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Pick from More Artists
John Haberin New York City
Nadar
If Nadar is so brutal and dispassionate, why do his portraits and his sitters seem to be putting on a pose? Their haunting mix of plainness and pretense foretells Modernism.
Nadelman
Can a show that reclaims an avant-garde artist for Sephardic culture seriously pretend to go "beyond the myth"? Consider the case of Amedeo Modigliani and, a continent away, Elie Nadelman.
Napier
Does computer art offer anything at all new, and is anyone buying? After a gallery tour and panel discussion, Mark Napier, Kirsten Geisler, John Klima, and John F. Simon suggest that old news from art and software can still create strange new bedfellows.
Nardo
The Brooklyn Museum showed Nardo de Cione's great Madonna from the New York Historical Society downstairs from Thomas Wilmer Dewing's decorative portraits. Must art always worship women?
Nares
Does painting have critics "Seeing Red"? A survey at Hunter College, influenced by Josef Albers, starts with the psychology of color, but James Nares, Walter Biggs, Nancy Scheinman, and Gregg Stone have something else in mind.
E. Nelson
Boys will be boys. But do Joan Mitchell and, in the galleries, Eileen Brady Nelson, Susan Rothenberg, and Kate Shepherd really just indulge in girl talk?
M. Nelson
Can installation art reveal a hidden New York? Mike Nelson, Carlos Amorales, Urs Fischer, and Reynold Reynolds dig deep.
Did Mike Nelson deliver the most dangerous exhibition of the year or just the sternest warning to visitors? Consider the "Best of 2007" and the year in review.
Neshat
Five years after Rapture, Shirin Neshat still finds an intensely personal drama in exotic rituals and another nation's public and private squares. Has video become simply cinema, romanticizing the prostitution that Mary Ellen Mark documented twenty-five years ago?
What happens when video art becomes as familiar as art-world stardom and home movies? Shirin Neshat casts aside her split-screen explorations of gender and exile for grand narratives.
Neuenschwander
What has invaded Chelsea in the fall—birds, meteor showers, drugs, or just art? Rivane Neuenschwander, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, and Yayoi Kusama have their own ways of looking to the sky.
Neuman
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?
Nevelson
How did a women turning sixty become an emerging artist of the 1960s? With her sculpture, Louise Nevelson takes the long view.
B. Newman
When Barnett Newman wrote "The Sublime Is Now," was he, along with Jackson Pollock and others, returning to Romantic myths or looking past them to now—and how quaint does that look after Postmodernism? Find out how New York stole the idea of the sublime.
M. K. S. Newman
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.
Nickas
Bob Nickas calls his group show "An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery." Could he be describing the appeal to insiders from Amy Sillman, Reena Spauling, and others near the downtown club scene?
Noguchi
Did Isamu Noguchi achieve inner peace or just worldly success, and which amounts to a greater evasion? The twin poles of his art—and the former factory and studio that holds it—suggest the paradoxical strength of Modernism's utopias.
What did Isamu Noguchi learn from Buckminster Fuller—art, design, or a vision of the future? "Best of Friends" recovers Fuller for modern art.
Nozkowski
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?
Ofili
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 Ofilit in London and Trinidad make it difficult even to know which.
British artists—such as Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, and Sam Taylor-Wood—and New York politicians recycle old scripts, nearly a decade after appropriation art held sway. What accounts for the shock of the not so new, and can a savvy analysis by Hal Foster pin it down?
Olitksi
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.
Oliver
Is London racing past New York or mired in tradition? Marilene Oliver, Ken Currie, Damien Hirst, Christian Jankowski, and Bridget Riley suggest the deep roots of a crazed arts scene and urban landscape.
Olivier
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?
Ono
What if a urinal entered the museum? Hypothetical art sounds like a contradiction in terms, but like Marcel Duchamp, Charles Ray, and Yoko Ono in her recent work, artists imagine it every day.
Is the Postmodern carnival art, decadence, or just plain fun? Conisder the pleasures of Pipilotti Rist, Bridget Riley, and a full-dress retrospective for Yoko Ono.
Onofre
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, Kara Walker, Hiro Yamagata, and Joao Onofre, does that mean more choices, more extravagance, or plainer tales?
Opie
Where have all the people gone? Catherine Opie photographs the emptiness of American cities, while Christina McPhee finds a surfeit of traces in La Conchita Mon Amour—digital prints, drawings, and video of a devastated coastal community.
Can critics still judge art, and should they? Raphael Rubinstein points to "A Quiet Crisis in Art," but more critical noise might well drown out some seriously quiet art—including the photographs of Catherine Opie, Shelburne Thurber, and Christoph Morlinghaus.
D. Oppenheim
What happens when a conceptual artist takes leave of his senses? Increasingly, Sol LeWitt tries too hard for the sensual, but Dennis Oppenheim just lets himself go crazy.
M. Oppenheim
Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup showed Surrealism a dark continent of the imagination. Can a retrospective, on display alongside African art, go beyond the teacup?
Oteiza
Does the Guggenheim still have a place for art? Jorge Oteiza, Daniel Buren, and Hilla Rebay take one back to the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and forward once again, to museum empires and empty ramps.
Owens
When so many Chelsea galleries jump-start their fall openings, has contemporary art lost the "battle for Babylon"? Jerry Saltz finds hope on the margins, but Bill Owens and others leave one unsure.
Paik
Should can his work single- or multiple-channel video, performance or Pop Art assemblage, Minimalist or excessive, installation art or just playing around? Nam June Paik presents both a fitting icon of the 1960s and an inventor who left his mark everywhere today.
Just what video art did Nam June Paik spawn? "Inner and Outer Space," featuring Pilotti Rist, and "Into the Light" trace two, treacherously intertwined traditions.
Paine
Not all sculpture looks better as an outdoor monument. How can Roxy Paine, Joel Shapiro, and others in Socrates Sculpture Park or the 2007 "Between the Bridges" look so graceful?
Parmigianino
Praised as the very incarnation of Raphael, Parmigianino did more than almost anyone to confuse his legacy. Did that make him a man of his time?
Does Parmigianino's Antea depict a real person or an ideal beauty? Sometimes the ideal comes with tantalizing hints of wealth, taste, and especially sex.
Pavia
Has modern sculpture settled into scrap, monumentalism, or both? Antony Gormley, Nancy Rubins, and the fate of a New York landmark by Philip Pavia navigate between Modernism, Minimalism, and the junkyard.
Peale
When artists like Susan Hiller, Charles Willson Peale, and Ed Ruscha 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.
Perl
"Is the art market making us stupid?" Jerry Saltz worries, and Jed Perl is dead certain, but "Private Treasures" look smart.
Can a museum dedicated to modernity become a custodian of the past? Jed Perl thinks so, but Mark Dion literally digs up the dirt on the Museum of Modern Art.
Pettibon
What ever happened to violence in art about Iraq, and what makes it so sexy? Raymond Pettibon and Ahmed Alsoudani.
Petrus
Among the great painters of the early Renaissance, Petrus Christus is the most approachable, but his career is shrouded in mystery. What happens when a museum helps a scholar rewrite his and art's history?
Piano
Renzo Piano adds a glass box to the Morgan Library, and his "cube" houses another library from long ago, of Federico da Montefeltro. Does the all-seeing eye belong to Renaissance perspective, Modernism, or the robber barons?
Will Renzo Piano get to unleash his imagination in the meatpacking district? The Whitney weighs a move to the foot of the High Line, as Dia:Chelsea jumps ship.
Picasso
Do Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse really stand for line and color, confrontation and guilty pleasure, or even modern art? A show of their rivalry and affection suggests double dealing.
"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?
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?
Can one locate the origins of modern art in something other than painting? Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso may not have discovered Cubism in film, but Henri Matisse sure knew textiles, and Stuart Davis literally drew on New York.
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.
How did Picasso get to America without leaving Europe? "Picasso and American Art" traces his influence on Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and others.
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."
When Gauguin says he likes his women fat and stupid, do his attitudes strike to the core of modern art? Griselda Pollock notices that he and Picasso have a problem, but Modernism may yet play its feminist gambits.
Out in Brooklyn, Thomas Wilmer Dewing's decorative portraits were worshiping women. What about Picasso's loving, angry women?
Pippin
Horace Pippin, like Jacob Lawrence, uses folk imagery to create a black man's art. Which is truer to Modernism and the African-American experience?
Pissarro
Did Camille Pissarro teach Paul Cézanne everything he knew? Their decade of closest collaboration takes art from Impressionism to an unpredictable future.
Camille Pissarro was also a Jew. Does it matter, and what kind of changing artistic identity led him toward modern painting?
Plumb
Can a feminist still laugh at fashion and celebrity? Shannon Plumb, Carla Gannis, Rachel Harrison, and Tracey Moffatt dress for success.
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.
G. Pollock
When Gauguin says he likes his women fat and stupid, do his attitudes strike to the core of modern art? Griselda Pollock notices that he and Picasso have a problem, but Modernism may yet play its feminist gambits.
J. Pollock
How did a tortured blowhard, drunk, and inept landscape painter accumulate such mythic stature? In Jackson Pollock's extraordinary retrospective, one comes to forget the performance, for paint itself learns to dance.
How did Picasso get to America without leaving Europe? "Picasso and American Art" traces his influence on Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and others.
Can lousy vision explain away Rembrandt's enigmatic gaze, or can fractal geometry quantify the symmetry in a Jackson Pollock? Art demands close technical analysis but deserves more than a reduction to acts of nature.
Is there more to critics, dealers, catalogs, and "the art world" than fraud and theft? A novel by Peter Carey, an economist, and the owner of a possible Jackson Pollock found in a thrift shop all want to know.
When Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived and worked together, who learned more? A fine postscript to Krasner's own retrospective has insights.
When Barnett Newman wrote "The Sublime Is Now," was he, along with Jackson Pollock and others, returning to Romantic myths or looking past them to now—and how quaint does that look after Postmodernism? Find out how New York stole the idea of the sublime.
Pontormo
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.
Pousette-Dart
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?
Poussin
Nicolas Poussin painted landscapes as "Arcadian visions." Does that make him a naturalist or a visionary?
How many lives had Anthony Blunt? Surely the specialist in Nicolas Poussin and the Cambridge spy have nothing at all in common—beyond the complexities of a life, of scholarship, and of their time.
American museums have two nearly identical versions of a Holy Family, but which did Nicolas Poussin paint? Even the experts keep changing their mind.
Academic art may sound sedate, but did Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain have something else in mind? Drawings from them and their time help define an ideal.
Poyet
Does fine art these days sound alarmingly—or thankfully—elistist compared to popular culture? With manuscript illumination from Jean Poyet, as well as relief sculpture from Donatello and others, the Renaissance showed off some delightful interchange between "high" and "low."
Prager
Alex Prager, Julie Blackmon, Clark and Pougnaud, Thomas Demand, and Benjamin Fink make photography at once domestic and fantastic. Can anyone tell what they create, what they stage, what they find, and what they manipulate?
Preheim
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.
Prince
Does Richard Prince still prefer the Marlborough Man to fine art? Irony of ironies, he finds his real audience in a museum.
Did Richard Prince deliver the worst exhibition of the year or the best case for women in the arts? Consider the "Best of 2007" and the year in review.
Purdum
What could be more academic these days than abstract art, except maybe turning against it? Cecily Brown has to make one ask, but along with Rebecca Purdum and James Hyde, she may offer too many answers.
Puryear
Martin Puryear takes Modernism to the woodshed. Should one call its identity Post-Minimal, post-black, or simply sculpture?
Quinlan
Sometimes art aspires to a science experiment. With Eileen Quinlan, David Fried, Antony Gormley, Jeppe Hein, and Mark Sheinkman, is it all done with smoke and mirrors?
Raimes
Is poured paint a revelation of the artist or a step beyond the visible? Alison A. Raimes starts a Critical Inquiry into Chaos.
Rakowitz
Through words or photos, one can imagine oneself a traveler in exotic lands. Do Michael Rakowitz, Joan Jonas, Simon Lee, and Michael Waugh make one a tourist or a voyeur?
Rankin
When the art scene blends into night life, does art become self-indulgence or directed dreaming? Jessica Rankin, Tara Donovan, Cao Fei, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Jessica Stockholder, and Salla Tykka each walk the line between light and dark.
Raphael
How could a painter of sweetness and light leave such a mark on the High Renaissance? The Colonna Altarpiece shows Raphael's ambition and his learning curve.
Did Raphael die for love or for his art? A controversial portrait and his final easel painting, La Fornarina, shows his legacy living on as, of all things, Mannerism.
What are two substitutes for the eye and two ways to break a museum's silence? Consider a magnifying glass aimed at Raphael, amid a show of "The Draftsman's Art," and a videotaped scream in the darkness from Gary Hill.
Rauch
How big can art get, and will it then outgrow its own myths? Ron Mueck, Dana Schutz, and Neo Rauch see art as a matter of life and death.
Whose life is this anyway? Neo Rauch, Robert Doisneau, Amy Bennett, and Sophie Calle all have deceptively traditional, penetrating views of realism, and their tales unfold against a complex world, but they bring one on intimate terms with the human comedy.
Rauschenberg
Did I walk into a Robert Rauschenberg, or did that mirror simply reflect someone else back? In his breakthrough "combines" of the 1950s, the artist gets physical, even when the images of others vanish before one's eyes.
If Postmodernism exists, when did it start—and must it be so shocking? If Robert Rauschenberg and his long career are any clue, Postmodernism and its shocks must be invented over and over again.
Ravitch
Which is more Orwellian, to overlook how propaganda controls thought, to mistake language for reality? Diane Ravitch finds textbooks crippled by censorship, but all too often she is on a witch hunt of her own directed against the living language.
C. Ray
What if a urinal entered the museum? Hypothetical art sounds like a contradiction in terms, but like Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, and Charles Ray, artists imagine it every day.
Man Ray
Man Ray enters a gallery known for Morris Louis and Yoko Ono. How many Modernisms are there?
Reas
Can digital art, for all its reliance on data and random access, still tell tales—and even lie? Computers and their metaphors help connect the dots from Sol LeWitt, Kysa Johnson, and Casey Reas to Christina McPhee.
Rebay
Does the Guggenheim still have a place for art? Hilla Rebay, Daniel Buren, and Jorge Oteiza take one back to the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and forward once again, to museum empires and empty ramps.
Redon
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?
Reed
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.
Reginato
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 Peter Reginato, Makoto Fujimura, Ronnie Landfield, Duston Spear, and Joseph Stashkevetch.
Reinhardt
Hanging Ad Reinhardt and Mondrian side by side shows their parallel growth as painters. How many Modernisms are there?
Reis
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, Robert Wogan, and Pedro Cabrita Reis—who makes one wrestle with the debris of an institution's past.
Rembrandt
What was Caravaggio doing at a Dutch painter's four hundredth birthday party? Perhaps he was helping one study Rembrandt prints.
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"?
When a committee officially demotes The Polish Rider to workshop production, should we care? Is the difference artistic genius or intellectual beauty?
The notion of originality has taken quite a beating from critics—not to mention from TV. Can the Met find the real Francisco de Goya and Rembrandt?
Could Rembrandt paint faces? If it sounds silly faced with the most famous portraitist ever, a tourist's innocent remark raises provocative questions about surface, reticence, and modernity.
Can lousy vision explain away Rembrandt's enigmatic gaze, or can fractal geometry quantify the symmetry in a Jackson Pollock? Art demands close technical analysis but deserves more than a reduction to acts of nature.
Resnick
Does abstraction really have to stand for painting, as if meanings stood still apart from art and culture? Skip over the decades with Milton Resnick, Nell Blaine, Anne Truitt, Sean Scully, and Simon Lee, and see if the whole idea of abstraction is still standing.
Reverón
Does "Primitivism Revisited" describe modern or even contemporary art? Armando Reverón and others journey between Europe and the Americas.
Reynolds and Jolley
Art seems to collapse right out from under Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, James Hopkins, Mike Kelley, Jon Kessler, Diana Kingsley, Daniel Rozin, and Catherine Sullivan. Are they just hyperactive or shaking things up?
Can installation art reveal a hidden New York? Reynold Reynolds, Carlos Amorales, Urs Fischer, and Mike Nelson dig deep.
Ricco
Summer and photography alike promise a window onto nature. How, then, do Dietmar Busse, Roger Ricco, and Sharon Lockhart present "Mutilated/Cultivated Environments"?
Richter
Can Gerhard Richter bury his traces? Blur and squeegee in hand, he grows over a career from cleverness into irony and a brush with the past.
Riedel
Must art comment only on itself, and must installations grow ever larger? Michael S. Riedel, "The Studio Visit," "Site 92," and Pierre Huyghe take the artist's working space as their muse.
Riemenschneider
While Dürer brought Germany the Renaissance, what happened to sculpture? Tilman Riemenschneider made the same change part of common experience, carving limewood Virgins, altars, and even chandeliers.
Riley
Is London racing past New York or mired in tradition? Bridget Riley, Ken Currie, Damien Hirst, Christian Jankowski, and Marilene Oliver suggest the deep roots of a crazed arts scene and urban landscape.
Is the Postmodern carnival art, decadence, or just plain fun? Conisder the pleasures of Yoko Ono, Pipilotti Rist, and Bridget Riley.
Rist
Pipilotti Rist, David Altmejd, Julianne Swartz, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Jane and Louise Wilson are back, Jonathan Cramer channels Jackson Pollock, and Bjorn Melhus changes the channels on Jerry Springer. Is Chelsea truly over the top?
Is the Postmodern carnival art, decadence, or just plain fun? Conisder the pleasures of Yoko Ono, Bridget Riley, and Pipilotti Rist.
Just what video art did Nam June Paik spawn? "Inner and Outer Space," featuring Pipilotti Rist, and "Into the Light" trace two, treacherously intertwined traditions.
Ritchie
Does Chelsea's massive fall opening amount to an entertainment event or a model for museums of contemporary art? In 2006, artists could easily grow cynical or messianic, including Jennifer Dalton, Barnaby Furnas, and Matthew Ritchie.
Rodchenko
Alexander Rodchenko could stand for government-supported art at its most thrilling—and terrifying. How would he enjoy shopping instead in Herald Square?
Rodin
Are Auguste Rodin's twisting bodies and multiple casts more like variations on a theme or Xerox copies? Arthur C. Danto, Nelson A. Goodman, and Rosalind E. Krauss—as critics and philosophers—each tackle the originality of the avant-garde.
Rogier
Could Rogier van der Weyden, Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, and Hans Memling have painted just for you? "Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych" shows the private side of the Renaissance.
Rorty
Richard Rorty could be America's first epistemologist to go for the public eye and political commitment. Is there room for male philosophers in feminism?
Rosenberg
When art includes gargoyles, prisons, a tale of two cities, and "the secret of the sex," should one call it a graphic novel? Maddy Rosenberg calls it an artist's book.
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?
Rosenquist
How can anyone take billboards so seriously? With his shifting images, James Rosenquist could belong with Pop Art, political rebellion, or Surrealism.
Roth
Art may or may not come out of fashion, but what makes it go out of fashion? Guess which applies to Dieter Roth, Lee Lozano, and Cindy Sherman, who stars in "Fashioning Fiction."
Rothko
In just one year, from 1948 to 1949, Mark Rothko found his trademark color, shape, and symmetry. Had he made his mark at last or let himself go?
Mark Rothko seems to demand a hushed respect for painting. In a postmodern age, can a museum visitor sit and live with a work of art?
When Barnett Newman wrote "The Sublime Is Now," was he, along with Mark Rothko and others, returning to Romantic myths or looking past them to now—and how quaint does that look after Postmodernism? Find out how New York stole the idea of the sublime.
Rothenberg
Boys will be boys. But do Joan Mitchell and, in the galleries, Susan Rothenberg, Eileen Brady Nelson, and Kate Shepherd really just indulge in girl talk?
Routson
Video art cannot imitate Mel Gibson, Federico Fellini, and Alfred Hitchcock all at the same time, can it? Jon Routson, Christian Jankowski, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller give it a try.
Rovner
How can science and art intersect, and, if they cannot, will opposites attract? Michal Rovner, "Produced at Eyebeam 2005," Mark Dion, Jessica Bronson, and Jacob van Ruisdael feel the attraction.
So what if art still looks pretty? In the hands of Michal Rovner, Diane Samuels, Mark Sheinkman, Julian Stanczak, and Jennifer Steinkamp, it may still come with Postmodernism's cool, harsh light and awareness of a lost present.
Rozin
Art seems to collapse right out from under Daniel Rozin, James Hopkins, Mike Kelley, Jon Kessler, Diana Kingsley, Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, and Catherine Sullivan. Are they just hyperactive or shaking things up?
Does the Chelsea gallery scene know where the bodies are bodied? Daniel Rozin, Wim Delvoye, Tracey Emin, Gary Hill, and Sam Taylor-Wood may not get real, but they do get physical.
Should one trace motion in painting and new media to illusion, vision, or physical sensation? Daniel Rozin looks in the mirror, Michael Betancourt in pop psychology, Diller Scofidio + Renfro at the spy camera, and Peter Paul Rubens into his own heart.
Rubens
Only a great draftsman could seem so effortless as Peter Paul Rubens. How can drawings reveal so little about an artist's hesitations—and so much of his influence?
Should one trace motion in painting and new media to illusion, vision, or physical sensation? Daniel Rozin looks in the mirror, Michael Betancourt in pop psychology, Diller Scofidio + Renfro at the spy camera, and Peter Paul Rubens into his own heart.
Rubins
Has modern sculpture settled into scrap, monumentalism, or both? Nancy Rubins, Antony Gormley, and the fate of a New York landmark by Philip Pavia navigate between Modernism, Minimalism, and the junkyard.
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?
Rubinstein
Can critics still judge art, and should they? Raphael Rubinstein points to "A Quiet Crisis in Art," but more critical noise might well drown out some seriously quiet art—including the photographs of Shelburne Thurber, Catherine Opie, and Christoph Morlinghaus.
Ruscha
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.
When artists like Susan Hiller, Charles Willson Peale, and Ed Ruscha 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.
Ruisdael
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.
Von Rydingsvard
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?
C. Ryman
Can one play at once abstract painter, architect, and voyeur? Cordy Ryman, Claire Seidl, David Ersser, and Christoph Morlinghaus can, but somehow using sculpture or photography.
R. Ryman
When black, white, and color become so visible that one wants to reach out and touch, can one still call it visionary? Robert Ryman, Petah Coyne, and Richard Tsao move beyond debates over formalism and illusion to metaphor, geometry, and goo.
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 Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, and many more, Dia:Beacon assumes control.
