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.

van Eyck

Who is that couple in Jan van Eyck's most famous painting, 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.

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 Vincent van Gogh's manic highs 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, van Gogh, really two of a kind, and what kind of art history does that leave?

Velázquez

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Vermeer's retrospective 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? One writer, dealer, curator, and organizer—Christian Viveros-Fauné—argues that a creative mind can have it all.

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?

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?

Warhol

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.

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?

Watteau

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

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?

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 National Academy Museum 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?

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.

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?

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.

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, while "CHOPLOGIC" prefers bold, block letters. What, then, are Wilson's little girls doing in the art museum, rather than just 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, David Altmejd, Pipilotti Rist, 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?

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

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.

Do David Wojnarowicz, Dosso Dossi, David Salle, and Julião Sarmento all spin postmodern allegories? Something funny happens to fables without a subtext.

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?

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?

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.

GROUP SHOWS

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

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?

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?

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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," James Turrell, and "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" all have one asking.

"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?

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?

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.

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 Sophie Calle, Gary Hume, and Peter Sarkisian.

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?

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?

Amy Wilson does not make art for the farsighted, while "CHOPLOGIC" prefers bold, block letters. What, then, are Wilson's little girls doing in the art museum, rather than just the Iraq war?

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 Tacita Dean, "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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Will the High Line preserve an overgrowth of wild flowers and urban history, 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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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? 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.

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.

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.

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 Jacob 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?

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, 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?

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.

"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.

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?

jhaber@haberarts.com