Special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art through May 14.

Whenever I see Diego Rivera’s distinctive art, my first thought is always to wonder once again why Nelson Rockefeller thought he’d be happy with one of Rivera’s murals in Rockefeller Center. Not only were Rivera’s socialist beliefs well known (he was a founding member of Mexico’s Communist party!), they inform virtually all of his work, so why in the world would the scion of one of the United States’ most famous capitalist families expect his own vision of “Man at the Crossroads” (the assigned subject) to be compatible with Rivera’s?!*

Rockefeller’s naïveté and arrogance become even funnier when you see the murals that brought Rivera to New York in the first place. Because so much of the internationally renowned artist’s work was fixed to the site of its creation, the fledgling Museum of Modern Art invited Rivera to create relatively portable murals at the museum itself. When he arrived, he created five frescoes with Mexican subject matter and three directly inspired by his visit to New York, and all of them deal with revolution, laborers, or inequality.

In short, nothing about the murals screams, “I belong in your family’s art deco temple of capitalism!”—except, of course, the fact that they’re beautiful and striking and bold. And in that the murals exemplify Rivera. His artistry is such that any fair observer would have to recognize it, but that artistry cannot be separated from Rivera’s political perspective any more than Bach’s St. John Passion can be separated from its liturgical foundation. That impassioned point of view is part of what makes the art so affecting and meaningful in the first place.

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Special exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., through May 13.

This past weekend, Sean and I visited Washington, D.C., a relatively spur-of-the-moment trip inspired in part by Sean’s desire to see the new Art of Video Games exhibit at the American Art Museum. Frankly, we were both a bit disappointed in that exhibit, which was diverting enough but shallow and predictable.* Later, though, we visited another Smithsonian art museum on little more than a whim and were absolutely enchanted with the featured exhibit there.

The irony was that Suprasensorial is an exhibit of art explicitly described in the literature as “accessible,” rejecting the “exclusivity and elitism of the art world”—a philosophy that the Video Games curators no doubt had in mind as well. And yet Suprasensorial was far more compelling, beautiful and evocative and unusually emotional for abstract art. It was a reminder that accessible doesn’t necessarily indicate lowest-common-denominator work.** At its best, accessible describes something elemental, something universal, something worth aspiring to.

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Special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art through June 11.

At first glance, artist Cindy Sherman, who first leapt to prominence in the 1970s, seems to have anticipated today’s endlessly self-photographing, narcissistic culture because she, too, photographs herself. Just as many people now constantly capture images of themselves and curate entire galleries of them online, the MoMA’s retrospective of Sherman’s art features Sherman’s face in all but a handful of the photographs.

And yet that’s misleading, for though Sherman is the model for her photographs, she’s never the subject. Before she ever snaps a photo, Sherman the artist has costumed and styled herself to create a character, often to such an extent that Sherman the individual is unrecognizable. Her art is self-obscuring, not self-revealing—which is not to say that it lacks a point of view. Her perspective (like that of any artist) is definitely there. When you look at one of Sherman’s photographs, you’re not simply looking at her; you’re simultaneously looking at her and at not-her and through her eyes, and that strange paradox is part of what makes her work so fascinating.

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Second edition of the Guggenheim Museum’s stillspotting nyc project.

Despite what many non–New York residents think, there actually are quiet, serene places in New York City (I’m partial to the North Woods in Central Park), but frankly, I don’t think the financial district is the best place to look for them. Arriving in Battery Park to visit the first “stillspot” selected by the architectural firm Snøhetta to provide a space that “transports visitors from the hustle and bustle of the streetscape to an elevated urban experience that makes them newly aware of their sense of hearing,” I was skeptical. And that skepticism never quite dissipated. The five To a Great City stillspots vary dramatically in their transportive ability, and the journeys from one to the next are somewhat exhausting.

But then the work concludes with a final stillspot so spectacular that the inadequacies of the previous ones seem irrelevant. In retrospect, I have a niggling suspicion that the show’s creators knew that would be the case and didn’t bother overmuch with the first four, and that makes me feel a little bit cheap. I can’t work up too much indignation, though—not when the memory of that fifth stillspot is so glorious.

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Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 7.

One can easily imagine the late designer Alexander McQueen as a painter or a sculptor. His artistic point of view is so strong that it seems to transcend the medium; it could work elsewhere. At the same time, one of the best things about his work is the craftsmanship itself: the embrace of his particular medium and the impeccable, intricate construction of each piece.

Walking through the Met’s retrospective of McQueen’s too-short career, one is dazzled by both the grand vision and the finely wrought detail, and I think it’s that—the union of stunning creativity and stunning technique—that makes his work fit in so well in an art museum. It’s what makes this art.

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Special exhibition at Discovery Times Square through September 5.

The famous maxim has it that tragedy plus time equals comedy, but comedy isn’t the only yield of that equation. You also get a ghoulish sort of wonder. Sure, if you choose to imagine what it might have been like in the Roman city of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE—if you truly contemplate the violent tremors and the widespread fires and the blackened sky—the event becomes almost unbearably grim. But why do that? With a few steps and more than nineteen centuries back, it’s not grim so much as fascinating: a thriving city preserved like a mosquito in amber. It’s incredible.

So I admit I half resented Discovery Times Square’s exhibit on Pompeii for rattling my sense of distance. I was happiest marveling at the artifacts of daily Roman life and reading over the scientific descriptions of the volcano eruption, but the exhibit seemed determined to strip me of my intellectualized stance. The famous plaster casts of the volcano’s victims are heartbreakingly detailed up close. You can see the faces contorted in fear, the hands grasping for loved ones, and in a dark room, with an eerie white noise filling your ears, the humanity of those victims and the horror they endured feels uncomfortably present. The effect is powerful—and appropriate, I suppose—but nonetheless, I missed my academic aloofness.

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Special exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden through April 25.

When you enter the conservatory for the New York Botanical Garden’s annual orchid show, you’re directed first through the permanent exhibition of desert and rainforest habitats—the latter of which is augmented with extra orchids for the occasion. In a lesser garden, this might be a drag, but the permanent exhibition is stunning, packed with plants so colorful and dramatic and unusual that they look unreal. Viewing the orchids in this context, with the accompanying literature, also provides some sense of how they fit into the natural world, clinging to the branches of a tree or huddled, small and secret, on the forest floor. Amid their native compatriots, the flowers seem all the more precious for being uncultivated and wild, not tame hothouse flowers but savage beauties, their grandeur innate in their bold colors and extravagant petals.

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Special installation at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of the White Light Festival through November 13.

The idea is so simple that it’s easy to underestimate. The installation divides the individual voices of a choir onto separate speakers that surround visitors as they listen to a performance of a sixteenth-century motet. One can sit in the center of the oval, awash in the music, or one can walk up to the speakers and hear the choir atomize back into individual voices. There’s not much to it.

Yet however simple an idea it is, multimedia artist Janet Cardiff executes it beautifully. For starters, choosing Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium was a stroke of genius. The motet features forty parts or, more precisely, eight quintets, with intricate polyphony both inside and among the fivesomes. At the center of the room, you hear the music moving around the oval, in front of you and behind you, introducing new ideas, echoing old ones, until suddenly all the voices sound at once in an almost overwhelming deluge of sound.

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Special exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum through January 9.

I think I would have guessed that romanticism is the more dangerous end on the classicism-romanticism continuum. Extreme romanticism has a perverse infatuation with insanity, mania, and death; extreme classicism … well, I probably would have brushed that off as mere cold rigidity about aesthetic formulae. No doubt that’s the casual assumption of one trained in music, where classicism really is that harmless, but after wandering through the Guggenheim’s exhibition on art in France, Italy, and Germany from 1918 to 1936 (alarm bells!), I feel rather stupid.

Not that everything in Chaos and Classicism is fascistic. Some artists were simply reacting to the destruction and horror of the first World War by turning back toward classical order and beauty. The literature associated with the exhibit makes this sound almost cowardly (“Rather than frank confrontation, a self-conscious forgetting determined many of the significant new forms of art”), but I think that’s unfair (and perhaps unintended). Some of Pablo Picasso’s neoclassic paintings, for example, are heartbreakingly lovely, and that kind of beauty holds its own sort of truth—a very different truth from something like Guernica, obviously, but an invaluable truth nonetheless.

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Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 31.

Truth be told, I went mainly for the view. The Met isn’t very tall—certainly not by New York City standards—but the building juts into Central Park, and from atop it, you can see the park in a stunning panorama, end to end, with the city skyline as a backdrop. That outlook makes the roof garden exhibits worth visiting under any circumstances, and Big Bambú, an enormous bamboo structure with walkable pathways that take you another forty feet up, seemed like an even better draw simply because it provides an even better view.

I was pleased to find, however, that Doug and Mike Starn’s grand construction is worth seeing for itself. The rooftop sometimes swallows up the art on display there, but Bambú is a site-specific work, and the open air and spectacular views feel like a part of it rather than an overwhelming frame. When you first step out of the stairwell onto the landing, you enter a small forest of bamboo, the stalks rising from the ground to support the structure above. From the side, you can see that the thousands of bamboo poles, bound together by nylon rope, actually take the shape of a cresting wave—a striking image against the blue sky above.

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