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

Pick from More Artists

John Haber
in New York City

Vaisman

Must irony preclude a love painting? Meyer Vaisman, Helene Appel, and Cynthia Daignault share real pleasures along with a knowing wink.

Valentin

Valentin de Boulogne in the early Baroque painted even myth from live models, including himself, while Jean Honoré Fragonard sketched Rococo excess. So which was the realist?

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.

Vallotton

Modernism brought an explosion of color and a reconfigured reality. Could one who helped bring it, Félix Vallotton, have dedicated himself to realism in black and white—and can Claudia Hart deepen early Modernism's disquiet by reimagining it as a video game?

Sara 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."

Stan VanDerBeek

Did Surrealism anticipate the Twilight Zone? "Revolution of the Eye," with help from Stan VanDerBeek, claims the influence of modern art on early American television.

van der Zee

The Great Depression was a crisis, but could Americans face it together? It may seem that way for Harold Haliday Costain, James van der Zee, and Hank Willis Thomas with For Freedoms.

van Dyck

Is that an aristocrat or an artist? For Anthony van Dyck, portraiture was an image of society unconcerned for mere detail, and he, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacob Jordaens shine in Flemish Baroque drawing.

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.

When Jan van Eyck most likely painted a Crucifixion and a Last Judgment, what lay behind them and between them? A focus exhibition looks for the missing pieces.

Did Jan van Eyck have second thoughts? Works on paper from the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden, from van Eyck to Piet Mondrian, find new beginnings, while the Morgan Library restores its McKim, Mead & White stone and adds a garden.

When Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christus painted Bruges, did they see a Renaissance city or the spiritual? Both painted a monk as patron and the Virgin within and apart, but "Hidden Faces" casts a veil over what they reveal.

When Mary puts the church behind her for the Annunciation, she stands at the threshold of the Renaissance as well. Should one thank Jan van Eyck, his brother Hubert, or Petrus Christus?

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.

When is a public collection a public responsibility? A visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts finds both, including work by Peter Paul Rubens, Frederic Edwin Church, Caravaggio, Pieter Bruegel, Jan van Eyck, and Petrus Christus.

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 Genk

Can an outsider struggle with real-world politics? Willem van Genk, Jeffrey Beebe, and Ralph Fasanella make art out of mental illness and the city.

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.

When you think of Starry Night, do you remember only the stars and the night? Vincent van Gogh sees the cypresses, while the Karen B. Cohen gift takes the Morgan Library "Into the Woods."

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.

Can museums reinvent themselves after Covid-19? The van Gogh Museum brings social distancing to Vincent van Gogh.

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?

van Yetter

Want your own history of art, with echoes of Modernism and family? Make it a work of art, like Mark van Yetter, Dotty Attie, and Nina Katchadourian with wide-ranging, colliding art histories.

Varejão

Does it take a woman to discover the dignity of native people? For Tarsila do Amaral it took Cubism and cannibals, and for Adriana Varejão it takes Native American traditions, while Zilia Sánchez finds very different heroines and warriors.

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.

Vega

When does madness end and theater begin? Carol Rama in Italy, Alan Vega in the punk scene, and "Delirious" go for sex, madness, and rock 'n' roll.

Velázquez

Someone was out to impress, and the Met's reopened European painting galleries tell its story. Was it Diego Velázquez, King Philip of Spain, or Francesco I d'Este?

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?

Could Diego Velázquez have painted his greatest portrait of a mere slave, his slave? Juan de Pareja gets his due as a painter himself and a free man.

Sturtevant did not make copies, but they sure look that way. Does that make a copy of a copy an original—and does that make a photographic reenactment of Diego Velázquez by Yasumasa Morimura a copy?

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?

Verhoeven

Alfred Leslie set aside the brush for the computer and "the lives of some women." Had he, Helen Verhoeven, Echo Eggebrecht, and Jan Müller found male fantasies or acid girls?

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?

Is there more to Girl with a Pearl Earring than the movie? Dutch painting from the Mauritshuis gives Jan Vermeer pride of place beside Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Carel Fabritius.

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

Paolo Veronese did not go to Murano for the glass. What does that say about "Relative Values" and the cost of Renaissance art?

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.

Vicuña

Can outsider art be political? Cecilia Vicuña survives the Pinochet regime and Nellie Mae Rowe a woman's work in the rural South, while Veronika Pausova in the Czech Republic takes up where Anna Zemánková and Art Brut left off.

Vieira

Is there a deconstructive architecture of the gallery? Allyson Vieira, Caitlin Masley, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and Kevin Zucker hint at its politics but barely find the architecture.

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.

Vierkant

Should shaped canvas stick to canvas—or the wall? Artie Vierkant, Phyllida Barlow, Charles Hinman, and Al Loving shape alternatives.

Vigée Le Brun

Not every woman artist would wish to stake her claim to fame on Marie Antoinette, but Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun managed quite a career, even while fleeing to what a show calls "City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics." How were gender and class so thoroughly intertwined?

Villalpando

Can Caravaggio in Italy lay claim to a painting attributed to Jusepe de Ribera in Spain, and can Cristóbal de Villalpando ascend the heights of a cathedral in Mexico? Behold the money

Villareal

With Rain Room and Random International, is the art of artificial lights now just a light show? Leo Villareal, Laddie John Dill, and Santiago Taccetti mirror the darkness.

Villar Rojas

Has New York found its backyard swimming pool? For summer sculpture, Anish Kapoor takes his whirlpool to Brooklyn Bridge Park, Adrián Villar Rojas his banquet to the Met roof, and Nari Ward his goats to Socrates Sculpture Park.

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.

Is it painting or construction—and an object in space or in history? Marianne Vitale, Christian Haub, Jannis Kounellis, Richard Nonas, Jim Osman, and others are defining a Neo-Minimalism for today.

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

Should Klaus Biesenbach step down as MoMA's chief curator at large? Christian Viveros-Fauné thinks so, even as the museum boasts of its future with "Scenes for a New Heritage."

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.

Vo

Danh Vo went from boat person to a treasurer of family and collective memories. Can he still return to Vietnam—and can the artists in "One Hand Clapping," including Cao Fei, find serenity?

Can you reassemble the Statue of Liberty or determine inside from out on the Met's roof? With Danh Vo and Dan Graham, summer sculpture moves from liberty to luxury.

Voisine

Who needs shaped canvas to reshape the rectangle? Don Voisine does it with geometry, Angelika Schori on both sides of the picture plane, and Al Loving with paint and paper.

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.

von Bonin

When artists bring nature into the gallery, is it alive? Garret Kane fishes in the Prow, Cosima von Bonin at the beach, and Aki Sasamoto in the wash, and the 2016 Governors Island Art Fair washes onshore.

Von Bruenchenhein

Who are you calling naive? Hayley Barker and Karla Knight know their way around Modernism and outsider art, Melvin "Milky" Way around biochemistry, while Eugene Von Bruenchenhein before them knew Abstract Expressionism and madness.

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.

Vote

Does realism in painting preserve the truth? Melanie Vote, Alejandro Campins, Bradley McCallum, and James White flaunt artifice and death.

Vuillard

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

Waddell

Does light take time to reach us? That could be the precondition of landscape for Stacy Lynn Waddell and for white blindness to the nght for Tariku Shiferaw, but African Americans in "Going Dark" are always on the edge of visibility.

Wagenknecht

Is assemblage a threat, to art or to you? Addie Wagenknecht smells blood, but Bob Smith plays around in the darkness, and Christine Rebhuhn feels right at home.

Wagner

Even apart from earthworks, can Minimalism mark the earth? It serves Merrill Wagner as a step toward painting, even as Thornton Willis, with his long commitment to geometric abstraction, pares back.

E. Walker

Can a black American into poetry, dance, and kinky sex take care of herself? Tiona Nekkia McClodden packs a gun, but Ella Walker, while not an African American, has her own theater of desire.

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.

Only Kara Walker could call a sculpture more than seventy-five feet long a subtlety. Is it subtle enough to touch the riddle of the sphinx, Brooklyn gentrification, and African American experience?

Kara Walker is losing patience with Trump's America, critics, and you. Should you listen when she, Sanford Biggers, and Nina Chanel Abney boast?

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.

L. Walker

Is there no rest for the weary, especially for an African American? Rodney McMillian sets himself up for failure, the artists in residence in "Tenses" ride the roller-coaster, and Larry Walker is still up against the wall.

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?

Wallace

Has abstraction maxed out? Ryan Wallace, Sarah Cain, Reed Danziger, Joanne Greenbaum, Gary Petersen, and David Rhodes make room for excess.

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.

Walp

Should still life aim for the moment or the thing itself? For Susan Jane Walp, it is first and foremost paint, but Tim Wilson finds it in a haunted house, Kyle Dunn and Martine Johanna in something close to love.

Walter

When Frank Walter turns out thousands of works, is it folk art or self-discovery? For Della Wells and Yvonne Wells, it is just another sunny day.

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.

Wang

Can painting approach poetry? Wei Jia and others in "Oil and Water" find Chinese calligraphy in abstraction or a western landscape, and "This Music Crept By Me upon the Waters" pairs artists and poets, while Wang Jianwei and V. S. Gaitonde ask art of East and West to step outside of time.

Ward

Should white America hear the silence or the voices? Nari Ward hears them both, in Harlem and African American history, while Wilmer Wilson IV staples them shut.

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.

Is Columbia University marching on Harlem? The Lenfest Center for the Arts, by Renzo Piano, opens with "Uptown" and a centerpiece by Nari Ward, while "We Wanted a Revolution" tracks black radical women decades before them.

Warhol

A retrospective of Andy Warhol enters a crowded field with themes of sexuality and camouflage. Does it still have room for his confrontations with death and art?

If Andy Warhol did not invent invent Pop Art or avant-garde film, why do people care so much? "Regarding Warhol" asks for his influence, but finds itself regarding Warhol.

Andy Warhol put a price tag on the Sistine Madonna. Did he find or lose the true church and popular culture in his art, and did Alex Katz make portraits, Pop Art, or Abstract Expressionism?

Was Andy Warhol serious about books as well as art, and did Marcel Broodthaers give up either one? The book art of one and the poetry of the other belong in anyone's imaginary museum.

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.

Is there a need for "slow art," and would it look any different from good art already? Jed Perl blames the need on Andy Warhol and "Warholism," but even the spectacle of Oscar Murillo can have serious intentions.

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.

When did a global art take over New York? As "Ambassador to the New," Ileana Sonnabend found room for both Andy Warhol and European painting.

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?

Washington

Can art create an ecosystem? Steffani Jemison, Cullen Washington, Jr., and Jennifer Packer hold the fort after Hurrican Sandy, while Dionisio Gonzáles and Mary Mattingly haul out the waste of globalization, and "Un/Natural Occurrences" seeks a climate for art.

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.

Watkins

Did Carleton Watkins create the notion of Yosemite as an American Eden? Now Annie Leibovitz undertakes a pilgrimage in search of paradise.

Watteau

Do you go to the Frick or the Rococo to escape this world? Jean Antoine Watteau finds a world at war and Arlene Shechet its porcelain, while Pierre Gouthière gilds the lily.

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

Why did Jacques-Louis David need so many preliminary drawings? He had to focus his art without losing his Neoclassical theater—like Claude Gillot, who taught Jean Antoine Watteau, in the Age of Reason.

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.

Watts

Can artists still leave their mark in paint? Andrea Belag, Grace Carney, Adam Pendleton, Michael Reafsnyder, and Chris Watts can with motifs, imagery, and surfaces while Trudy Benson catalogues the result.

Waugh

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

Way

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.

Gillian Wearing just wants to tell the truth about you, or does she? She and Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie in "Face to Face" suggest how much of women in photography lies behind a mask.

Webster

What if you could have your own private park, in one of New York's liveliest neighborhoods? Barry Diller has Little Island, but he and Thomas Heatherwick are not keeping it to themselves, while Meg Webster extends the ecosystem beyond Governors Island.

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.

Weeks

Is there a deconstructive architecture of the gallery? Ishmael Randall Weeks, Caitlin Masley, Allyson Vieira, and Kevin Zucker hint at its politics but barely find the architecture.

Weems

Some artists represent African American history. Carrie Mae Weems seeks it out personally, but can she still put herself on the line?

What does MoMA's 2020 "fall reveal" reveal? The museum rehangs its permanent collection, including series by Gerhard Richter and Carrie Mae Weems.

What happened to the Guggenheim Museum's collection? Carrie Mae Weems, Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Chan, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, and Richard Prince are granted "Artistic License" to find out, but the Whitney's collection looks downright new as well.

Wegman

Is William Wegman cute to the point of animal cruelty? He and his dog emerge from the calendars and into California conceptualism, while Ulrike Müller uses household pets to find a path between children's art, Cubist prints, and gender identity.

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 summer sculpture vanish into carpeting and thin air? Unlike typical summer sculpture, Peter Wegner and Rudolf Stingel take the great outdoors inside.

Wei Ja

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

D. and S. Weiner

Is New York vanishing before your eyes? Herman Leonard and Kahlil Joseph track its jazz rhythms, while Petrit Halilaj brings a perspective from war-torn Europe and Dan and Sandra Weiner from another vintage New York.

L. Weiner

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

Weisz

The Drawing Center returns to Soho, with architecture by Claire Weisz and the diaries, notebooks, or "assembly instructions" of Guillermo Kuitca, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, and Alexandre Singh. How modest (or ambitious) is that?

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?

Is the resurgence of abstract painting more than a show? Marjorie Welish, Erin O'Keefe, Michael Rouillard, and Yun Hyong-keun build on small differences.

Welling

How does photography differ from painting or collage? James Welling and Sandi Haber Fifield play with both, but photography puts barriers in their way, and John Houck now urns it to painting instead.

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.

D. Wells

When Frank Walter turns out thousands of works, is it folk art or self-discovery? For Della Wells and Yvonne Wells, it is just another sunny day.

Y. Wells

When Frank Walter turns out thousands of works, is it folk art or self-discovery? For Della Wells and Yvonne Wells, it is just another sunny day.

Wermers

Are earthworks just overblown dump sites? Mierle Laderman Ukeles stands up for sanitation workers as "maintenance artists," and Eleanor Antin lets empty boots stand on their own, while Louise Dudis stands up to trees and Nicole Wermers to awnings.

E. Wesley

Should African Americans take pride in surfaces or, like artists in residence in Harlem, "Material Histories"? The artists in "Speaking of People" find inspiration in Ebony and Jet magazines, but Eric Wesley is not so sure about making progress.

J. Wesley

When it comes to images of women, can the adolescent male gaze grow up? John Wesley, William Copley, Francesco Clemente, and Ivy Haldeman take women seriously, but not without a smile.

Wesselmann

How does an artist get from abstraction to the human figure? For Philip Guston and Tom Wesselmann, it took a lot less delicacy.

West

Abstract art may seem to belong to the past the more it asserts its authority. Can James Turrell, Ad Reinhardt, Michael West, Albert Kotin, and Lynne Drexler recover a neglected past and present?

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.

Weston

Eva Hesse made an expanded Minimalism speak for its materials, for a viewer's anxieties, and for her. Can Charisse Pearlina Weston, Xaviera Simmons, and Torkwase Dyson do the same for African Americans today?

Wheeler

What relates mushroom clouds to mushrooms, other than shape? For Bruce Conner the explosions come quickly—much as for Doug Wheeler in his Synthetic Desert.

Can art still floor you? Sam Moyer, Karla Black, Ann Shostrom, and Doug Wheeler look to marble, dust, fabric, and light to challenge the gallery floor and the weight of the art world.

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.

A. M. White

Can a Caribbean or Mexican American artist cross the border? Esteban Cabeza de Baca feels the desert heat in Chelsea and Teresita Fernández a tropical storm, while Austin Martin White and Kathia St. Hilaire feel the rubber burning.

C. White

When images of dignity collide ugly reality, which is the winner? Charles White feels "a special responsibility," while "Soul of a Nation" confronts African American abstraction with Black Power.

J. White

Does realism in painting preserve the truth? James White, Alejandro Campins, Bradley McCallum, and Melanie Vote flaunt artifice and death.

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.

Whitney

For every emerging artist gaining the spotlight, an artist somewhere else just keeps plodding along. What gives Stanley Whitney, Louise Fishman, and Jack Tworkov their abstract determination?

Whitten

A work of art called Aphrodite's Lover can only be an act of love. For Jack Whitten as an African American whose sources still influence Simone Leigh today, was sculpture also a sword?

Is it mourning or morning in America? The African American artists in "Grief and Grievance," with help from Glenn Ligon, riff on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Daniel LaRue Johnson, and Jack Whitten.

Wiener

Can abstraction still set off fireworks? Odili Donald Odita finds the other in color, while Mark Wiener turns in the end to black and white.

Wilcox

There may be no finer place for public art, but can art fully respond to New York if it does not have star quality? Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and T. J. Wilcox pick out a Voice Tunnel and the skyline.

Wiley

What makes an official portrait official? Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald treat Barack and Michelle Obama to flora and fancy dress, while Troy Michie recalls the Zoot Suit Riots and Firelei Báez the fire of women in Harlem.

Did Jacques-Louis David sell out in switching allegiances from the French republic to empire? He and Kehinde Wiley get to have it both ways when it comes to Napoleon and, for Wiley, public sculpture.

Can Moynihan Train Hall make up for the indignities of Penn Station? Skidmore, Owings & Merrill give it their best, with an assist from Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Kehinde Wiley, and Stan Douglas.

Who owns history, including art history? The question takes on special urgency in black America—and for Kehinde Wiley, Titus Kaphar, and Keris Salmon.

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.

Wilkes

Is there more to political art than the foul rag and bone shop of the heart? Cathy Wilkes, Jimmie Durham, and Leon Golub put their bodies on the line.

A. Williams

Do galleries and museums still need social distancing? Lucy Raven may catch you by surprise with others, past a wall of concrete and light, while Karyn Olivier remakes architecture from its seeming collapse, and Amanda Williams cordons off the chairs.

C. Williams

Do you believe in magic? Laura Larson connects nineteenth-century spirit photography to empty hotel rooms and contemporary adolescence, while Scott Alario finds magic in a family portrait, but Christopher Williams cuts through the mystery.

J. Williams

Can formalism lose itself in a dance, in language, or in a maze? Jeff Williams, Karl Haendel, Gabriel Sierra, and Ruby Sky Stiler are monkeying around with Minimalism.

S. 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.

T. Williams

With Tod Williams and Billie Tsien as architects, has the Barnes Foundation sold out or found itself? In Philadelphia now, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and a ton of Pierre-August Renoir are still getting the "hang" of modern art.

Can the American Folk Art Museum be saved? Michael Kimmelman and others speak out, as Diller Scofidio + Renfro and MoMA plan to demolish the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien architecture for yet another expansion.

W. T. Williams

Can abstract art accommodate diversity? "Making Space" looks at women in postwar abstraction, Kazuko Miyamoto looks back at Minimalism, and William T. Williams looks back as an African American.

Willis

Even apart from earthworks, can Minimalism mark the earth? It serves Merrill Wagner as a step toward painting, even as Thornton Willis, with his long commitment to geometric abstraction, pares back.

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.

F. Wilson

Can one construct the life of an artist from three screens and an empty living room? Beth Campbell acts the same wherever she goes, while Fred Wilson finds local color in the museum.

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?

Letha Wilson

Has photography outgrown planet earth? Amid the impulse to think big, Letha Wilson, Darren Almond, and Thomas Ruff cover Mars, seven continents, and America's geologic present.

P. Wilson

Can art trace the materials of a life? The artists in residence in "Pass, Carry, Hold," Paula Wilson, Virginia Overton, and Leonardo Drew step off the wall.

Can art still aspire to a window onto nature? Mary Obering and Patrick Wilson treat abstraction as a window, to which Peter Halley adds his customary bars, while Pádraig Timoney and Claire Kerr multiply the languages of art.

Does found the future of abstract art lie in "chromatic figuration"? "Overflow, Afterglow" thinks so, but Yto Barrada, Hasani Sahlehe, and Patrick Wilson know when to look back.

T. Wilson

W. Wilson

Should white America hear the silence or the voices? Nari Ward hears them both, in Harlem and African American history, while Wilmer Wilson IV staples them shut.

Wine

Must art bring gentrification and the end of affordable housing? "After the Plaster Foundation" demands a place to live, while Tishan Hsu and Jesse Wine furnish it and dismember its occupants.

Winkleman

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

Is art at the mercy of big money, and what about New York City? Peter Schjeldahl and Edward Winkleman debate the spectacle.

"Art Fairs: An Irresistible Force in the Art World?" If the answer seems too obvious for words, Ed Winkleman, Elizabeth Dee, Richard Lehun, and Nicholas O'Donnell tally up the financial and ethical implications, while Dee looks for an answer in Independent Projects.

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?

Winogrand

Did Garry Winogrand see only comedy and terror? In his metropolis, nothing was harder to bear than being alone.

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.

Terry Winters and others leave their traces on the wall and on paper, Ethan Greenbaum in plastic, and Diana Al-Hadid in a tangled impasto. Are these still the impression of nature?

Witkin

Was it ever easy to take in the Sistine Chapel? Photographs and plates without prints by Andrew Witkin take one closer to Michelangelo.

WitteVeen

Can abandoned Brooklyn and Beirut bring an end to the pain of war? Bettina WitteVeen speaks for the injured and Walid Raad for the anonymous and displaced.

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.

Wojciechowsky

Mary Lee Bendolph at Gee's Bend helped make quilting an art form, while Christopher Stout calls his painted linen quilts, and Margot, Agatha Wojciechowsky, and Tamara Gonzales reach for beauty, horror, and the spirit world. Can their claims be reconciled?

Wojnarowicz

Were there a naughty and nice side to Peter Hujar—and a madcap and merely angry side to David Wojnarowicz? If their poles were never far apart, so their lives and deaths were intertwined as well.

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.

Wolff

What lies between the covers of fine binding? The Laubespine-Villeroy library unfolds "Poetry and Patronage," Barbara Wolff the Book of Ruth.

Barbara Wolff and "Repetition and Difference," with help from Gilles Deleuze, find nature's and art's abundance in Jewish tradition. Between contemporary art and the past, who has changed whom?

Womack

What is more realistic—photography, illusion, or the plain sense of things? Mike Womack, Leslie Hewitt, John Houck, Ron Milewicz, and Michael St. John compare memory and realism.

L. Wong

Now that anything goes, where can it stop? Helen Marten and, at a gallery with Kathy Ruttenberg, Lily Wong reach beyond conceptual art and fantasy to painting, while Elizabeth Schwaiger all but paints herself out of her studio.

M. Wong

There are allegories, and then there are all-ugh-ories. Which describe art after AIDS and art after Eastern Europe by Martin Wong, Nicole Eisenman, Goshka Macuga, and Andra Ursuta?

Wong Ping

Lynn Hershman Leeson has spent a lifetime playing others, with and without digital assistance. Can she, Ed Atkins, and Wong Ping also play themselves?

Wood

With American Gothic, Grant Wood had found his American myth. Did he enshrine it, satirize it, or fear it—and would he recognize American art and its communities through the lens of Nick Mauss and modern dance?

Woodruff

When Martin Johnson Heade painted a gathering storm, did he foresee a war? "The Civil War and American Art" and "Photography and the American Civil War" show painters like Winslow Homer and photographers like Mathew Brady caught up in events more than they ever knew—and Hale Woodruff in his murals evoked them for the next century.

B. Woodman

More than a year before the American Civil War, Dave could see it coming. Did he and the black potters of Stone Bluff Manufactory foretell freedom then and the medium for Betty Woodman and Jennifer Paige Cohen today?

F. 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?

Woods

What do you get if you ask someone who hates cities to plan for their future? With Frank Lloyd Wright you might escape into the sky, and with Lebbeus Woods you might get a city at war.

Wool

Was there more to Robert Indiana than love? His text-driven Pop Art creates product logos for a transformation of America, but Christopher Wool is still looking for trouble.

Wright

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

Did the architect of a mile-high building seek to rein in skyscrapers? When it comes to Frank Lloyd Wright, MoMA and Columbia University are still unpacking the archive, while Queens uncovers his place in "Never Built New York."

What do you get if you ask someone who hates cities to plan for their future? With Frank Lloyd Wright you might escape into the sky, and with Lebbeus Woods you might get a city at war.

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.

Xin Song

Can an installation extend both painting and political art? Xin Song, El Anatsui, Wolfgang Laib, and Lin Yan add local and global color.

Xiyadie

Which are saints and which are sinners? "Comparative Hell" takes Asia to hell and back, while Xiyadie finds joy in a queer utopias.

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?

Yankus

Marc Yankus photographs buildings you only thought you knew and Thomas Roma the shadows of Brooklyn, while Paul Anthony Smith sees the city beyind barriers and a beach in Puerto Rica. Which is the real New York. Is this the real New York?

Yasinsky

When women artists play against stereotype, are they getting hysterical? Karen Yasinsky, Zoe Beloff, Nathalie Djurberg, and Mika Rottenberg 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.

Yi

Can art ride out the storm? Anicka Yi, Tom Burckhardt, and Maya Lin respond to climate change with their own ecosystems.

Yiadom-Boakye

Can black art aspire to the universal? Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints private moments with imaginary friends, Teju Cole mixes photography and poetry, and Umar Rashid recalls a mythical Kingdom of Harlem.

Yoakum

Can an African American artist claim succession? Steffani Jemison looks at once to the black community and white conceptual artists, while Joseph E. Yoakum moves mountains, and the artists in residence in "(Never) as I Was" stick, at first glance, closer to home.

Peter Young

Is Pattern and Decoration about discipline or excess? Valerie Jaudon patiently pursues her weave, while Peter Young works his way out of Minimalism, and John McAllister mixes ranting and radiance.

Purvis Young

What is the price of justice? Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts plead for African Americans in prison without trial, Simone Leigh remembers black women in confinement, and Purvis Young takes it to the streets.

Yun

Is the resurgence of abstract painting more than a show? Yun Hyong-keun, Erin O'Keefe, Michael Rouillard, and Marjorie Welish build on small differences.

Yuskavage

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 an early retrospective.

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

Zamora

Was 2020 New York summer sculpture missing something important, sculpture? Not entirely, but Nancy Baker Cahill went virtual, while Héctor Zamora and Abigail DeVille were late for the party.

Can summer sculpture survive a lockdown? The 2019 Socrates Annual offers a brief escape from Covid-19, before Héctor Zamora and "Monuments Now" with Jeffrey Gibson kick in.

Zapkus

As painting roars back, can it take too many shortcuts? Not for Kes Zapkus, Clare Grill, or Iman Raad.

Zarzeczna

John Dante Bianchi and Monika Zarzeczna make abstract art, Elizabeth Jaeger and Bruce M. Sherman ceramics, Lee Relvas wood craft, and Elaine Cameron-Weir lab equipment. So who do they all appear to fragment or to extend human flesh?

Zarina

When do terror and loss translate into something spiritual, personal, and true to the present? Zarina Hashmi and Huma Bhabha are of very different generations and hostile nations, but in place and spirit not so very far away.

Zausner

Can a bustling city offer empty pleasures? Holly Zausner, Christopher Culver, Duane Michals, and Katherine Newbegin look to landmarks, subways, and fire escapes for a sense of home.

Zemánková

Zerbini

When does abstraction become new media? Max Frintrop and Luiz Zerbini draw on the digital as imagery and tool, but Walter Darby Bannard experimented all along with paint.

Zhang

Can Gauri Gill in India see behind the masks, can Kenneth Tam find hope after forced Chinese American labor in the American West, and can Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan in China still claim the land as their own? Here tradition is itself only a mask.

Did Modernism end oceans apart? "Transmissions" traces art and the Cold War from Eastern Europe to Latin America, while Zhang Hongtu breaches walls in China and New York.

Zindato

One fills mad landscapes with eyes and snakes, one has struggled with mental illness and Minimalism, one still believes in ghosts, and one bundles trash from the street. So which of Domenico Zindato, Martin Thompson, Allison Schulnik, and Judith Scott is making outsider art?

Zito

Joseph Zito, Dwyer Kilcollin, and Annette Lemieux make sculpture from spare forms, household items, post-industrial materials, and bitter memories. Is it Minimalism or excess?

Remember when art took time? Joseph Zito, Simone Bailey, Janaye Brown, Claudia Joskowicz, Jorge Macchi, James Nares, and "Long Takes" experience the gallery and the brink of revolution in real time.

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.

Zox

Did art have to choose between color-field painting and Minimalism? "The Fullness of Color," "Marking Time," Larry Zox, and Rob de Oude have their doubts.

Zucker

Is there a deconstructive architecture of the gallery? Kevin Zucker, Caitlin Masley, Allyson Vieira, and Ishmael Randall Weeks hint at its politics but barely find the architecture.

Zurbarán

Did Spain in the Baroque find the promised land? Francisco de Zurbarán sent paintings to the Americas, while Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and his status could fool the eye.

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.

Zurkow

Where did the cows go? Rem Koolhaas looks into "Countryside, the Future," while Marina Zurkow and Sarah Rothberg explore the limits to growth in plain old water.

GROUP SHOWS

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

First, however, are artists, any artists, complicit with a venal, oppressive art world? Consider three little words related to complicity.

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.

Can indigenous art be thoroughly modern? It takes Mary Sully to New York and Aboriginal Australian bark painting to the land itself.

Are abstract artists abstracting away and, if so, from what? "Abstraction from Nature" takes a broad view of both its terms, while JP Munro turns them into myth and Ilana Savdie a carnival.

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.

Are there way too many images—and all the wrong kind? "A Trillion Sunsets" looks for them in photography and online, "Actual Size" at actual size, and John Divola in an abandoned corner of California.

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 Byzantine art the missing link between the ancients and the Renaissance? "Africa and Byzantium" bridges centuries and continents, while Maxime Du Camp in nineteenth-century photography can only try to look back.

Who are these people? "Posing Modernity" spotlights the black model from Edouard Manet, Olympia, and Henri Matisse to today, while "African Americans Portraits" views the 1940s and 1950s in studio photography.

Jennifer Packer paints those she knows well, Adam Pendleton records the toppling of a Confederate monument, and Afrofuturism gets a period room at the Met. So why is the African American eye still not satisfied?

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.

Must art bring gentrification and the end of affordable housing? "After the Plaster Foundation" demands a place to live, while Tishan Hsu and Jesse Wine furnish it and dismember its occupants.

When Claude Lorrain painted Battle on a Bridge, could he have had in mind Jewish refugees in World War II? Surely not, but his is among the "Afterlives" of Nazi-looted art.

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"?

Is art photography's elephant in the living room? It is for the 2022 AIPAD Photography Show, much like dance for Sam Contis and "Time Management Techniques" for photographers today.

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."

Is the Whitney's new home in the Meatpacking District, designed by Renzo Piano, an eyesore or an eye-opener? Maybe both, but then, as the inaugural exhibition has it, "America Is Hard to See."

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"?

Can rehanging a museum collection capture a greater America? The American Folk Art Museum contains "Multitudes," while the Brooklyn Museum gives greater weight to Native American art and the Whitney finds diversity "At the Dawn of a New Age."

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?

Was American Modernism ambivalent about Modernism and America? From Edward Hopper to Georgia O'Keeffe, "American Modern" finds space for MoMA's permanent collection, while Eliot Porter points to what it leaves out.

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?

A second "Americans in Paris" and "Asian-American Abstraction" take postwar American abstraction overseas and back, with a trip to Paris and an encounter with Abstract Expressionism. Can you tell one from the other?

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.

Has photography's decisive moment past? The National Gallery of Canada prefers "The Extended Moment," while the Morgan Library sees group portraits as "Among Others," and Don McCullin finds the ultimate group portrait of an age in wartime.

Is New York still an "Analog City"? This Web critic often remembers it that way, but "Architecture Now" sees a greener future.

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

Does Ernst Haas take photography close to abstraction? The photographers in "AND/ALSO" and the prints in "Nothing Is So Humble" still grapple with claims to truth and to art.

Who knew that Martin Luther King, Jr., and the New York Knicks are just regular guys? Henry Taylor and Spike Lee look to the black and white communities for local heroes, while "And Ever an Edge" finds the chill winds of home.

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.

In a time of inequality and Occupy Wall Street, are there two Americas—and two New Yorks? With Monika Sosnowska, the Eastern bloc meets urban America, while summer group shows seek urban "Multiplicity" and "Another Look at Detroit."

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

What if photography had been around for centuries? The medium was just three years old when Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey sought ancient civilizations in all their glory, while "Apollo's Muse" turns its lens on moon.

Have time on your hands, like a flâneur in early modern Paris, and doubts about art? "The Arcades" pairs contemporary art and Walter Benjamin, while Louise Lawler takes one behind the scenes of a collection.

Is New York still an "Analog City"? This Web critic often remembers it that way, but "Architecture Now" sees a greener future.

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, Frieze 2012 (its first year in New York), and other fairs offer competing visions of where the action is.

A century after the 1913 Armory Show brought Modernism to America, can art still shock? Maybe not, but the 2013 Armory Show, Moving Image, the Independent, other fairs, and "Decenter" sure inspire fear for the state of the art.

Can there be a place for fast art? The 2014 Armory Show demands it, while Volta, Frieze, Pulse, NADA, and new competitors are fighting for space.

Can the 2015 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, NADA, the Governors Island Arts Fair, and other fairs see past contemporary art to history? At Volta, Travis Somerville remembers a lynching.

What should you see at the art fairs? At the 2016 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, and Volta, not to mention Art New York, Art in Context, NADA, and more, whatever you like.

Have the art fairs made galleries a thing of the past? With the 2017 Armory Show, Volta, the Independent, NADA, Moving Image, Frieze, the AIPAD Photography Show, and more, the pressure is on.

Can the art fairs stay contemporary? The AIPAD Photography Show tries not to, but the 2018 Armory Show, Volta, the ADAA Art Show, the Independent, NADA, Spring Break, Scope, and Frieze keep adding features.

Are the art fairs turning on each other. Volta and the 2019 Armory Show try to cooperate, even as one pays the price, while Frieze, Frieze Sculpture, NADA House, Portal GI, the ADAA Art Show, the Independent, Spring Break, and Scope fight for the spoils.

Do we really need art fairs? Maybe, but only because the 2020 Armory Show, the ADAA Art Show, Volta, Scope, Spring Break, the Independent, NADA, and Frieze all meet different needs.

Can I finally bring myself to skip the art fairs? The 2021 Armory Show, the Independent, Works on Paper, Spring Break, the Future Fair, and Clio beg to differ.

Even before the 2022 Armory Show, Frieze returns, scaled back but more inclusive. Can the Independent, NADA, and Volta still offer an alternative?

Are the art fairs growing or shrinking? Frieze, I-54, Volta, NADA, and the Independent keep their post-Covid scale for 2023 but aim big.

The 2022 Armory Show and 2024 Armory Show look bigger than ever, with or without the masks. Can the Independent, Spring Break, and Works on Paper still offer an alternative to business as usual?

How did David Hammons get to the downtown New York of "Around Day's End" and Gordon Matta-Clark—and to his own "Day's End"? So elusive an artist began by leaving his mark in Body Prints.

Do art advisors need regulation? A panel on "Art Advising 2.0" at Sotheby's featuring Sean Kelly, Megan Fox Kelly, Noah Horowitz, and Richard Lehun puzzled over ethics and the law.

Does action painting still mean American art or even abstraction? In a new look at their permanent collections, two museums find "Art of Another Kind," in Europe, and "Signs & Symbols."

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"?

Did outsider art inspire Abstract Expressionism? "Art Brut in America" recalls Jean Dubuffet in New York, while his drawings and Ronald Lockett remember the madness of modern art.

Is there more to contemporary Chinese art than sex between pigs, pit bulls, snakes, and scorpions? "Art and China After 1989" is brash, showy, and political but faces charges of censorship.

Was there more to Frida Kahlo than her appearance? Maybe not, but others shared her obsession and her "Art of Defiance."

Can art keep up? With "Art Happens Here," Rhizome brings its Net Art Anthology to the Web and a museum, while "New Order" finds a material side to art and technology.

What happened to the Guggenheim Museum's collection? Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Chan, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince, and Carrie Mae Weems are granted "Artistic License" to find out, but the Whitney's collection looks downright new as well.

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 the Tower of Babel really such a bad idea? Its rise and fall into distinct languages and peoples parallel the aspirations and diversity of the 2021 Asia Society Triennial.

"Americans in Paris" and "Asian-American Abstraction" take postwar American abstraction overseas and back, with a trip to Paris and an encounter with Abstract Expressionism. Can you tell one from the other?

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? For "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" and "Better Homes," it could be a greater Minimalism or a greater irony.

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

And then there was art. Can "Back to Eden" and Camille Henrot get themselves back to the garden?

"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.

Which best describes video art—sculpture or spectacle? "Before Projection" claims the first and "Programmed" the second, while Erin Shirreff, Tomás Saraceno, and Doug Aitken take the course of the sun into the gallery.

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.

What is left if blockbusters are just business as usual, and videos by Tacita Dean become tributes to artists who have passed away? A lot, and the "Best of 2012" is all over the map.

Sometimes art just has to survive, but exhibitions are also charged with recovery. The "Best of 2014" takes the tale beyond New York.

Could the "Best of 2015" be examples of failure? I overlooked my share of artists, but the Whitney thrives on ugliness at first glance and Latin American art on a fraught emotional and political history.

Who would ask for the best of 2016, if it means looking back at an election year that I, for one, shall be glad never to see again? Yet it offered consistency and diversity.

Was the best of 2017 buried in controversy? At least it stirred controversy while highlighting drawing and diversity.

As markets peak and crash, is art looking up or down. The best of 2018 suggests both trends, but not everyone is trendy.

Did the best of 2019 play it safe? Art still thrived on diversity and growing pains.

Can there be the best in an awful year? The best of 2020 lies in diversity, but also in those who cared, like you.

Did the best of 2021 lie in a mad rush to catch up or in restraint, with attention to museum collections? Art might have settled for business as usual after Covid-19, but it offered so much more.

Does the best of 2022 merit a top ten list? Maybe not, but the year had its share of blockbusters, diversity, big names, and focused small shows.

The best of 2023 really did include blockbusters. Can diversity and a museum's mission still take one beyond the hype?

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? For "Aspects, Forms, and Figures and "Better Homes," it could be a greater Minimalism or a greater irony.

Is art "Between the Bridges" a parable of artists in Brooklyn? For 2012, summer sculpture expands to Williamsburg and finds "Common Ground" in City Hall Park.

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 Governors 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."

Danish Romanticism includes the harbor in sunlight and moonlight, portraits, and palaces. Is it also "Beyond the Light," and could Francisco Oller see past the Latin American sunlight to Impressionism?

Was Jean-Michel Basquiat a street artist? He responded in paint to the death of Michael Stewart, who the police arrested and killed as one, but others even then looked "Beyond the Streets."

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.

When did subjectivity become the new black? John Divola, León Ferrari, Kerstin Persson, Andrea Longacre-White find depths where a group show insists on "Black."

What does it mean for summer sculpture to be site specific? "Black Atlantic" turns its back on Liberty and Cristina Iglesias finds hidden waters, while Maren Hassinger and Wyatt Kahn turn modest objects into steel for urban parks.

Kerry James Marshall got his start by painting an invisible man. How did he or, in photography and video, "Black Cowboy" find community, in black and white America and in art?

Is jazz closer to abstraction or to African American identity? "Blues for Smoke," with help from Glenn Ligon, has room for both.

Can a celebration of African Americans help overcome very real dangers? Arthur Jafa and "The Body Politic" (with Steve McQueen, David Hammons, and Mika Rottenberg) make the body in question a part of black history and culture.

Do some women just refuse to shut up? "Born in Flames" opens with a torrent of words in search of a feminist future, but Shigeko Kubota found her voice in video and ushing waters, while Huguette Caland kept her silence in abstraction with awareness of a woman's body.

Just how dark were the dark ages, and what lay behind the covers of precious books? The Holy Roman Empire and, centuries later in France, the Wrightsman collection and "Bound for Versailles," had their "Imperial Splendor."

Are "The Brand New Heavies," curated by Mickalene Thomas, post-post-black? She and Hank Willis Thomas make everything uncertain in African American identity but gender, but "Now Dig This!" tries to recover them both.

Has outsider art entered the mainstream? A panel on "Break on Through (from the Outside)" at Sotheby's featuring Andrew Edlin, Scott Ogden, Edward M. Gómez, Daniel Swanigan Snow, and Richard Lehun wonders if it should—while "History Refuses to Die" with Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, and Gee's Bend quilts ponders the evidence.

For all his cruelty, William Hogarth allowed Londoners a proper English beer. Can the Met's British galleries keep to a decorative richness and a proper cup of tea?

Does art lead right to the gift shop? "The Value of Good Design" hardly minds if it does, but architecture, design, and science together can still hope to repair a "Broken Nature."

Can a museum turn two hundred without lying about its age? The Brooklyn Museum rehangs yet again its American art, while rounding up the borough for "The Brooklyn Artists Show."

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

Can a museum turn two hundred without lying about its age? The Brooklyn Museum rehangs yet again its American art, while rounding up the borough for "The Brooklyn Artists Show."

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 through 2011, can an alternative community or an alternative space survive?

Is Bushwick settling down? Maybe not, but Charles Atlas, Deborah Brown, and Bushwick Open Studios 2012 challenge the art fairs.

If you can't beat 'em, pretend that you already have. That may describe the Bruce High Quality Foundation, but is it fair to everyday artists, dealers, and Bushwick Open Studios 2013?

What is there to do when the war has no end? "But a Storm Is Blowing in Paradise" brings art from the Middle East and North Africa, while Toyin Ojih Odutola finds pleasure and pain in black and white.

Who would star in The Americans today? The black and white photographers in "But Still, It Turns," curated by Paul Graham, and Dawoud Bey in Birmingham and Harlem cross America.

Amid all the noise and gestures, can art still think small? The Morgan Library displays contemporary drawings "By Any Means," while "Microwave" put scale to the test, and Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François imagine what is left when so much else has washed away.

Can even summer break out of gallery walls? 2015 group shows say "Hello Walls" and play "By the Book."

Alice Adams brings architecture to Minimalism, while "By the Way" seeks sculpture in material and motion. Could Dorothy Dehner before them lead the way while leaving David Smith behind?

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.

Did Europe subjugate the Americas or leave behind a richer creole? "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World" takes three museums, five hundred artists, and four hundred years to find out.

When it comes to Modernism, should one call it past or hope to escape? "Cellblock," featuring Peter Halley, looks for a way out, while "How Much Do I Owe You?" follows the money right into a vault.

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?

When is a summer group show a themed show? In 2013, familiar themes get slippery, maybe most of all with "Chick Lit."

Does a dog have a Buddha nature? Maybe not, but "Chinese Painting and Calligraphy" and the Cowles collection of Japanese art have their "Three Perfections."

Does Latin American art for Daniel Lind-Ramos all go back to an old storyteller? The Phelps de Cisneros collection has its "Chosen Memories."

Can art look behind Manhattan to revitalize New York? "Civic Action" has a vision for Long Island City, while "Puddle, Pothole, Portal" opens an expanded SculptureCenter.

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.

Did Modernism die off or just shatter in the face of competing avant-gardes? Club 57 takes to the dark side of the 1970s, and Duncan Hannah remembers in Twentieth-Century Boy.

Can architecture address climate change? "Emerging Ecologies" looks back to Buckminster Fuller and others for models, while "Coal + Ice" in a multimedia extravaganza sees the peril ahead.

When you think of Starry Night, do you remember only the stars and the night? Vincent van Gogh sees the cypresses, while the Karen B. Cohen gift takes the Morgan Library "Into the Woods."

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.

Chinese art and early Buddhist art in India exchange power for the pleasure of contemplation. Do "Companions in Solitude" and "Tree and Serpent" find it in art or nature?

Which are saints and which are sinners? "Comparative Hell" takes Asia to hell and back, while Xiyadie finds joy in a queer utopias.

In Renaissance Italy, "Concinnitas" stood for beauty as a "skillful joining." Could that include the "Twisted Data" of art, mathematics, and science—or stock trades for Sarah Meyohas?

Does the connoisseur's eye discern or erase the greatness of the past? "Conversations in Drawing" from the Gray collection can afford to do both, but Guercino drawings still give weight to a vision.

Is book art a display of text, images, or the sculptural object? A panel on "Content Through Structure" led by Maddy Rosenberg examines the aims of art criticism and the artist's book.

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

Where did the cows go? Rem Koolhaas looks into "Countryside, the Future," while Marina Zurkow and Sarah Rothberg explore the limits to growth in plain old water.

Can Tyler Mitchell make you feel good? He says so, but his black utopia, "Covid New York," "#ICPConcerned," and John Akomfrah know only loss.

Does a dog have a Buddha nature? Maybe not, but "Chinese Painting and Calligraphy" and the Cowles collection of Japanese art have their "Three Perfections."

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.

When is political art a contradiction in terms? "Zero Tolerance" and "Crossing Brooklyn" aim to represent global protest and the Brooklyn artist community, but Bob and Roberta Smith would just as soon forget the whole thing.

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?

As László Moholy-Nagy traveled from the Bauhaus to America, he dreamed of a "new ordering of a new world." For him and for the artists in Dadaglobe, was rootlessness never far from the order?

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?

Is this our common humanity? The bodily terror of Kiki Smith and the Straus collection joins the annual juried show at Hudson Valley MOCA as "Death Is Irrelevant."

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? 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 made people line up to see Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and the Bauhaus? Rather than relying solely on censorship, the Nazis put on display "Degenerate Art."

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.

When does madness end and theater begin? Carol Rama in Italy, Alan Vega in the punk scene, and "Delirious" go for sex, madness, and rock 'n' roll

Was a woman the first known author? "She Who Wrote" recovers Mesopotamian women for today, while the Met's new galleries for Cycladic art look back almost as far.

Does New York still have room for life? "Life Between Buildings" and "Designing Peace" bring a touch of humanity and greenery, but Duke Riley does not need art to save New York waterways.

Would you sell a painting to save a life, at the price of losing a city's heart? The Detroit Institute of Arts feels the pressure.

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.

When did plein-air painting leave Romanticism behind? English and German drawings engage in "A Dialogue with Nature," before the untamed landscape of Théodore Rousseau and the Barbizon school.

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?

Can sculpture still shock? Alina Szapocznikow survives the camps but not cancer, while "A Disagreeable Object" claims Surrealism for today.

Has summer sculpture left the parks behind? With Orly Genger, Ugo Rondinone, "do it (outside)," and Thomas Houseago at Storm King Art Center it becomes the fabric of New York.

With so much left to collaboration and the unconsciousness, does Surrealist drawing sound like a contradiction in terms? "Drawing Surrealism" claims for fifteen countries, including postwar America, a seat at the Surrealist table.

When Carl Andre typed pillars of words and wild strings of letters, were they lessons in how to read or how not to be read? One could ask the same about text as art in "Drawing Time, Reading Time"—or art as music for William Engelen.

"Dreamlands" sees the moving image as changing "how we see and experience the world." Like video by Pipilotti Rist, is it immersive cinema or art?

Politics is serious business, but then so is art. Why, then, do Sue Coe and Thomas Bayrle need to demand that you take them seriously, and how does "Due Process" take a less polemical approach to black lives and incarceration?

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?

In The Tribute Money and in a young man, does Michelangelo see a growing mastery or a choice? He finds them both in "Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich" and "From Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery."

Did Giovanni Battista Moroni paint sitters "as they looked," and is that a bad thing? Maybe not, but "Early Italian Drawings" pair design and invention.

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.

Could something as simple as a color chart keep formalism alive—or does it just add another layer of conceptual art? Tauba Auerbach, Jaq Chartier, Kathy Goodell, Harriet Korman, and Catherine Lee turn to dots and dashes for "Ecstatic Alphabets."

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."

Can architecture address climate change? "Emerging Ecologies" looks back to Buckminster Fuller and others for models, while "Coal + Ice" in a multimedia extravaganza sees the peril ahead.

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.

Juan Francisco Elso and Latin American artists place "An Emphasis on Resistance." Can they feel the pain of martyrdom and revolution half as much as Carlos Martiel?

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? Chris Burden 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," like the studio artists in "Midnight's Daydream," make it difficult even to know which.

Did Alfred Jarry spew nonsense or the avant-garde? Jarry and Ubu Roi made a scandal of modern art, and soon the artists in "Engineer, Agitator, Constructor" made it a matter of promotion.

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

Was Abstract Expressionism all about thinking big? "Epic Abstraction" extends its history to women and the present, while Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler step out from behind the veils.

Someone was out to impress, and the Met's reopened European painting galleries tell its story. Was it Diego Velázquez, King Philip of Spain, or Francesco I d'Este?

Can a gift renew a museum's purpose or pervert it? The Eveillard gift brings John Singer Sargent and works on paper to the Frick, while the Gregory gift brings the decorative arts and Rosalba Carriera.

Does a collector need good taste? The Eveillard gift to the Morgan keeps things plain and disciplined, while the Moore gift brings a visit from the Dutch.

Is it time for a Neo-Minimalism? "Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday," "Furniture," and "Its Endless Undoing" discover a subversive everyday—and they are not alone.

Is art a window onto the world? Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Samara Golden, and "Everything, Everyday" stop at the stage door.

Are they all out to get you? "Everything Is Connected" connects art and conspiracy, while Adelita Husni-Bey, Mariana Castillo Deball, and Mika Rottenberg turn for hope to more ancient myths, maps, theater, Third World workers, and lawyers.

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.

Did you know that an artist was involved in the first desktop computer? "Thinking Machines" and "Experiments in Electrostatics" find art in the modern office—and Daniel Neumann and Julianne Swartz in the mix.

When Yoko Ono made her Painting for the Wind, did she anticipate earthworks? "Expo 1: New York," including Olafur Eliasson, asks what remains today of earth art and the earth.

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.

What does MoMA's 2020 "fall reveal" reveal? The museum rehangs its permanent collection, including series by Gerhard Richter and Carrie Mae Weems.

Did Modernism begin with photography and film? MoMA's 2021 "fall reveal" sees them as a key to modern art's diversity, and Jonas Mekas at the Jewish Museum supplies the map.

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

Is the woman holding the void by Alberto Giacometti begging for attention? MoMA's 2019 expansion certainly is, and so is Faurschou New York, where a dealer and collector has museum aspirations.

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

Was the architecture of Louis I. Kahn about concrete and stone or light, space, and sky? Years after his death, FDR Four Freedoms Park and the expanded Yale University Art Gallery speak to both.

Is there really "The Female Gaze," and what could it look like? Janine Antoni 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.

Charles Ritchie calls his intimate sketches drawings and journals, and what could be more intimate and inviting? For "The Feverish Library," art and books intersect when it comes to words and ideas as well.

Can group shows of emerging artists get out of hand, and can a show of drawings get tired of drawing? The 2017 Governors Island Art Fair, Open Sessions at the Drawing Center, and "Fictions" at the Studio Museum in Harlem take stock.

For "Nature," the 2019 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, as for "Figuring the Floral" at Wave Hill, "nature is the ultimate guide." But are they true to design, to science, or to nature?

How black was ancient Egyptian art? "Flight into Egypt" asks black artists today.

Are summer group shows just art fairs without the tourists and collectors? Some in 2017 stand out, alongside Francisco Ugarte, Shara Hughes, Patricia Treib, and "Flora Fantastica!"

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.

Could America's most overlooked folk artist have had serious academic training? For Archibald Motley and "Folk Art and American Modernism," it took those two terms to sustain each other.

With "Fore," the Studio Museum takes up its theme of black and post-black identity. Does that include the identity of another show of emerging artists?

Can suburbia and the Third World learn from Modernism's ideal city? "Uneven Growth" compares six global megacities, while "Foreclosed" engineers the American dream.

Has contemporary painting entered an atemporal world? "The Forever Now" has emerging art thinking big, but Walter Robinson sees only "zombie formalism."

Did MoMA PS1 celebrate forty years as New York's pioneering arts institution by closing? Not quite, but "Forty" remembers, while Vito Acconci and Lucas Samaras forget others than themselves.

Is fine art a relic of a less cynical age? Gonzalo Fonseca builds on Isamu Noguchi and Nancy Graves on relics and mappings, while "Fossil Tales" refuses to see artist books as extinct even as a gallery passes.

Can photography separate industry from craft or Modernism from beauty? Richard Benson embraces them all, while "Fotoclubismo" before him in Brazil shows how photography can give women their due, too.

Is gender a fluid concept or a fog machine for art? "Trigger" sees gender as a tool and a weapon, while "Found" combines queer archaeology with queer abstraction.

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 a collection from a mansion thrive on Brutalism? The Frick Madison brings decorative art and art history to Marcel Breuer.

Is there a market for defiance? The 2012 Armory Show, Volta, Moving Image, the Independent, Frieze 2012 (its first year in New York), and other fairs offer competing visions of where the action is.

Can there be a place for fast art? The 2014 Armory Show demands it, while Volta, Frieze, Pulse, NADA, and new competitors are fighting for space.

Have the art fairs made galleries a thing of the past? With the 2017 Armory Show, Volta, the Independent, NADA, Moving Image, Frieze, the AIPAD Photography Show, and more, the pressure is on.

Do we really need art fairs? Maybe, but only because the 2020 Armory Show, the ADAA Art Show, Volta, Scope, Spring Break, the Independent, NADA, and Frieze all meet different needs.

Even before the 2022 Armory Show, Frieze returns, scaled back but more inclusive. Can the Independent, NADA, and Volta still offer an alternative?

Will museums, galleries, and so much more survive a lockdown? For all the threats to art after Covid-19 and galleries after Covid-19, some boast of "virtual exhibitions," socially distanced museums, and the death of art fairs.

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.

Is it time for a Neo-Minimalism? "Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday," "Furniture," and "Its Endless Undoing" discover a subversive everyday—and they are not alone.

Did art have to choose between color-field painting and Minimalism? "The Fullness of Color," "Marking Time," Larry Zox, and Rob de Oude have their doubts.

Can a movement devoted to speed have stumbled so slowly to an ending? "Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe" looks beyond Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and fascism to set design, such women as Benedetta Cappa, and a thirty-five year history.

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.

Can portrait photography find room for so many people? They could be "Your Mirror," the lost souls never far from Alec Soth, or "Ghosts."

Was Modernism the art of the machine? Come to "Ghosts in the Machine" looking for the machine in art, and you may find yourself instead looking at the ghost of the machine.

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 2009 Governors Island Art Fair just wants artist space.

Can private architecture thrive on public access, and can emerging artists live up to the challenge of site-specific art? The 2018 Governors Island Art Fair and the Socrates Annual find them learning the hard way, but the Ford Foundation by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo still brings the outside in.

Identity is a matter of pride, but is it also a matter of "Grace"? Identity politics is anything but graceful in the art of Ina Archer, Charles Long, and Hannah Starkey.

So all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely selfies? Maybe not, but others in "Grand Illusions" had their staged photography more than a century before Cindy Sherman, while Alice Austen had a reclusive stage to herself on Staten Island.

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.

What happens when hoary museums take over displays of emerging artists? With "Greater New York 2015" at MoMA PS1 and "Unorthodox" at the Jewish Museum, they start to emerge from the dead.

Can "Greater New York 2021" go bigger? It aims to bridge social worlds in a vibrant city, but it is too set on fighting old wars.

Is it mourning or morning in America? The African American artists in "Grief and Grievance," with help from Glenn Ligon, riff on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Daniel LaRue Johnson, and Jack Whitten.

Long before MAGA and melting ice made headlines, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith painted The Vanishing American—and she did not mean the Pueblo people and pottery in "Grounded in Clay." Is Native American art so quick to see?

Is there a distinctly Japanese avant-garde? "Tokyo, 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde" and "Gutai: Splendid Playground" find a quarter center of postwar avant-gardes, in individuals, collectives, and movements.

Must survivalism drive Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison to a portable orchard? The 2004 Harlem Sculpture Gardens, Alexis Rockman, and Tiril Hasselknippe find more summery alternatives.

Is Harlem still on your mind? The Met pairs "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism."

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

Can even summer break out of gallery walls? 2015 group shows say "Hello Walls" and play "By the Book."

"Here and Elsewhere," including Etel Adnan, traces years of conflict in art of the Arab lands. Can artists cross borders while taking sides?

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.

Do the High Line, contributions to Hudson Yards by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, and the Museum of Modern Art with help from Diller Scofidio + Renfro represent New York's worst or its hopes for the future? Architecture enters a new decade with choices ahead.

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?

With 100 Famous Views of Edo, Utagawa Hiroshige kept up with a changing city, while the Hodgkin collection takes South Asian art across the centuries as "Indian Skies." Is Takashi Murakami up to the job today?

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 contemporary art no longer at home? "Home Is a Foreign Place" finds Jasper Johns and his flag still flying, while Louise Nevelson on paper finds dark closets of the imagination.

Myrlande Constant celebrates quilting and revolution, while Renée Stout connects portraiture, politics, and painting by numbers. Are they both voodoo children, and can "Hope Is a Discipline" and "Tropical Frequencies" give them hope?

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.

When it comes to Modernism, should one call it past or hope to escape? "Cellblock," featuring Peter Halley, looks for a way out, while "How Much Do I Owe You?" follows the money right into a vault.

Can growth make a city less urban? With sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick and a tower by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, Hudson Yards asks one to step up and apart from the grid.

Do libraries have a future after books? The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library and Hunters Point Community Library give it a go.

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.

Are the art fairs growing or shrinking? Frieze, I-54, Volta, NADA, and the Independent keep their post-Covid scale for 2023 but aim big.

Can Tyler Mitchell make you feel good? He says so, but his black utopia, "Covid New York," "#ICPConcerned," and John Akomfrah know only loss.

Is "ICP at 50" still open to change? What Cornell Capa founded to promote "concerned" photography also displays a fashion photographer who died of AIDS in David Seidner.

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.

Can immigrants leave their memories behind? Sheida Soleimani and Daniel Shieh can ask their parents, "Immersion" everywhere that they have lived.

When change came to painting and to Paris, were the department stores there first? Berthe Morisot takes out her best dress and her art, Gustave Caillebotte and Pierre-Auguste Renoir their umbrellas, and Edouard Manet and Claude Monet their brush for "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity."

John Singer Sargent could do anything. So you may want to say after seeing his watercolors or "The Impressionist Line," drawings from the Clark Institute from Edgar Degas to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but what exactly could he do?

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" While "World War I and the Visual Arts" breaks the silence, "An Incomplete History of Protest" assigns political art a grade of incomplete.

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 should you see at the art fairs? At the 2016 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, and Volta, not to mention Art New York, Art in Context, NADA, and more, whatever you like.

Have the art fairs made galleries a thing of the past? With the 2017 Armory Show, Volta, the Independent, NADA, Moving Image, Frieze, the AIPAD Photography Show, and more, the pressure is on.

Do we really need art fairs? Maybe, but only because the 2020 Armory Show, the ADAA Art Show, Volta, Scope, Spring Break, the Independent, NADA, and Frieze all meet different needs.

Can I finally bring myself to skip the art fairs? The 2021 Armory Show, the Independent, Works on Paper, Spring Break, the Future Fair, and Clio beg to differ.

Even before the 2022 Armory Show, Frieze returns, scaled back but more inclusive. Can the Independent, NADA, and Volta still offer an alternative?

The 2022 Armory Show and 2024 Armory Show look bigger than ever, with or without the masks. Can the Independent, Spring Break, and Works on Paper still offer an alternative to business as usual?

Are the art fairs growing or shrinking? Frieze, I-54, Volta, NADA, and the Independent keep their post-Covid scale for 2023 but aim big.

Richard Hunt takes his public sculpture indoors, while "inHarlem" for 2016 heads for the parks and Michael Richards for Governors Island. Which owes more to monumentality or community?

What is an artist's inheritance? "Inheritance" sees it in family, diversity, and art itself, while Tuan Andrew Nguyen confronts a nation's contested heritage, and Pepón Osorio brings a community of his own making to the museum.

What do art and the urban experience have in common, other than real-estate values? "In Practice" for 2003 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.

Where were those voices? "In Practice" for 2021 makes them and the way home hard to find—like an ocean crossing and a way out of climate change for Rindon Johnson and digital displays of the perfect storm for Rachel Rosheger.

Did Africa give birth to art? Lydia Ourahmane finds cave art in scorched earth, but Andy Coolquitt, Michael Mahalchick, and "In Practice" for 2022 insist that ruin need not mean collapse.

What can art do in the face of a global crisis? "Insecurities" maps refugees and shelters, while Sophia Al-Maria views "temples of capitalism" in the Gulf states, and "Tales of Our Time" finds post-industrial wastelands in China.

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.

When you think of Starry Night, do you remember only the stars and the night? Vincent van Gogh sees the cypresses, while the Karen B. Cohen gift takes the Morgan Library "Into the Woods."

What is it to be an American? The answers for Diana Markosian, Gillian Laub, Muriel Hasbun, and the black photographers in "Inward" play out on their smart phones, on TV, and in the streets of New York.

If Wassily Kandinsky hesitated and Pablo Picasso backed off, who gets credit for abstraction? "Inventing Abstraction" describes not movements but networks and connections, including dance and music.

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.

If one could read the calligraphy in "Iran Modern," would its message be modern? As with Hayv Kahraman today, an art of indirection weaves between abstraction, politics, and tradition.

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"?

If Modernism explored the language of art, is it now at a loss for words? Sarah Charlesworth, Thomas Scheibitz, Sadie Benning, and "Itself Not So" move between photography, geometry, and aphasia.

Is it time for a Neo-Minimalism? "Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday," "Furniture," and "Its Endless Undoing" discover a subversive everyday—and they are not alone.

Who would wear something as confining as a Soundsuit, by Nick Cave? Cave himself tries them on, and he means African American art to speak out from the silence, like the Studio Museum artists in residence in "It's Time for Me to Go."

Roberto Burle Marx, SANAA, and "A Japanese Constellation" make design a collaboration with others and the garden. Is there more to modern architecture than the wow?

For just three years, Alan Solomon threw the Jewish Museum into the turmoil of the city and the turmoil of contemporary art. Why would "New York: 1962–1964" distingiush the two—and why would a black-run gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, Just Above Midtown?

Are no two snowflakes alike? Maybe not, but "The Keeper" has no end of collections to make you wonder, including thousands of photographs and teddy bears from Ydessa Hendeles, like a cultural history from Hanne Darboven.

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.

What caused Jackson Pollock to think big? Peggy Guggenheim and Mural take Pollock away from the easel, while "Knotted, Torn, Scattered" takes sculpture off the wall.

The Korean Media Arts Festival and Sara Cwynar span digital, neural, and human networks. Could Doug Aitken have captured them all in song?

Could American art be for everybody? Edith Halpert helped put it on the map, just as the women in "Labyrinth of Forms" were breaking through to abstraction.

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 architecture sustain a revolution? "Latin America in Construction" looks past such names as Oscar Niemeyer to a continent under construction, but photography still sees "The Light in Cuban Eyes."

Why did Cubism so love newsprint and the headlines? In the Leonard A. Lauder collection, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, and Pablo Picasso keep making news.

Do art galleries have a future? A panel on "Letting Go of Brick and Mortar" at Christie's featuring Nicole Klagsbrun, Jay Gorney, Josh Baer, and Richard Lehun looks at the alternatives.

Does New York still have room for life? "Life Between Buildings" and "Designing Peace" bring a touch of humanity and greenery, but Duke Riley does not need art to save New York waterways.

Dan Flavin collects the Hudson River School, Ellsworth Kelly draws plants, and Storm King Art Center explores its Hudson River landscape. Guess which show is called "Light and Landscape"?

Can architecture sustain a revolution? "Latin America in Construction" looks past such names as Oscar Niemeyer to a continent under construction, but photography still sees "The Light in Cuban Eyes."

Is your idea of real life Michelangelo or Duane Hanson? "Like Life" looks at seven hundred years of sculpture, color, and the body.

Can an atheist celebrate African religion in Communist Cuba? Belkis Ayón crosses dark borders, like Tania Bruguera and the Caribbean artists in "Liminal Spaces."

Could Korean art keep up with the pace of change in the 1960s? In performance, "Only the Young" can experiment, but the Met places contemporary Korean art in a deeper past, as "Lineages."

Remember when art took time? Simone Bailey, Janaye Brown, Claudia Joskowicz, Jorge Macchi, James Nares, Joseph Zito, and "Long Takes" experience the gallery and the brink of revolution in real time.

Can photographs break the silence? "Love Songs" and "Trust Me" capture fragments of intimacy, while Iiu Susiraja has a discomforting love affair with herself.

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.

Marcel Storr has his urban visions, but can outsider art find a home in the city? "Made in New York City" sees it there all along, while Keiran Brennan Hinton and Michael Gregory turn to interiors and landscapes.

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.

Can "Making Knowing" make the case for craft as art, even apart from fabric? For Samuel Levi Jones and Suzanne Jackson, raw materials speak for African American voices.

Museums are reopening after Covid-19, but is there no going back? "Making the Met" looks at back at the years since 1870 for a celebration.

Can abstract art accommodate diversity? "Making Space" looks at women in postwar abstraction, Kazuko Miyamoto looks back at Minimalism, and William T. Williams looks back as an African American.

For six months, New Yorkers experienced a modified house arrest, but could they even begin to understand life in prison? "Marking Time" and James (Yaya) Hough speak out against mass incarceration.

Did art have to choose between color-field painting and Minimalism? "The Fullness of Color," "Marking Time" (a different show), Larry Zox, and Rob de Oude have their doubts.

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.

Are blacks and felons the "Unnamed Figures" of American folk art? Not for "Marvels of My Own Inventiveness," Ray Materson, and Joe Coleman.

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.

Was J. P. Morgan as collector expressing his scholarship and pieta or just showing off? His wealth appears in "Morgan's Bibles" alongside "Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality," but his librarian, Belle da Costa Green, had the last word.

What was medieval time? With an assist from the Master of Catherine of Cleves and Jean Poyer, "Now and Forever" and "Medieval Monsters" step out of time and space.

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.

Can an older medium make it new? Paul Gauguin and "Medium as Muse: Woodcuts and the Modern Book" experiment with prints and the modern.

Is the Met Breuer on Madison Avenue still the Whitney? It may look familiar, in architecture by Marcel Breuer, but it has such challenges to a canon of American art as Nasreen Mohamedi.

Is the Met finished with Marcel Breuer? With "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible," opening the museum's presence on Madison Avenue as the Met Breuer, it sees art itself as a work in progress.

Amid all the noise and gestures, can art still think small? The Morgan Library displays contemporary drawings "By Any Means," while "Microwave" puts scale to the test, and Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François imagine what is left when so much else has washed away.

Can the Chinese artists in "Mirror Image" really expect open doors, and can Refik Anadol really see MoMA in his machine dreams? Maybe not, but the video art in "Visionary Legacies" at the Asia Society was there well before.

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.

Before there was a Glass House, there was the Maison de Verre. So why is Pierre Chareau so little known, and what does that say about "The Modern Interior"?

Did magazine photography diminish art? For "Modern Look," it was a collaboration with an industry that asked only to "astonish me," but Gordon Parks had his doubts.

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.

What was the human cost of Nazi-looted art? Edmund de Waal and the Ephrussi family remember, while the Neue Galerie looks to its collection with "Modern Worlds."

Thanks to Yoshio Taniguchi, MoMA's 2004 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?

Can Diller Scofidio + Renfro rescue the Museum of Modern Art for the permanent collection? MoMA's 2019 expansion banks on diversity and installation art, as "Surrounds."

Is the woman holding the void by Alberto Giacometti begging for attention? MoMA's 2019 expansion certainly is, and so is Faurschou New York, where a dealer and collector has museum aspirations.

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? "Monuments for the USA" seeks a nation worth remembering.

Can summer sculpture survive a lockdown? The 2019 Socrates Annual offers a brief escape from Covid-19, before Héctor Zamora and "Monuments Now" with Jeffrey Gibson kick in.

What does architecture have to do with blackness? "Reconstruction: Architecture and Blackness in America" sees black towers as a site of freedom, while "Monuments Now" with Jeffrey Gibson expands into the community.

Think struggling artists have it bad? After gentrification and displacement, Nicole Awai, Julie Becker, Devin Kenny, Ebony G. Patterson, and the artists in residence in Harlem in "MOOD" seek a place to call home.

Does a collector need good taste? The Eveillard gift to the Morgan keeps things plain and disciplined, while the Moore gift brings a visit from the Dutch.

Did the Great Migration carry African Americans north to freedom? A museum sees instead "A Movement in Every Direction," while William Christenberry and RaMell Ross keep returning to Hale County, Alabama.

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 should you see at the art fairs? At the 2016 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, and Volta, not to mention Art New York, Art in Context, NADA, and more, whatever you like.

Have the art fairs made galleries a thing of the past? With the 2017 Armory Show, Volta, the Independent, NADA, Moving Image, Frieze, the AIPAD Photography Show, and more, the pressure is on.

Are exhibitions recovering women artists? "Radical Women" in Latin American art, Juanita McNeely, and "Multiply Identify Her" took the initiative.

To quote Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite useless." But is it "Useless," like a classic video by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, or science fiction, like the Latin American art in "Mundos Alternos"?

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.

Has summer sculpture swooped in—or just a drone by Sam Durant? It encounters culture change and climate change with "The Musical Brain," Guadalupe Maravilla, Maya Lin, Melvin Edwards, and "Re:Growth."

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

Frederic Leighton and "Mystical Symbolism" had death on their mind. Could they bring a taste for high fashion, sex, and the spiritual to modern art?

Can there be a place for fast art? The 2014 Armory Show demands it, while Volta, Frieze, Pulse, NADA, and new competitors are fighting for space.

Can the 2015 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, NADA, the Governors Island Arts Fair, the Governors Island Arts Fair, and other fairs see past contemporary art to history? At Volta, Travis Somerville remembers a lynching.

Have the art fairs made galleries a thing of the past? With the 2017 Armory Show, Volta, the Independent, NADA, Moving Image, Frieze, the AIPAD Photography Show, and more, the pressure is on.

Do we really need art fairs? Maybe, but only because the 2020 Armory Show, the ADAA Art Show, Volta, Scope, Spring Break, the Independent, NADA, and Frieze all meet different needs.

Even before the 2022 Armory Show, Frieze returns, scaled back but more inclusive. Can the Independent, NADA, and Volta still offer an alternative?

Are the art fairs growing or shrinking? Frieze, I-54, Volta, NADA, and the Independent keep their post-Covid scale for 2023 but aim big.

What defines conservative art—an accessible artist, an academy of fine art, or a sober realist at home in one? The 2006 National Academy Annual emerges from 181 years of torpor and Bo Bartlett, Victor Burgin, and Alina Grasmann from the American tradition.

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.

For "Nature," the 2019 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, as for "Figuring the Floral" at Wave Hill, "nature is the ultimate guide." But are they true to design, to science, or to nature?

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.

Can art keep up? With "Art Happens Here," Rhizome brings its Net Art Anthology to the Web and a museum, while "New Order" finds a material side to art and technology.

Can art be too smart for its own good, and what about too beautiful? Scott Reeder and "New Photography 2013," including Eileen Quinlan, pull off both, and they are not alone.

Can photographers still love photography? "New Photography 2015" is stuck in an age of irony, but "Photo-Poetics" finds poetry in the photographic object.

Can art embrace politics without falling prey to jargon? The artists in "Songs for Sabotage," "New Photography 2018," and "Scenes from the Collection" at the Jewish Museum strike back.

Photography goes global, and so does Queens. What memories will "New Photography 2023" preserve of Lagos, An-My Lê of Vietnam, Tracey Rose of South Africa, and Aliza Nisenbaum of Corona?

Can a history of modern photography get along without men? It can if it looks behind the camera to "The New Women."

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

Is there a politics of postmodern architecture? "9 + 1 Ways of Being Political" finds mostly dystopias and unfinished business, but Henri Labrouste helped create modern Paris by opening architecture to the public long ago.

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?

Does Ernst Haas take photography close to abstraction? The photographers in "AND/ALSO" and the prints in "Nothing Is So Humble" still grapple with its claims to truth and to art.

What was medieval time? With an assist from the Master of Catherine of Cleves and Jean Poyer, "Now and Forever" and "Medieval Monsters" step out of time and space.

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.

What was art like twenty years ago, in a time of celebrity, poverty, Postmodernism, and AIDS? "NYC 1993" sees only sex and death.

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?

What do you remember of political art, the headlines or the images? "Off the Record" remembers the anger and the irony, while Gregg Bordowitz maintains them in the face of AIDS today.

Danh Vo went from boat person to a treasurer of family and collective memories. Can he still return to Vietnam—and can the artists in "One Hand Clapping," including Cao Fei, find serenity?

What does it take for drawings to keep up with the present? "100 Drawings from Now" finds upheaval and isolation, while the Jack Shear collection has still more drawings but a lean sensibility.

Could Korean art keep up with the pace of change in the 1960s? In performance, "Only the Young" can experiment, but the Met places contemporary Korean art in a deeper past, as "Lineages."

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.

How will climate remake a port city? "On the Waterfront," curated by Maddy Rosenberg, maps Brooklyn, while Wave Hill and Lovid see a more idyllic or high-tech Hudson.

Does the state of the art lie in the city or in solitude? The Shed reaches out with "Open Call 2021," while the New Museum Triennial, as "Soft Water, Hard Stone," may yet wear resistance away.

Does diversity demand a clamor of voices or only a cacophony? "Open Call 2023" and four shows at the Queens Museum ask for both.

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.

Was Minimalism quintessentially American? With such artists as Lygia Clark, "Other Primary Structures" builds on a legendary exhibition to see it as global, while "Supports/Surfaces" follows it to France.

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.

Does found the future of abstract art lie in "chromatic figuration"? "Overflow, Afterglow" thinks so, but Yto Barrada, Hasani Sahlehe, and Patrick Wilson know when to look back.

Can a dead civilization live on in contemporary art? With "Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay," Manuel Mendive, and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, the peoples of the Americas survive in a continuous chain of the living.

Did European painting start afresh in Mexico City and the United States? For "Painted in Mexico" and Washington for Antonio Canova, an world is dying, and a new world is unable to be born.

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.

Has summer sculpture run up against a brick wall? Maybe in Socrates Sculpture Park, but not for Pierre Huyghe, Tatiana Trouvé, and "Panorama."

Can art trace the materials of a life? The artists in residence in "Pass, Carry, Hold," Paula Wilson, Virginia Overton, and Leonardo Drew step off the wall.

Is there something queer about nature? Wave Hill runs into "Perfect Trouble," while Mark Armijo McKnight counts the seconds.

Can social media turn art into action? "Perpetual Revolution" ditches photography for the latest upload and Catpc for African chocolate.

Did postwar abstraction find room for women? "Perseverance" thinks so, while Zipora Fried connects and extends the dots, and Jane Swavely zips things up.

Does Latin American art for Daniel Lind-Ramos all go back to an old storyteller? The Phelps de Cisneros collection has its "Chosen Memories."

Can a major museum expansion slip in through the back door? Frank Gehry does at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with new galleries, new architecture, and Teresita Fernández.

If self-taught photography were outsider art, would Instagram be the largest outsider art fair ever? "Photo Brut" and Gary Burnley bring out slippery notions of photography, outsider art, and European and American tradition.

Is photography a window onto the world or "A World of Its Own"? MoMA revists its collection as a history of photography in the studio, in the tradition of "The Photographic Object."

Can "Photography's Last Century" claim the century for staged photographs and a mystery theater? Dora Kallmus, or Madame d'Ora, found herself obliged to drop the poses.

Can photographers still love photography? "New Photography 2015" is stuck in an age of irony, but "Photo-Poetics" finds poetry in the photographic object.

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 Governors Island Art Fair just wants artist space.

Must the subject of a photograph be able to look you in the face? "The Shape of Things" finds an inwardness in things and "The Poetics of Place" only lost origins.

What lies between the covers of fine binding? The Laubespine-Villeroy library unfolds "Poetry and Patronage," Barbara Wolff the Book of Ruth.

Is the revival of abstraction excess or enigma? "Pour," Trudy Benson, Canan Talon, and others pour it on.

When did Modernism become propaganda? "The Power of Pictures" follows early Soviet photography, including including El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, but earlier still Alfred Stieglitz joined photojournalism and experiment.

When did collecting become scholarship? Some might say with Pierre-Jean Mariette in drawings, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in posters and prints for MoMA, or the founding of the Met's print department and "The Power of Prints."

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.

Can architecture transform a city—or the world? South Asian architects after 1947 pursued "The Project of Independence," while Chinese architects today address climate change with "Renew Reuse Recycle."

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.

With his Circus Sideshow, did Georges Seurat capture a tawdry spectacle or the theater of modern life? Unlike for Claude Monet and others in "Public Parks, Private Gardens," this is no Sunday walk in the park.

The International Center of Photography opens its new home on the Bowery with "Public, Private, Secret"—but which will it be? As with Julieta Aranda, it is getting harder and harder to say.

Can art look behind Manhattan to revitalize New York? "Civic Action" has a vision for Long Island City, while "Puddle, Pothole, Portal" opens an expanded SculptureCenter.

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.

Can there be a place for fast art? The 2014 Armory Show demands it, while Volta, Frieze, Pulse, NADA, and new competitors are fighting for space.

What should you see at the art fairs? At the 2016 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, and Volta, not to mention Art New York, Art in Context, NADA, and more, whatever you like.

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?

Is folk art, Caribbean art, or African art obsessed with dying? John Dunkley works between day and night and Paa Joe between coffins and castles, while "Race, Myth, Art, and Justice" shares secrets.

Is a show of black performance art unfair to African Americans? Adrian Piper passes on it, and "Rituals of Rented Island" turns to Soho, but "rAdicAl preEsEncE" makes better sense of history.

Are exhibitions recovering women artists? "Radical Women" in Latin American art, Juanita McNeely, and "Multiply Identify Her" took the initiative.

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.

With Rain Room and Random International, is the art of artificial lights now just a light show? Laddie John Dill, Santiago Taccetti, and Leo Villareal mirror the darkness.

Can appropriation ruin Cindy Sherman or entire neighborhoods? James Franco and Urs Fischer treat it as the privilege of wealth, but "The Real Estate Show" and Shelley Reed look to a more savvy past.

What distinguishes American Surrealism, and does it come down to Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, or neither one? The Whitney calls it "Real/Surreal."

Did Virgil Abloh abandon the street? Knobkerry had a community store to match its East Village styles, but not the product photography in "The Real Thing."

Can art recreate nature? Hilary Lorenz, David McQueen, John Newsom, Tom Pnini, "Recapturing the Scenic Wilds," and Wave Hill settle for museums of natural history.

Will the revolution be televised? It already has been—and turned into video art with "Signals" and AI with "Refigured."

Paolo Veronese did not go to Murano for the glass. What does that say about "Relative Values" and the cost of Renaissance art?

The Whitney calls a show of abstract art "Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Painting and Drawing." With Julie Mehretu and, in the galleries, Ingrid Calame, and Jean-Paul Riopelle need one even think of abstract art as painting and drawing?

Did the Renaissance and Neoclassicism aim for rationality and perfection? With Antonio Canova, David d'Angers, and "Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes" by Andrea Riccio and others, sculpture goes to extremes that anticipate Romanticism and today.

For a Renaissance artist, the sculpture garden of Lorenzo de' Medici was the place to be. Could its curator, Bertoldo di Giovanni, have influenced Michelangelo, and what of "The Renaissance of Etching"?

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.

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?

Barbara Wolff and "Repetition and Difference," with help from Gilles Deleuze, find nature's and art's abundance in Jewish tradition. Between contemporary art and the past, who has changed whom?

Could there be a traditional Japanese art of Minimalism? "Requiem for the Sun" recreates the art of Mono-ha and Lee Ufan, decades before Lara Favaretto combines Minimalism, pop culture, and self-involvement.

Did Surrealism anticipate the Twilight Zone? "Revolution of the Eye," with help from Stan VanDerBeek, claims the influence of modern art on early American television.

If "The Revolutionary Impulse" shows the Russian avant-garde as open to anything, Francis Picabia went from abstraction to Dada, Surrealism, fascism, and back. Was he postmodern before his time or the Zelig of modern art?

Is a show of black performance art unfair to African Americans? Adrian Piper passes on it, and "Rituals of Rented Island" turns to Soho, but "rAdicAl preEsEncE" makes better sense of history.

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.

Must Jewish collectors stay true to their heritage? The Sassoons cultivated portraits by John Singer Sargent and friends in high places, while the Newman Foundation sees Barnett Newman in art today.

Should Klaus Biesenbach step down as MoMA's chief curator at large? Christian Viveros-Fauné thinks so, even as the museum boasts of its future with "Scenes for a New Heritage."

Can art embrace politics without falling prey to jargon? The artists in "Songs for Sabotage," "New Photography 2018," and "Scenes from the Collection" at the Jewish Museum strike back.

In an age of blockbusters, what is left for the small museum? It can partner with others, like the Scottish National Gallery at the Frick, or focus on its collection, like The Crusader Bible at the Morgan Library.

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

Is there no place like home? Two summer group shows disagree, but others take art into "Screenscapes" and to France for Supports/Surfaces.

Can art look behind Manhattan to revitalize New York? "Civic Action" has a vision for Long Island City, while "Puddle, Pothole, Portal" opens an expanded SculptureCenter.

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

Who has the right to abstraction? "Searching the Sky for Rain" puts it in question, but Paul Loughney, Julia Rommel, and Richard Roth demonstrate its diversity.

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.

As the fashion for posthumous portraits in America in "Securing the Shadow" came to a close, George Caleb Bingham kept looking past Missouri or even the Hudson River School. Why, then, did he keep returning to life on the river?

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.

Was there ever so self-conscious an art as German and Austrian Expressionism? "The Self-Portrait," from Egon Schiele to Max Beckmann, helps rescue the self-aware from self-conceit, while George Grosz sees in the Weimar Republic an eclipse of the sun.

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?

Once abstract art had to be big, bold, and what else? Sonia Gechtoff felt herself drawn to the sea and Naotaka Hiro to canvas, so much that he stuck his arms right through it, while the Guggenheim with "Sensory Poetics" is still collecting a generation of abstraction.

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 the subject of a photograph be able to look you in the face? "The Shape of Things" finds an inwardness in things and "The Poetics of Place" only lost origins.

Was a woman the first known author? "She Who Wrote" recovers Mesopotamian women for today, while the Met's new galleries for Cycladic art look back almost as far.

Paul Paiement brings illusion to sun-baked hills, while Hilary Pecis brings patterning and the comforts of home, in what the Whitney calls "Shifting Landscapes." Which is the real landscape and the real American West?

What stands between text art and land art? With Michelle Stuart, Mark Lyon, and "Sight Reading," photography is reaching for the stars.

Will the revolution be televised? It already has been—and turned into video art with "Signals" and AI with "Refigured."

Does action painting still mean American art or even abstraction? In a new look at their permanent collections, two museums find "Art of Another Kind," in Europe, and "Signs & Symbols."

Was there more to Jay DeFeo than The Rose? Maybe so, as a kind of lifelong "Sinister Pop."

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.

Can older art sustain new and trendy themes? The Met's Skylight Project sheds light on Pieter Bruegel and European painting.

The Claude Master illuminated tiny manuscripts, and seven contemporary artists might have learned from him. So which is in "Miracles in Miniature" and which is "Small"?

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

Can private architecture thrive on public access, and can emerging artists live up to the challenge of site-specific art? The 2018 Governors Island Art Fair and the 2018 Socrates Annual find them learning the hard way, but the Ford Foundation by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo still brings the outside in.

Can summer sculpture survive a lockdown? The 2019 Socrates Annual offers a brief escape from Covid-19, before Héctor Zamora and "Monuments Now" with Jeffrey Gibson kick in.

For schools in a pandemic, why not hold class outdoors? Hugh Hayden and the 2021 Socrates Annual take desks, trees, and sculpture to New York's parks.

Does the state of the art lie in the city or in solitude? The Shed reaches out with "Open Call 2021," while the New Museum Triennial, as "Soft Water, Hard Stone," may yet wear resistance away.

Can art embrace politics without falling prey to jargon? The artists in "Songs for Sabotage," "New Photography 2018," and "Scenes from the Collection" at the Jewish Museum strike back.

When images of dignity collide ugly reality, which is the winner? Charles White feels "a special responsibility," while "Soul of a Nation" confronts African American abstraction with Black Power.

Heard melodies are sweet, but are unheard melodies really sweeter? "Soundings: A Contemporary Score" hears mostly white noise, "The String and the Mirror" mostly thought itself.

Can paint still have an impact? Adolph Gottlieb in the 1950s and color in the 1960s were "Spilling Over."

What do art and the urban experience have in common, other than real-estate values? "Sprawl 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.

Do libraries have a future after books? The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library and Hunters Point Community Library give it a go.

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.

Dan Flavin collects the Hudson River School, Ellsworth Kelly draws plants, and Storm King Art Center explores fills its Hudson River landscape. Guess which show is called "Light and Landscape"?

Has summer sculpture left the parks behind? With Orly Genger, Ugo Rondinone, "do it (outside)," and Thomas Houseago at Storm King Art Center it becomes the fabric of New York.

With his date paintings and ephemera, On Kawara takes a long time to get to today. Like the "Storylines" that follow him at the Guggenheim, was he in search of painting, his time, or himself?

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.

Heard melodies are sweet, but are unheard melodies really sweeter? "Soundings: A Contemporary Score" hears mostly white noise, "The String and the Mirror" mostly thought itself.

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."

Is there no place like home? Two summer group shows disagree, but others take art into "Screenscapes" and to France for Supports/Surfaces.

What does it take to fill the expanded MoMA? "Sur Moderno" journeys from Latin America to abstraction, Pope.L crawls more than its length, and Betye Saar looks through a black girl's window.

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.

When artists everywhere have their nightmares, is it still a movement? "Surrealism Beyond Borders," Leonora Carrington, and "Surrealism in Mexico" keep dreaming.

Is "Surround Audience" at the New Museum the new-media triennial or political? With help from Ryan Trecartin, it may just have a short attention span, but Wynne Greenwood keeps her music video going for a lot longer.

Can Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler rescue the Museum of Modern Art for the permanent collection? MoMA's 2019 expansion banks on diversity and installation art, as "Surrounds."

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.

Is there art you cannot even give away? "Take Me (I'm Yours)," featuring Christian Boltanski, treats relational esthetics as a gift—but a yard sale by Kai Althoff is not giving anything away.

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" and Andreas Gursky 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.

Are the oil fires still burning? "Theater of Operations" hammers home two Gulf Wars, while "Waiting for Omar Gatlato" expands the theater of operations to Algiers?

For Robert Storr, does conceptual art embody 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 anything hold a summer group show together? It could be "This Is What Sculpture Looks Like" or a style.

Is there more to African American culture than divas and mass incarceration? Jamaal Peterman and "This Longing Vessel" have their doubts, but Garrett Bradley recovers a century-old film history.

Can photography see through barriers between people? Frédéric Brenner brings twelve photographers to "This Place," in the Middle East, where Shimon Attie works as well, while John Akomfrah finds poignancy in the migration across continents.

Does a dog have a Buddha nature? Maybe not, but "Chinese Painting and Calligraphy" and the Cowles collection of Japanese art have their "Three Perfections."

Is art photography's elephant in the living room? It is for the 2022 AIPAD Photography Show, much like dance for Sam Contis and "Time Management Techniques" for photographers today.

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.

Will entropy reduce art and humanity alike to dust? Ed Atkins watches it happen, while emerging artists find themselves in "Total Disbelief," and Al Taylor picks up the remains from the street.

Are we there yet? A utopia is literally a no place, but postwar architecture in Yugoslavia moved "Toward a Concrete Utopia"—much as Bodys Isek Kingelez had city dreams in Central Africa.

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?

Did Modernism end oceans apart? "Transmissions" traces art and the Cold War from Eastern Europe to Latin America, while Zhang Hongtu breaches walls in China and New York.

Amalia Mesa-Bains and Chicana feminism look beyond domesticity, even as La Trienal 2024 crosses borders to return home. Can "Domesticanx" still start at home?

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

Chinese art and early Buddhist art in India exchange power for the pleasure of contemplation. Do "Companions in Solitude" and "Tree and Serpent" find it in art or nature?

Is gender a fluid concept or a fog machine for art? "Trigger" sees gender as a tool and a weapon, while "Found" combines queer archaeology with queer abstraction.

Can photographs break the silence? "Love Songs" and "Trust Me" capture fragments of intimacy, while Iiu Susiraja has a discomforting love affair with herself.

Is art just another show of wealth? "Tudor England" may think so, for all the skill of Hans Holbein the Younger, while Rosalba Carriera and Nicolas Party make the most of Rococo pomposity and piety.

In Renaissance Italy, "Concinnitas" stood for beauty as a "skillful joining." Could that include the "Twisted Data" of art, mathematics, and science—or stock trades for Sarah Meyohas?

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.

Are Latin America and the north "Under the Same Sun"? Doris Salcedo and others find themselves caught between terror and the everyday—or between "tropical sensibility" and "modernities."

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.

Can suburbia and the Third World learn from Modernism's ideal city? "Uneven Growth" compares six global megacities, while "Foreclosed" engineers the American dream.

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.

Is the Met finished with Marcel Breuer? With "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible," opening the museum's presence on Madison Avenue as the Met Breuer, it sees art itself as a work in progress.

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?

Are blacks and felons the "Unnamed Figures" of American folk art? Not for "Marvels of My Own Inventiveness," Ray Materson, and Joe Coleman.

What happens when hoary museums take over displays of emerging artists? With "Greater New York 2015" at MoMA PS1 and "Unorthodox" at the Jewish Museum, they start to emerge from the dead.

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.

To quote Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite useless." But is it "Useless," like a classic video by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, or science fiction, like the Latin American art in "Mundos Alternos"?

Does art lead right to the gift shop? "The Value of Good Design" hardly minds if it does, but architecture, design, and science together can still hope to repair a "Broken Nature."

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

Is the Guggenheim's vision gone for good? "Visionaries" looks back to Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay, and creating a modern Guggenheim, while Maurizio Cattelan brings a tawdrier gold toilet.

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," Mark di Suvero, and Jaume Plensa.

Can contemporary art still still leave the mark of the artist? "What It Becomes" looks for it in self-portraits, "Vital Signs" in the artist's body.

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.

Can there be a place for fast art? The 2014 Armory Show demands it, while Volta, Frieze, Pulse, NADA, and new competitors are fighting for space.

Can the 2015 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, NADA, and other fairs see past contemporary art to history? At Volta, Travis Somerville remembers a lynching.

What should you see at the art fairs? At the 2016 Armory Show, the Independent, Pulse, Moving Image, and Volta, not to mention Art New York, Art in Context, NADA, and more, whatever you like.

Do we really need art fairs? Maybe, but only because the 2020 Armory Show, the ADAA Art Show, Volta, Scope, Spring Break, the Independent, NADA, and Frieze all meet different needs.

Even before the 2022 Armory Show, Frieze returns, scaled back but more inclusive. Can the Independent, NADA, and Volta still offer an alternative?

Are the art fairs growing or shrinking? Frieze, I-54, Volta, NADA, and the Independent keep their post-Covid scale for 2023 but aim big.

"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?

Is it unfair to contemporary art to compare it to Mannerism—or unfair to Mannerism? Jerry Saltz and Peter Schjeldahl look beyond Neo-Mannerism, while the Wagner collection makes contemporary art look all the more mannered.

Are the oil fires still burning? "Theater of Operations" hammers home two Gulf Wars, while "Waiting for Omar Gatlato" expands the theater of operations to Algiers?

Has the Met forgotten ""Water Scarcity" and its own "Water Memories"? Native Americans cannot, and the land for Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas has its claims, too.

Can art recreate nature? Hilary Lorenz, David McQueen, John Newsom, Tom Pnini, "Recapturing the Scenic Wilds," and Wave Hill settle for museums of natural history.

How does a photographer capture the decisive moment? For Mark Steinmetz, by waiting for lightning to strike, while Hans Breder takes photography from Surrealism to body art and Ana Mendieta, and "We Are Here" finds it on the street.

Is there a point of intersection between African American and Jewish Art? With "We Fight to Build a Free World," Jonathan Horowitz fights the good fight, but Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson see American politics as the scene of a crime.

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

Can contemporary art still still leave the mark of the artist? "What It Becomes" looks for it in self-portraits, "Vital Signs" in the artist's body.

"When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South" comes close to identifying African American art with outsider art. Can "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties" bring things back to politics and to caring?

Has American art found its way home? In his last years, Marsden Hartley tried to remake himself as the painter of Maine, and now the Whitney rehangs its collection as "Where We Are."

If art is "fluid" and "permeable," will it have nowhere to stand? You may find out in the politically charged 2024 Whitney Biennial.

The 2022 Whitney Biennial is "Quiet as It's Kept"? Why, then, do the loud creative voices keep coming?

Whether in anger or pain, the 2019 Whitney Biennial looks for reassurance. Is it the well-meaning biennial?

The 2017 Whitney Biennial makes the case for youth and diversity. Is it political art or a dance marathon.

Does a white woman have the right to portray the death of Emmett Till? Dana Schutz stirs controversy at the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Is this really its last on Madison Avenue? The lifeless 2014 Whitney Biennial looks back, but not to the museum or to the course of American art.

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 does that say about the dual role 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?

Is photography a window onto the world or "A World of Its Own"? MoMA revists its collection as a history of photography in the studio, in the tradition of "The Photographic Object."

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" While "World War I and the Visual Arts" breaks the silence, "An Incomplete History of Protest" assigns political art a grade of incomplete.

Was the architecture of Louis I. Kahn about concrete and stone or light, space, and sky? Years after his death, FDR Four Freedoms Park and the expanded Yale University Art Gallery speak to both.

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

Can portrait photography find room for so many people? They could be "Your Mirror," the lost souls never far from Alec Soth, or "Ghosts."

Tired of art movements, and wish you could reset to Zero? Yet that, too, was a movement, including Heinz Mack and in a valuable parallel to Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in Iran, with painting and kinetic art that recall all too well the 1960s and 1970s.

jhaber@haberarts.com