compare its crowds to those for the Chelsea money machine.

Was Minimalism all along about familiar objects or perception? James Turrell, David Novros, and "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" all have one asking.

Can physics or biology be an art? "Anatomical/Microbial/Microcosms" and "Attract/Repel" seek connections between science, books, and art.

"Barcelona and Modernity: From Gaudí to Dalí" and Spanish Painting from "El Greco to Picasso" both deserve the name "From Picasso to Picasso." But can Barcelona or the Spanish mind really explain any of these artists?

When Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy came to America, did they bring fine art, sound design, or more consumer products? "From the Bauhaus to the New World" has one asking, while "Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity" shows how Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer shaped modern art.

Does a tribute say more about the original or the present? With "The Bearden Project" and a mural, Kira Lynn Harris and others remember Romare Bearden.

A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Yet could the cynics in "The Price of Everything" and "Beneath the Underdog" offer the best hope for art?

Could Renaissance art history lie off the beaten path, with a forgotten sculptor and a town in northern Italy? Antico rediscovers antiquity, while Bergamo holds painting by Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Lorenzo Lotto.

What happens when abstraction meets the ready-made gesture? Tamar Halpern, Skyler Brickley, and Amy Sillman take painting "Besides, With, Against, and Yet."

Can you name the most dangerous and most necrophilic exhibitions, much less the "Best of 2007"? From the Whitney's rebirth and the Guggenheim's death throes to MOMA's solid business as usual, consider the year in review.

Must a museum sell such assets as paintings by Sanford Robinson Gifford and Frederic Edwin Church? The "Best of 2008" collides with a financial crisis.

Art endured a year of the Great Recession, covering the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and even MOMA's atrium. Is that the "Best of 2009"?

Is it acceptable at last to find big shows disappointing and big dealers annoying? With the "Best of 2010," art sees a greater diversity and drift.

Are museums in the recession just making do? With the "Best of 2011," thank art for small mercies.

Do summers bring out everyone's inner child or just some childish art? For 2008, Jeff Koons and Chris Burden play hard, while "Waste Not, Want Not" in Astoria and a version of "Between the Bridges" called "Relative Environment" teach one to recycle one's toys.

Not all sculpture looks better as an outdoor monument. How can Joel Shapiro, Roxy Paine, and others in Socrates Sculpture Park or the 2007 "Between the Bridges" look so graceful?

In 2006, Nancy Rubins, Cai Guo-Qiang, and "Between the Bridges" join an almost empty landscape for summer sculpture. Is the promise of lower Manhattan culture fading?

For once, can outdoor sculpture evoke the lazy months of summer? In 2005, Sol LeWitt, "Set and Drift" on Governor's Island, "Sport" in Socrates Sculpture Park, and "Between the Bridges" all give it a try.

How long will New York look to the sky at Ground Zero? Outdoor installations in 2003 from Wim Delvoye, the Socrates Sculpture Park, and "Between the Bridges" have one reimagining the ground below.

Can art find common ground for grieving? A path lies from Ground Zero to Brian Tolle's Irish Hunger Memorial and the BWAC 2002 twentieth anniversary of sculpture "Between the Bridges."

Can digital art make a revolution while appropriating the same old world? Compare "BitStreams" and "Data Dynamics" to the obsessions, intimacy, and invasions of privacy in such gallery artists as Gary Hume and Peter Sarkisian.

What is a museum's mission, art or attendance. Call it quality or diversity, but The Brooklyn Museum fails at both.

Should one ban the Whitney Biennial, replaced by the "Brucennial" and the Bruce High Quality Foundation? The edgy 2012 Whitney Biennial may not back down, but it is stripped down.

Architecture long ago entered the museum, but can buildings—or entire cities? "The Building Show" and "Burgeoning Geometries" give it their best.

Fire consumed a political statement by Dinos and Jake Chapman, while Sue Coe and group shows like "Bush League" and "The Presidency" went on the warpath. Did any of it make a difference?

As galleries concentrate in Manhattan, artists spread further throughout New York. With Bushwick Open Studios, can an alternative community or an alternative space survive?

When women come to Pop or installation, do they fall for its seductions? "Seductive Subversion" insists on the seductions and subversions of women Pop artists, while "Campaign" applies them to the present and to men.

Is there a direct line from Pablo Picasso to fascism? "Chaos and Classicism" sees his postwar Neoclassicism in everything from Magic Realism to collaboration.

A Chelsea arts walk sounds so informal. So what are all these galleries doing over there, and why do they show so clearly the limits of a purely American form of late-modern or postmodern art?

Can New York and suburbia learn from Modernism's ideal city? "Civic Action" has a vision for Long Island City, while "Foreclosed" engineers the American dream.

When Andrea del Sarto paints The Sacrifice of Isaac, should one identify with Abraham's dilemma or the look in Isaac's eyes? A selection of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art offers an unusually intimate history of Western art.

With "Family Pictures" and "Closed Circuit," two museums step hesitantly into new media. Who knew?

Does the Lower East Side merely extend Chelsea? Do Ho Suh, Khalif Kelly, Pieter Schoolwerth, and the video artists in "Closer Now" might agree to disagree.

Can art set color free and design free the mind, without both adding still more stifling constraints? "Color Chart: Reinventing Color," inspired by Donald Batchelor, and "Design and the Elastic Mind" pursue two postmodern utopias.

Does photography still have an inferiority complex? Chris Jordan, Vera Lutter, "The End Is Nigh," and "Colour Before Color" try extra hard to make an impression.

Have social media taken over everything? David Byrne, "Social Media," "Facetime," and "Corporations Are People Too" try something more collaborative, but also impersonal.

Sherrie Levine and "Crazy Lady" have no love or fear of a museum. Can she enter it all the same?

Is all the world a stage? On the path from "Creating the Modern Stage" to installation art, Guyton/Walker and Jacqueline Humphries find abstraction.

Théodore Géricault took Romanticism out to sea, and artists as late as Edouard Manet kept "Crossing the Channel." Did an era really set its differences aside, or has museum politics displaced artistic and national divisions?

If abstraction is the cutting edge, just who is doing the cutting? Nancy Haynes finds its dark edges, "Cutters" slices them into the work, and Mary Heilmann surfs through them.

A survey of "Dada" spans two doors, six cities, and hundreds of objects. Did Marcel Duchamp, May Ray, and others rebel against the very idea of art or engender all of art to come?

The media in "The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes" and "Treasures of a Lost Art: Italian Manuscript Painting" have vanished, and neither one left copies. Must photographs and books come in multiple editions to feel modern?

Do "December" and the solstice stand for a promise or for dark nights? Marianne Vitale poses much the same question to Minimalism and Melissa Gordon to Piet Mondrian.

Was there more to women's art in the 1970s than politics? Valerie Jaudon brought pattern and decoration to formalism, while Jackie Ferrara, Nancy Holt, and others created "Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art."

Does art still have the power to shock—or only to numb the senses? "Into Me / Out of Me," inspired by Susan Sontag on raw experience—along with subsequent shows of "Defamation of Character," "Silicone Valley," and Vic Muniz—can make one overlook the difference.

What marks the edge between city and country? Like suburbia and sprawltown, James Bleecker, Tadashi Kawamata, Patrick O'Hare, and "Degrees of Freedom" are learning to forget.

With Minimalism, does art surrender to experience, or does the viewer surrender to the art? With a factory redesign by Robert Irwin, 300,000 square feet, and big shows for Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, and many more, Dia:Beacon assumes control.

Too often one thinks of prints as small and self-effacing. Can Odilon Redon and "New York/Paris Dialogue Paris/New York," a show of artist's books curated by Maddy Rosenberg, at last give the media their due?

A girl at a window by Rembrandt leans casually into the light. Does the Dulwich Picture Gallery represent Regency calm or a more Romantic future, and does a late self-portrait from Kenwood House close the circle?

Did artists of the 1980s sell out, get forced out, or aspire to move out all along? "East Village USA" evokes a scene of experiment and entrepreneurship, like a trial run for art today.

When Paul Klee and Ellsworth Kelly step back from vision, have they put the abstract in abstraction? Artists today can still draw back from "The Edge."

Why not start your own museum? The Emily Fisher Landau Center, designed by Max Gordon, replays in real time the birth of the modern museum from private collections.

Does photography still have an inferiority complex? Chris Jordan, Vera Lutter, "The End Is Nigh," and "Colour Before Color" try extra hard to make an impression.

It takes "Endurance" to survive as an artist, but what about as a spectator? Exit Art, the Soho space, wants to know.

No one truly can speak for others, much less for race in America, so who can call black artists to account if they try—or if they refuse? The abstract art in "Energy/Experimentation," the studio artists in "Midnight's Daydream," and Chris Ofili in London and Trinidad make it difficult even to know which.

Can the "global village" stand in for some modernity's urban, intellectual, and artistic neighborhoods? "Entelechs" takes to the Web.

Did the March on Washington demand a response from African American artists? When Romare Bearden helped found "Spiral," he could only dream how Radcliffe Bailey, "Evidence of Accumulation," and Lyle Ashton Harris would spiral outward.

Is there more to an installation than the leftovers from a performance? With "Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction" an alternative space reopens, and the installation never stops performing.

When "Exposed: The Victorian Nude" comes to Brooklyn, the gloves are off. But what exactly is one seeing through?

Art can carry on after 9/11, but can it return to normal? A group show seeks sincerity in "Extreme Existence" while, over in Brooklyn, Karen Dolmanisth and Deborah Masters mix ritual and performance, and Bob and Roberta Smith offer an Art Amnesty.

How can science and art intersect, and, if they cannot, will opposites attract? "Produced at Eyebeam 2005," Mark Dion, Michal Rovner, Jessica Bronson, and Jacob van Ruisdael feel the attraction.

Have social media taken over everything? David Byrne, "Social Media," "Facetime," and "Corporations Are People Too" try something more collaborative, but also impersonal.

With "Family Pictures" and "Closed Circuit," two museums step hesitantly into new media. Who knew?

Untitled Film Stills showed Cindy Sherman as infinitely malleable. How could she or "Fashioning Fiction" find anything left to change?

Is there really "The Female Gaze," and what could it look like? Janine Antoni, Alfred Gescheidt, and Juergen Teller parse the elements of desire.

How many feminisms does it take to light up Brooklyn? Despite "Global Feminisms," Judy Chicago, and a new Sackler Center for Feminist Art, all too few, but "The Feminine Mystique" in Jersey City has a better idea.

Should artists have a natural sympathy for refugees? Maybe not, but "Senso Unico" finds exiles in Italy, "Flow" in and beyond Africa, and Julio Bittencourt in a boarded-up building in Brazil.

Can New York and suburbia learn from Modernism's ideal city? "Civic Action" has a vision for Long Island City, while "Foreclosed" engineers the American dream.

As cable TV and the Web become prime news sources, should one mourn the death of an informed citizen or celebrate new voices in new media? For "The Last Newspaper" and "Free," change comes as old news.

Can black artists afford to use words like free and style? At the Studio Museum in Harlem, they wrestle—"Freestyle," with "Frequency," and from "Scratch"—with black and white America

Can the great postwar movements encompass a full century of American art and an Edward Hopper retrospective? With "Full House," just past sculpture by Michael Heizer, the Whitney's permanent collection gives it a try.

The New Museum calls its 2009 Generational "Younger than Jesus" and its 2012 Triennial "The Ungovernables." After globalization, what defines a generation?

Arturo Herrera paints convincingly with collage, Mariah Robertson with photograms, and Angel Otero with spattered fabric. Can abstraction relive its "Geometric Days"?

What does this Jackson Pollock mean to you? John Armstrong thinks that art's value lies in something very personal, but the Gere collection, of some sixty early landscape sketches in oil, shows how personal reveries in art took shape not all that long ago.

How German was German Expressionism? "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse" aims to shift the center of Modernism from Paris.

Which supplies the most grisly erotic theory—high heels in the mud, Abu Ghraib, or gold chains? Marilyn Minter, Fernando Botero, and "The Gold Standard" know what is naughty and nice.

Long after the Battle of Brooklyn, will New York again have a military history? "PLOT/09" seeks its ghosts, but the Governor's Island Art Fair just wants artist space.

Is the art scene a carnival or a deadly game? "Greater New York," "Greater New York 2005," and "Greater New York 2010" combine P.S. 1, the Modern, endless curators, thousands of slides, and dozens of artists at a time to leave an adult visitor a very knowing child.

Is recent photography too familiar or too strange? The Guggenheim calls it "Haunted," or what Sigmund Freud called the uncanny.

If outrage sells, why does David Wojnarowicz still face censorship? After the outrage, "Hide/Seek" finds gay lives from the AIDS epidemic to the very origins of American Modernism.

Will the High Line and the High Line extension preserve an overgrowth of wild flowers and urban history, with sculpture by Sarah Sze, or will it tower over Chelsea as one more dark, utopian vision? Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in association with Field Operations and with photographs by Joel Sternfeld, offer a look down upon the art world.

A steam shovel and power saw sound like tools for Robert Smithson. But what remained of Minimalism and its "High Times, Hard Times" after Gordon Matta-Clark cut into it?

Can prefabricated homes remake modern living or just offer the same old parts? "Home Delivery" builds for speed, but Paul McCarthy slams the door.

Is art devolving into a scary, macho remake of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll? Mike Kelley and Michael Smith take Baby IKKI to Burning Man, "The Horror Show" plays on, and Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman convert a huge gallery into Black-Acid Co-op.

Where did the Renaissance begin in earnest? The Limbourg brothers illuminate the International Style, "Pages of Gold" follows progress across Europe, and "Icon Painting in Venetian Crete" takes El Greco from his origins to Italy.

If Postmodernism wants to ground art historically, why does it keep riffing so wildly on the past? Consider what happens when Robert Mapplethorpe encounters Mannerism, contemporary painters create their own "Idols of Perversity," and—long before both—Goethe built a great drawing collection on his mistakes.

Learning to love photography after sex and the Web? Leigh Ledare, Donna Ferrato, and iheartphotograph.com state their case.

In "Illuminating the Medieval Hunt," is the Morgan Library illuminating the early Renaissance? Le Livre de la Chasse unbinds a rare manuscript.

Does the Independent depend on other art fairs? The 2010 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs are getting competitive again.

What happens when the 2011 Armory Show absorbs Volta, Pulse and a competitor switch places, and even the Independent spawns a parody? Better look for Moving Image.

Is there a market for defiance? The 2012 Armory Show, Volta, Moving Image, the Independent, and other fairs offer competing visions of where the action is.

What do art and the urban experience have in common, other than real-estate values? "In Practice" for 2003, Keith Sonnier, and "Sprawl" take the issues into a gallery's unsettling interior.

As installation art takes over, can any sculpture garden bother with plants or a gallery with real life? Monica Bonvicini, "In Practice" for 2007, and Jannis Kounellis give it a try.

After traditional representation and abstraction, can painters still map space? Tom McGrath, Corinne Wasmuht, and "Inside Out, Outside In" negotiate the panoramas of airports and cities at night.

Just what video art did Nam June Paik spawn? "Into the Light" and "Inner and Outer Space" trace two, treacherously intertwined traditions.

Must one see Iran and the Old Silk Road through western eyes—or the west through the eyes of others? "Iran Inside Out" manages both, while Eve Sussman rides the transcontinental railroad in search of the space race.

With its reopened "Art of the Arab Lands," the Met welcomes the Islamic galleries back to the museum and the public to Islamic art. Can a mere show also do justice to "Master Painters of India"?

Is there more to art that resentment on the outside and big names within? "Knight's Move" raises the possibilities and dilemmas of mixed media and Generation X art.

When political art goes wrong, it can get too didactic or too personal. With Marlene Dumas, Emily Jacir, and "The Labyrinth Wall," can it ever be both at once?

Can political art overcome nostalgia for war? "Love/War/Sex" offers a dark "theater" of operations.

Has gentrification brought grief to the Lower East Side, and has Southern California caught the last wave? "Lush Life" and "Swell" confront the art of the coasts.

Did Modernism have a choice, and does the Museum of Modern Art now? In "Making Choices: 1920-1960," Cindy Sherman's shards of an ego, "The Marriage of Reason and Squalor by Frank Stella, and Walker Evans's collision with reality each get to define modern art's first decades of triumph.

Which is a more fitting memorial, a statue or a pit in the earth? In very different ways, the National September 11 Memorial and the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial seek the sky.

With its reopened "Art of the Arab Lands," the Met welcomes the Islamic galleries back to the museum and the public to Islamic art. Can a mere show also do justice to "Master Painters of India"?

When Terry Winters paints his Knotted Graphs, is he doing math or illustrating it? "Measure for Measure," Alyson Shotz, and Winters raise questions about art and mathematics.

Is there any difference between video art and technology? In a lavish exhibition called "Mediascape," I was never sure.

Can the experience of a book stretch from one mind to a household and out to an entire public world? A Medieval Housebook" suggests how, set alongside shows of "The Medieval World" and of controversial works by Giotto and others from Assisi.

Is it springtime for Hitler or just the spring art season? "Mirroring Evil" makes the case for confronting the Holocaust—in every way but with the work.

Does modern art have a Y2K problem? When the Museum of Modern Art celebrates the millenium with a return to "Modern Starts" called "People, Places, Things," I began to wonder.

Thanks to Yoshio Taniguchi, MOMA's reopening in Manhattan is breathtaking (and revisited for its first exhibition upstairs and downstairs, as well as for its progress one year later). But will the rarefied air support a conversation with the work?

Is modern art really a corporate institution? With MOMA QNS, the Museum of Modern expands its empire into uncharted territory, and the territory takes it all in stride.

You call this a monument? Ed Ruscha traces the course of empire and Thomas Hirschhorn a world in ruins, while "Monuments for the USA" seeks a nation worth remembering.

What happens when the 2011 Armory Show absorbs Volta, Pulse and a competitor switch places, and even the Independent spawns a parody? Better look for Moving Image.

Is there a market for defiance? The 2012 Armory Show, Volta, Moving Image, the Independent, and other fairs offer competing visions of where the action is.

Why are museums competing as sites for celebrity architecture? With a new home by Brad Cloepfil and an inaugural show, "Second Lives," the Museum of Arts and Design demands its place in the arts.

The Museum of Chinese in America brings the past to light when it leaves the galleries to descend underground. Can Maya Lin bridge landscape, architecture, and community?

As part of the redesign of 2 Columbus Circle, Brad Cloepfil has clad the Museum of Arts and Design in terra-cotta and glass that, some say, spell out HE in huge capital letters. What are some of its other features?

When artists take "The Museum as Muse," have they made the ultimate critique—or given in to the museum institution? Just when postmodern critics thought they knew, the Modern takes itself as muse, too.

Summer and photography alike promise a window onto nature. How, then, do Dietmar Busse, Roger Ricco, and Sharon Lockhart present "Mutilated/Cultivated Environments"?

If art is going to cut through the market's chaos and complicity, it needs a map. Could abstraction from Marjorie Welish, Larry Silver, or the 2008 National Academy Annual supply one?

Which is a more fitting memorial, a statue or a pit in the earth? In very different ways, the National September 11 Memorial and the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial seek the sky.

Does art parallel science or something older? "Natural Histories" stresses the handmade, while Shane Hope teaches molecules to paint.

Can art about Africa engage politics rather than the primitive? "Négritude" sees a hybrid, global culture in Modernism, and Bathélémy Toguo bears its burdens.

Can art recover the spiritual or only a degraded ritual? "After Nature" and "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith" try to save a multicultural humanity, but only after plenty of suffering.

Are "The New Black Heavies" post-post-black? Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas make everything uncertain in African American identity but gender.

With Daniel Canogar, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, and Jennifer Steinkamp, have new media become an obsession? The New York Electronic Arts Fair invades Governor's Island, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster invades Chelsea.

In academic art as in cliché, once all roads led to Rome. In "1900: Art at the Crossroads" or in modern and postmodern art every since, can they lead to nineteenth-century Paris?

Without Alanna Heiss, will P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center become anything but contemporary? "1969" takes it back forty years—and to MOMA's permanent collection.

"Not for Sale" takes work that artists have kept for themselves, but has P.S. 1 managed not to sell out? Jerry Saltz has his doubts.

Doreen McCarthy loves plastics, Lisa Hoke recycles, and "Notes on 'Notes on Camp' " recalls Susan Sontag. For all the theater, can the art object still slip out from within quotes?

Can realism co-exist with colorblindness—or only disgust at shades of gray? "Now You See It: Color and the Mind's Eye" traces the limits of a scientific optics.

For much of the public, modern art has never been desirable, and yet its images are full of "Objects of Desire." Are they traditional still life or a new game with reality?

Does contemporary art offer an endless, impersonal shopping mall or that special moment of intimacy with the artist, the work, and oneself? Try the extremes of the 2004 Armory Show and "One on One in Video," including Shannon Plumb.

Can "drawing through the twentieth century" dispense with both drawing and paper? At the Modern, "On Line" connects Picasso, dance, and Minimalism.

Is Modernism at an end, and if not, how late does it stay open? It depends where the accent falls in the Museum of Modern Art's final millenium wrap-up, "Open Ends."

The Brooklyn Museum invites two hundred borough artists to its "Open House"—and the world to its new entrance pavilion. With so much art now beyond Manhattan, how can it all get past the literal glass ceiling?

What happened to the flatness of abstract art? Jacob Kassay, Cordy Ryman, and "Organic Geometries" subject Modernism to slash and burn.

It takes only a small step to proceed from chaos to mythos. Can that explain "Organizing Chaos," Tunga, and Jim Shaw's The Donner Party?

An exhibition puts "The Origins of Impressionism" back in the Salon. Can it dispel the air of mystery and adventure around the birth of modern style?

Is there an art of Eastern Europe? Memories for Gustav Metzger run from the Holocaust to riots in London, but for "Ostalgie" art still lies behind the Berlin Wall.

Had I entered a history museum, a museum of natural history, or the Museum of Arts and Design? "Otherworldly" combines paintings and photographs with dioramas and scale models by James Casebere and others, for contemporary art in miniature.

Does the slow pace of video or a bare installation afford an escape from this world or an invitation to engagement? "Out of Time," drawn from MOMA's permanent collection, and Douglas Gordon both want to know.

Was Janet Sobel an Abstract Expressionist or a primitive? The 2009 Outsider Art Fair shows how both ideas helped to create outsider art.

Can you connect the dots all the way from Leonardo to Caravaggio and call it a regional style? With "Painters of Reality," painting in Lombardy turns out to look more eclectic than that innocent title lets on.

For a time Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman shared a Soho gallery. Did they ignite "The Pictures Generation"?

Long after the Battle of Brooklyn, will New York again have a military history? "PLOT/09" seeks its ghosts, but the Governor's Island Art Fair just wants artist space.

Could Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling have painted just for you? "Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych" shows the private side of the Renaissance.

Fire consumed a political statement by Dinos and Jake Chapman, while Sue Coe and group shows like "Bush League" and "The Presidency" went on the warpath. Did any of it make a difference?

A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Yet could the cynics in "The Price of Everything" and "Beneath the Underdog" offer the best hope for art?

Long after Picasso's fears and Adolph Gottlieb's alchemy, can one still take "the primitive" or the shock of the avant-garde seriously? A new Web magazine locates Modernism's "Primitive Discord."

Does "Primitivism Revisited" describe modern or even contemporary art? Armando Reverón and others journey between Europe and the Americas.

"Is the art market making us stupid?" Jerry Saltz worries, and Jed Perl is dead certain, but "Private Treasures" look smart.

Art cries out for a great alternative space, but as alternative to what? I find out at "P.S 1: The Reopening" and again after its merger to become "The Museum of Modern Art at P.S. 1," still with its permanent installation of James Turrell.

I went to the 2009 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs in search of a beer. Did that show me the fate of art in a recession?

Does the Independent depend on other art fairs? The 2010 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs are getting competitive again.

What happens when the 2011 Armory Show absorbs Volta, Pulse and a competitor switch places, and even the Independent spawns a parody? Better look for Moving Image.

Wood should allow one to climb its fragile beams. Why, then, do Karyn Olivier, Ursula von Rydingsvard, "Trace," and "Quid Pro Quo" make playgrounds such eerie places to play?

Do fabric and tapestry design still stand for multiculturalism, tradition, or women's work? Charles LeDray, "Rags to Richesse," and Banners of Persuasion range from the East Village to North Africa and from myth to a man's sexual coming of age.

What distinguishes American Surrealism, and does it come down to Edward Hopper? The Whitney calls it "Real/Surreal," but Llyn Foulkes updates it for Pop Art and LA.

The Whitney calls a show of abstract art "Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Painting and Drawing." With Julie Mehretu and, in the galleries, Pat Steir and Ernst Haas, need one even think of abstract art as painting and drawing?

The Guggenheim invites the Pompidou Center to New York, to create an "imaginary museum" of Modernism. Does the "Rendezvous" of actual museum institutions deaden art instead?

Did the Renaissance in Italy rediscover the individual, in profile and in the round? "The Renaissance Portrait" moves from Donatello to Giovanni Bellini and from heads of states to a wider world.

Should one call Antoine Watteau a revolutionary or a man of the theater? "Watteau to Degas" and "Rococo to Revolution" contrast changing styles and the eye of a connoisseur.

How did Mannerism turn from agony to manner? Agnolo Bronzino drawings take him from Pontormo's studio to self-reflection, while "Rome After Raphael" watches the manner die.

Romanticism did not easily sit still—especially Northern Romanticism. What then keeps Caspar David Friedrich and "Room with a View" so safely behind shuttered windows?

Can museums set art apart from its commodity value, and if not, who gets to cash in? Brandeis University turns on its donors, with plans to sell off the Rose Museum, while the Brooklyn Museum panders to one, with work by Hernan Bas.

How many feminisms does it take to light up Brooklyn? Despite "Global Feminisms," Judy Chicago, and a new Sackler Center for Feminist Art, all too few.

Can black artists afford to use words like free and style? At the Studio Museum in Harlem, they wrestle—"Freestyle," with "Frequency," and from "Scratch"—with black and white America

Tony Smith leaves a cigarette butt in Central Park, and sculpture parks reinvigorate New York. Which is more open to the commmunity?

Why are museums competing as sites for celebrity architecture? With a new home by Brad Cloepfil and an inaugural show, "Second Lives," the Museum of Arts and Design demands its place in the arts.

Does painting have critics "Seeing Red"? A survey at Hunter College, influenced by Josef Albers, starts with the psychology of color, but Walter Biggs, James Nares, Nancy Scheinman, and Gregg Stone have something else in mind.

For "Sensation" in Brooklyn, British artists and New York politicians recycle old scripts, nearly a decade after appropriation art held sway. With Dinos and Jake Chapman, Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, to name just a few, what accounts for the shock of the not so new, and can a savvy analysis by Hal Foster pin it down?

Should artists have a natural sympathy for refugees? Maybe not, but "Senso Unico" finds exiles in Italy, "Flow" in and beyond Africa, and Julio Bittencourt in a boarded-up building in Brazil.

"September 11" omits art about 9/11. Is its tenth anniversary best met in silence?

Must art comment only on itself, and must installations grow ever larger? "Site 92," "The Studio Visit," Michael S. Riedel, and Pierre Huyghe take the artist's working space as their muse.

Is art trapped in a vicious circle of celebrity artists, curators, and collectors? Jeff Koons curates "Skin Fruit," the Dakis Joannou Collection.

Have social media taken over everything? David Byrne, "Social Media," "Facetime," and "Corporations Are People Too" try something more collaborative, but also impersonal.

What do art and the urban experience have in common, other than real-estate values? "Sprawl," Keith Sonnier, and "In Practice" for 2003 take the issues into a gallery's unsettling interior.

Is public sculpture still standing or standing still? Antony Gormley and "Statuesque" aim for grand but vulnerable statuary, and then George Herms comes to salvage the mess.

How did Alexander Calder get from the whimsey of his Circus to the abstract sculpture at Storm King Art Center? His Paris years show him deciding between the noble savage and the savage sophisticate.

If a photograph never lies, how can it quote Magritte, Duchamp, and Freud? Agata Olek Oleksiak and Naomi White, "Strange Magic," and Peggy Preheim dream up their own answers.

Must art comment only on itself, and must installations grow ever larger? "The Studio Visit," "Site 92," Michael S. Riedel, and Pierre Huyghe take the artist's working space as their muse.

What does the psychedelic era have to do with art, other than album covers? Yayoi Kusama goes tripping, while the Whitney returns to the "Summer of Love."

Could André Breton get enough sex? With "Surrealism: Desire Unbound" and Salvador Dalí the Met allows Breton's movement plenty of desire, but too small a revolution and not nearly enough madness.

Has gentrification brought grief to the Lower East Side, and has Southern California caught the last wave? "Lush Life" and "Swell" confront the art of the coasts.

What is the Museum of Modern Art doing back in Manhattan? With "Take Two," it adjusts Yoshio Taniguchi's large new galleries and adjusts to contemporary art.

What was left behind from the Factory's fifteen minutes of fame? Andy Warhol, for one, with his Screen Tests and other motion pictures—and his part in "The Talent Show."

Can art leap tall buildings in a single bound? Unlike typical summer sculpture, "Tall Buildings," Andreas Gursky, and Peter Wegner take the great outdoors inside.

What is the Museum of Modern Art doing in Queens? With "Tempo" and "To Be Looked At" as opening exhibitions, MOMA QNS responds to its new surroundings.

For Robert Storr, conceptual art embodies the excesses of art-world stardom and childish installations. Olaf Breuning, Dan Fischer, and the African Americans in "30 Seconds off an Inch" point instead to conceptual arts in the plural.

Can art from Toledo means more than El Greco? While Spain and St. John the Divine set aside "Time to Hope" once more, the Toledo Museum shows art history's grappling with humanity and nature in such figures as El Greco, Piero di Cosimo, and Jacopo Bassano.

Wood should allow one to climb its fragile beams. Why, then, do Karyn Olivier, Ursula von Rydingsvard, "Trace," and "Quid Pro Quo" make playgrounds such eerie places to play?

Talking about "The Tradition of the New" makes "Postwar Masterpieces" at the Guggenheim look old. Is that a sign of their time—or ours?

The New Museum calls its 2009 Generational "Younger than Jesus" and its 2012 Triennial "The Ungovernables." After globalization, what defines a generation?

Up on the latest gossip from Artforum? Money talks louder than art yet again, through the UBS Collection and the sale of an Asher B. Durand.

What can sustain the Chelsea money machine, and what is it doing to the state of the art? With Aleksandra Mir, Paul McCarthy, and the Whitney "Undone," it is heading south.

When thieves stole The Scream and Madonna, by Edvard Munch, in August 2004, did they really get the goods, or did they just miss the version of the first stolen from another museum in Oslo ten years before? A show of "The Unfinished Print," including several versions of Madonna, discovers how the same word—and the same art—can mean both raw and just one more step in a series.

The New Museum calls its 2009 Generational "Younger than Jesus" and its 2012 Triennial "The Ungovernables." After globalization, what defines a generation?

The New Museum, in architecture by Sanaa, promises a rebirth on the Bowery, but its opening show, "Unmonumental," promises to retain the spirit of the Lower East Side. Which will win out?

Is race in America a usable past? Rafael Ferrer has gone from painter to Bronx street artist and back, while "Usable Pasts" at the Studio Museum answers with a plural.

When I think of sex, violence, and sheer play, am I talking about childhood or art? "Visions of Childhood" at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center lets Nayland Blake, Lewis Carroll, Nan Goldin, Grace Goldsmith, Laurie Simmons, and others ask just that.

Has summer sculpture gone for permanence? New York finds safety in "VISTA," Ai Weiwei, Mark di Suvero, and Jaume Plensa.

I went to the 2009 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs in search of a beer. Did that show me the fate of art in a recession?

Does the Independent depend on other art fairs? The 2010 Armory Show, Pulse, Volta, and other art fairs are getting competitive again.

What happens when the 2011 Armory Show absorbs Volta, Pulse and a competitor switch places, and even the Independent spawns a parody? Better look for Moving Image.

Is there a market for defiance? The 2012 Armory Show, Volta, Moving Image, the Independent, and other fairs offer competing visions of where the action is.

"WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution" could sound like a blow against the patriarchy, a comic strip, a feminist collective, or a sex act. Did an explosion of women's art and activism reenergize art in bad times?

"What Is Painting?" MOMA wants to know, but it may not listen to enough answers.

Should one ban the Whitney Biennial, replaced by the "Brucennial" and the Bruce High Quality Foundation? The edgy 2012 Whitney Biennial may not back down, but it is stripped down.

Think the recession is good for artists? The 2010 Whitney Biennial cuts back on artists and ideas.

One could treat the entire 2008 Whitney Biennial as an installation. Can it not just define American art or failure in American cities, but actually create them?

Who needs a survey of contemporary American art anyway? The 2006 Whitney Biennial has some problems with the words contemporary, American, and even art.

Can a survey of American art ever be "fair and balanced"? The 2004 Whitney Biennial tries awfully hard to please.

The 2002 Whitney Biennial scours America for the state of the art world. Could it succeed all too well?

After a three-year interval, the 2000 Whitney Biennial has a paradoxical name, plus huge publicity over a German-born artist's Nazi references. What about the paradox of American art in a global community?

In fact, one expects a Biennial to spotlight American art. Did the 1997 Whitney Biennial show instead what America is missing?

One expects a Biennial to involve politics. Did the rhetoric in the 1993 Whitney Biennial straighten out the art world at last?

The New Museum calls its 2009 Generational "Younger than Jesus" and its 2012 Triennial "The Ungovernables." After globalization, what defines a generation?

jhaber@haberarts.com