Is this the same Fogel who once displayed a plywood fort, like an overgrown boy? Is he joined by Hank Willis Thomas, who has struggled with black male identity—and now serves up a “chorus line” titled Alive with Pleasure!? How about Clifford Owens, who poses naked himself in performance, along with his audience? Collages by Derrick Adams include African American women in profile, like Egyptian queens, but would they work as streetscapes in tribute to Romare Bearden? All of the above, but in “Campaign” they truly do speak to gender and, in fact, to women.

Of course, men, too, belong to a culture obsessed with celebrity, lifestyle, and image making. This is not, however, about their anxieties and their self-image. When Deville Cohen arranged men supporting a car body, he could have been putting them through their paces, but one saw only their legs and high heels. Now they get along just fine with his poster girl—and the hand reaching up from her inflatable raft. The curator, Amy Stewart-Smith, has worked on “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1′s show of emerging artists in 2005, and “Civic Action,” plans for Long Island City at the Noguchi Museum right now. She approaches gender with the same concern for alternative contexts and visions.

That double-take applies to women as well. With a fragrance called Revolution!, in a display case with some suspicious debris, Lisa Kirk could be speaking to femininity or to class. And now I can look back at her 2009 performance piece, a woman selling real estate, as about the performer or the real estate. With her blond girls debating the Iraq War or their own inner lives, Amy Wilson has mixed politics and innocence. Here, though, a sparer cast on brown paper does take up fashion, and suddenly her earlier work belongs less to folk art and more to gender as well. Laurel Nakadate still dwells on Gen Y tears, but here she seems at least a little more grown up.

Sometimes the shift in focus is obvious, as for Nida Abidi’s woman in black, posed between Britney and Islam. Where Aleksandra Mir once compiled records of global inequality, here a wall sketch charts the “evolution” of a naked being—from a child to a shapely woman to a heavy blob on the floor. Sometimes it is not. Jill Magid surrounds a slim neon curve with words punched into Sheetrock like bullet holes, the text referencing a theorist of killing, and I am still trying to figure it out. Sometimes “Campaign” widens an artist’s perspective, as when Kate Gilmore now poses alongside other women, from fat to slim, each stuck in her own pink arch. Sometimes it tones things down, reducing Mika Rottenberg and her video wrestlers to traces of butt and hair, in place of a woman’s eyes and mouth.

The show starts almost quietly, give or take a poster outcry from Kathe Burkhart and Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir’s artificial legs and artificial hair sticking out from a balcony. (On my second visit, the legs had vanished, but then she and several artists use the show as a performance set now and then.) Jen Denike’s Girls Like Me, fondling or sucking each other’s feet, look downright restful. A second room gets raunchier, as in Fay Ray’s wall-size array of photo boxes with eyes, lips, and other organs piled like petals. Somewhere in between, Shana Moulton gives herself a class in make-up and skin care, in preposterous caked mud and bright colors. Like everyone in fashion’s smear campaign, sometimes an artist has to cover up.

One year ago, a show of women in Pop art at the Brooklyn Museum asked about their “Seductive Subversions.” It also wanted to know if they really Pop artists. All those labels—women in Pop, seductions, and subversions—could apply to the twenty-seven artists in “Campaign” as well. So what if they are two generations younger, and several are men? After all, it is hard to start a campaign without camp. I have thus appended this review to my earlier one, as my latest upload.

“The Bearden Project” looks at him in very much the same way, too—and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. Through March 11, the project gathers a single work each from a panoply of living artists (nearly fifty so far and growing), all inspired by Romare Bearden. While it missed his September 2 centenary, portions will remain on view through that date next year, and the online selection will continue to change as well. It sounds like a formula, and it is. At least it would be anywhere but at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which propelled the careers of more than a few contributors. If it seems like just another survey of African American art or just an extension of the permanent collection, that is the point.

Of course, a show like this raises an old question, especially after Bearden’s own practice of collage and appropriation. Does a copy or a tribute say more about the original or the present? Derrick Adams even calls his work Self-Reflective, and his customary animations put that, too, in quotes. Or does the distinction vanish over time as the presence of the original grows stronger? The Bearden Project makes the case for just that. It seeks not the anxiety of influence, but its breadth.

The two lone works from Bearden himself point in at least three directions, as well as to both the generation after him and to the present. Set beside an image of two women, his Conjure Woman belongs to the sequence he called Prevalence of Ritual, and three more examples from 1974 just happen to hang in a show upstairs. Back downstairs, its resounding blackness leads straight to Jack Whitten’s dark clotted 1988 painting, marked by tire tracks and footprints. It also hangs near Robert Pruitt’s 2011 Conjuring Woman, with a communications tower sprouting from her head. Together, they show Bearden at his most Homeric and spiritual, abstract and painterly, and contemporary and fantastic. In different ways, too, they reflect on the “Spiral” black artist collective from the 1960s, of which Bearden and Whitten were a part.

It would take more shows to expand on the possibilities—and there are and will be more for the centenary. The project Web site lists quite a few. Yet the show has a sense of an ending where one would least expect it. Downstairs, through May 27, the museum’s project space has another imagining of The Block. Kira Lynn Harris takes on all these themes, updating Bearden’s 1971 six panels and eighteen feet for a contemporary setting. Make that a contemporary setting twice over, as site-specific art and a more familiar New York.

It is also black twice over, in its subject and in white lines on four black walls in place of Bearden’s sharp color, like chalk on a blackboard. Bearden represented a church, a grocery store, a barbershop, apartment buildings, and the people of Harlem. The Block (Bellona) has them all, but as glimpses of private lives in the night. They include lovers, a woman leaning out in contemplation, the lives behind a window shade, and an angel descending. One can almost hear the sounds of passing traffic, but also the silence. They take Bearden so far into the present that sleep will come like an eraser to sweep them away.

Note: a publication commissioned but then rejected this review. Read the full version and you can decide if it is any good.

With more than three hundred dot paintings spanning all eleven branches of Gagosian until February 18, it is as if the world’s largest chain store had appeared out of nowhere. With a title like “The Complete Dot Paintings” and a promise that, for five weeks, “the sun never sets” on his art, Hirst shows his skill at branding even apart from the art. If the first is off (by a factor of five), and the second is off (by a matter of the Pacific Ocean), that only adds to the delight in hype itself. The talk may run to dismay or to excitement, but it is still talk.

Reviews run to both at once, give or take the lonely defenders of Western civilization. Critics duly note the hype and blandness, before moving quickly and downright ingeniously to the defense. One notes that plenty of museum artists lack the profundity of a Rembrandt. Another compares the walls of color and the use of assistants to Sol LeWitt—while another argues that, when it comes to “visual interest,” Hirst could have done worse, like Christo with The Gates. Besides, the critic adds, if the dots display “unevenness,” and most are just plain “very bad,” one can always pick and choose. The Web has run much the same course as the pros, from questioning whether proper art can rely on assistants to the largest outpouring of Facebook links and images that I have ever seen.

The defenses hardly bother to describe the work, but one can see why. It is not easy to know what to praise when so little is going on, deliberately so at that. Sure, one can move between paintings as large as Abstract Expressionist murals to as small as miniatures—or from circular designs almost like Op Art to a few bare circles more than a meter apiece, like Minimalism. One can move from a big room on 22nd Street, to arrangements by series on 24th Street, to several floors uptown that give one the flattering sense of penetrating more and more exclusive spaces. But connoisseurship is beside the point. Everyone will have favorites, because there is no accounting for taste, and because people always find patterns in randomness.

The defenses are not only excuses, but lame ones at that. Finding Hirst better than artists one dislikes does not help, and Christo deserves better anyway even past his prime. Yes, Central Park outshines his glossy orange—just as the American west looks more than glorious enough without his wonderful Valley Curtain (or indeed Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty)—but so what? The rippling gates and curtains draw on the visual splendor of their surroundings, and the combination creates a collaborative work beyond Hirst’s wildest dreams. As for LeWitt, he manages to derive chaotic outcomes from strict directions, while Hirst derives predictable outcomes from lack of direction. LeWitt also somehow spins artistic control into an assault on the whole idea of authenticity, while Hirst steps away from the canvas to play the star.

The criticism is just as misleading. Workshops sustained art history, at least until Michelangelo banished assistants from the Sistine Chapel, and an artist can turn to them today, too, exactly as the task demands it. And filling eleven galleries on three continents demands it if anything does. Many struggling painters resent overblown success in place of the handmade, but tough.

For all that, though, the outrage raises a troubling point. The end of the workshop system coincided with the increasing status of art—and here an artist is hiring assistants in order to play genius!

As with so much else, the turning point comes with Andy Warhol. With the Factory, Warhol genuinely hoped to democratize art, but he also relished his roles as stylist and celebrity. Hirst has his own artistic ambivalence. His rotting flesh and shark tank shared the earnest meditation on death in Brits like Francis Bacon—while boasting of ease and excess. Hirst took up painting before, as a realist, and he failed (although his cabinets of pills do look like spots). Ironically, the dots allow him at last to bring his self-confidence to painting, and one may as well enjoy the excess.

Note: I have added this as a postscript to a longer earlier article on Hirst, with two exhibitions five years apart. I also caught his opening in London in 2003, with a new gallery site he apparently hated. Oh, and yes, Hirst did execute at least a couple of the earliest dot paintings by hand.

One first sees two oversized coat hooks, as if blown up in Photoshop, but real. The artist, with the mysterious handle A Kassan, calls them Mask/Hook, perhaps to note the resemblance to a face—or to a mask hiding a face—with screws in place of eyes and a very long turned-up nose. The work’s subtitle offers the invitation Make Yourself at Home, but one of the two has its nose (excuse me, hook) torn off, as if the room’s sole other occupant had left all too hurriedly. Zevs (normally an anonymous street artist) rephotographs icons of knowledge and invention, like Plato and Thomas Edison, but with their faces “violated” by what appears an overeager flashbulb. Maiken Bent leaves room for faces, in a display of handmade dog collars and stitched leather, but one must supply one’s own, at a clear risk. Jan S. Hansen’s mask-like watercolors derive from Sufi imagery, with perhaps more sexual associations.

There is video, but either more or less than meets the eye. Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s monitor rests on the floor, welcoming eye contact, should one kneel and submit. Naturally, it supplies a tale of sexual abuse—with a promise of salvation through a boyfriend’s face time disrupted by yet another act of betrayal. Maria Petschnig projects her video high up in a corner, behind supporting beams, where one may not notice it at all. She even calls it Pareidolia, meaning a vague stimulus, and it presents only a woman’s breasts and torso bound up for an unknown’s pleasure. Rosalind Nashashibi sticks to the rough rhythms of sixteen-millimeter film, with passers-by outside a police station that one might well mistake for a crime scene.

Aleksandra Domanović and Odires Mlászho do photograph faces, but at a further physical, artistic, and sexual remove. Domanović gives an image of Marshal Tito, the former communist leader of the former Yugoslavia, the texture of fabric or cold stone—and feminized features. Mlászho appropriates museum images of Roman relics of women who died long ago from a class that common people might have known only as images. Their eyes bear yet another mask, from the circular overlay of other photographs, of men. Debo Eilers also includes faces, from which colored squares pop out as for a touch screen or a mouse click. And the faces belong to the artist’s computer desktop.

Then again, his work is perhaps the most tactile and least digital, in a show about recourse from the digital. Of course, face time refers to that recourse, as a basic human need. But is it, too, mediated? The curators, Toke Lykkeberg and Julia Rodrigues, sure think so. They cite Emmanuel Levinas, a midcentury philosopher and the author of Entre Nous (“between us”). For an existentialist like him or Jean-Paul Sartre, the self is itself discovered, created, and mediated through face-to-face encounters with others.

Make that the other, a term they adopted from Martin Heidegger. One might look quite some time here for one’s significant other, and one might not find the encounter all that reassuring after all. It is not likely to come from Daniel Gordon’s Blue Eye, an abstract photo with a spot of blue, or from Michel Journiac’s staged family portrait as “travestis” of themselves—in French, suggestive at once of travesty and transvestite (and once used for cross-dressing theatrical roles, as in Shakespearean comedy). It can hardly come from DIS Magazine’s advice on How to Hide from Machines, as a Web site. The show’s international cast helps account for the darkness and obscurity, although Eilers and Petschnig also appeared in “Greater New York 2010” with more dark or erotic fables. Compared to the all-American glibness of “Social Media” this past fall in Chelsea, they come as an unhealthy but much-needed antidote.

Like so many back then, Rietveld was a dreamer and not a torturer. He worked in all sorts of media, including jewelry, and he reduced them to simple elements to make them affordable to all. Few remember his name, although many visitors to MOMA will have seen the chair. He had the Bauhaus in mind when he began it, but Mondrian’s Dutch art movement came to inspire its primary colors. Maybe he saw that Mondrian had what he lacked, asymmetry—those compositions that barely rein in the commotion of modern life. Gordon can control them at all only by pulling them apart and stripping away the color.

Rietveld himself welcomes one in, at Marianne Boesky through February 11 (and I should have told you about it in time, but this has been a busy month at haberarts.com), through a photograph of his press layout room for UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. The triangular patchwork of flooring already looks askew, for all its clean, empty space. The press here are not the only absent editors. Gordon reproduces it as a small painting, basically a coarse silkscreen, with a detachment more than one step removed from Modernism’s urgency. And she takes the same approach to Mondrian, with full-scale appropriations in black and white.

The corresponding colors appear as blocks on pedestals, like theme and variations, and I took them for independent sculpture. Evidently something has come apart in half a century or so, and the viewer has responsibility for putting it back together. A second room makes that task even more challenging, with coarser screens, thicker edges, messier grids, occasional colors, and some images. Who are these people? Gordon starts here with newspapers, injecting not Mondrian into the present but recent history into Mondrian. She could almost have scraped it away by hand—about such investigative journalism as the Pentagon Papers.

Do silkscreens, grids, headlines, and crises recall Andy Warhol, like the electric chair of his Orange Disaster? Do not blame Rietveld for the shocks, but do not blame Gordon and appropriation for the lack of them either. Imagine that Warhol had looked for past rather than present headlines, answers rather than frightening questions, an earlier modern art rather than a growing minimalism—and then stripped them all away. Gordon shares something of postmodern fears of institutional power, but also a degree of respect. Absence here becomes almost longing. Her show is not quite great moments in history, and it is certainly not one itself, but it remembers and imagines them.

A truly postmodern chair turns up at Haunch of Venison, through March 3, and one can even sit in it. Well, maybe not sit still, for the curvaceous metal of Thomas Heatherwick spins in circles pretty much whether one will or no. Other seating, in long silvery benches, has the same one-piece elegance, produced by extrusion, but also a rigidity that De Stijl would envy. Heatherwick, too, is known for exploding the past, as in the Brit’s reinvention of London double-decker buses, the flowing stairs leading up to a second-floor department store, and a “puff ball” pavilion that looks from the outside like a gigantic seedcase of sixty thousand optical strands. Form never quite follows function, at least for readers prone to nausea and in search of seating, but it does reflect on function. I have to hope that his architecture does the same, but can Postmodernism ever draw on forces half as powerful or terrifying as the past?

In the end, it also helped bring not just attention, but acceptance. With Wojnarowicz gone, not even the right was moralizing. And that bears celebrating all by itself. The show, of portraits of and by gays, takes such American icons as Grant Wood out of the closet. In the lushest and darkest of abstractions by Jasper Johns, In Memory of My Feelings, it finds his sense of loss after breaking up with Robert Rauschenberg. It treats the AIDS epidemic as heartrending, not as an indictment of gay lives and gay identity.

And no one complains. In fact, the entire show recasts the origins and course of American Modernism through gay eyes. It moves from Thomas Eakins through the Harlem Renaissance to the 1990s. It pictures American expatriates in Paris like Betty Parsons, the future dealer for Jackson Pollock, as a lesbian circle. It shows another side to Charles Sheeler than America’s response to both Cubism and the industrial heartland, in a watercolor of sailors strutting their stuff. It succeeds by not flaunting outrage—and that is remarkable all by itself.

If “Hide/Seek” sounds like little more than greatest hits, it is. Even for individual artists, one can largely predict the selections—like Mapplethorpe as S&M Nazi or with a death’s head. If it sounds all over the map, it is that, too. It defines portraiture as anything remotely confessional in any medium, from Sheeler’s group scenes and Johns’s abstraction to a pile of candy by Félix Gonzáles-Torres. Several artists in the show are not gay.

Sometimes, in fact, it is hard to tell, and that, too, is part of the story. In the very first painting, by Eakins, a boxer struts his stuff before an adoring and very respectable male crowd. The artist’s psychobiography may never be fully told, but that may be the point as well. For Eakins, who married (and also painted his wife looking slightly bored), the nude meant the truth, and he would have painted women he knew in the nude but that they and Philadelphia society refused. Yet he also shifted attention from traditional female nudes to the male body, which his taut and obsessive drawing lent a special tension. For him and for the entire boxing arena, an unspoken sexuality appears to course through heterosexual society.

I wanted to dislike a generic history, and I wanted to admire the Brooklyn Museum, which fills out works that could not travel with photos and wall labels. Mostly, though, I got caught up in the paradox of safety and surprise. Often artists respond to one another, as with an agonized Felix Parte on his deathbed by AA Bronson, both of the Canadian collective General Idea. The huge scale and lacquer on vinyl gives it the color, texture, and immediacy of a shower curtain. Patterns clash, but they also make one strangely at home in the horrific bedroom. And then thankfully there is the hero or villain of the moment, in David Wojnarowicz.