“Billboard”, painted by Grace Hartigan in 1957 and now in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where I saw it on a recent trip to the Twin Cities. Although Hartigan “officially” counts as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, what impressed me about this picture was how much it anticipated Pop art. Hartigan based it on a collage of Life magazine snippets that included ads for toothpaste and food shots. “I have found my subject,” she’s quoted as saying. “It concerns that which is vulgar and vital in American life, and possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful.” All true of the best Pop, except for that old-fashioned bit about transcendence.

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These images are by an Austrian artist named Kiki Kogelnik, who died in 1997. She had a stint in 1960s  New York, and is now showing at Simon Subal Gallery there. What interests me about her is that, even as she adopted the look of Pop Art, her content looked forward to feminist work of the 1980s and 90s. She was interested in the female body and how science and medicine touch it, and she sampled clinical imagery to get at her concerns. Of course, in the mostly male world of Pop, this was hardly a way to hit it big.

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Ai Weiwei goes uncuffed in this still from “Grass Mud Horse Style”, his cover version of the wildly viral “Gangnam Style” music video from Korea. As I argue in my piece on today’s Daily Beast, Ai turns the pop-culture original into an artful readymade, and uses it to speak about unchained creative freedom.

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The facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, completed in 2003 by Vito Acconci and Steven Holl, is still one of the most exciting built projects in New York. Today, Acconci was announced as Designer of the Year by organizers of the Design Miami fair – as you can read in my profile of him on the Daily Beast. Ever since 1988, when he quit performance art for design, Acconci’s central strategy has been to confuse inside and outside, top and bottom. That is, he wants to mess with the most basic architectural coordinates. The Storefront may be the best example of him doing just that.

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A show at Kerry Schuss gallery in New York collides new works by the excellent ceramic artist Beverly Semmes and somewhat older pieces by the untrained painter Freddie Brice (1920-1998). I’m pretty sure that most works by outsider artists only get their aesthetic worth once they have been shipped into the discourse of modern art – they are something like artistic readymades, closer to Duchamp’s bottlerack than to his “Nude Descending”. On the other hand, work from the Art Brut tradition where Semmes has her roots depends on outsider art for its inspiration – there’s some sense that artists like Semmes couldn’t exist without the example of the Brices of this world. I admire Schuss’s pairing, because it puts these tensions on view.

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Tony Smith’s “Source” reaches toward the ceiling at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. It’s a recent realization of a piece conceived by Smith in 1967, and displayed at the following year’s Documenta festival in Germany. Despite its bulk, my favorite thing about “Source” is that it can seem size-less: It is so much about the set of rules that dictate its shape that it would be the same piece as a desktop maquette or filling a skyscraper’s plaza. “Source” ends up feeling like an essentially virtual, Platonic, immaterial object. Even when you know it’s right before you, it could as easily be CGI. That makes it feel as much 2012 as 1967.

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These two photos by Elad Lassry are from his solo show called "Untitled (Presence)", running for a few more days at the Kitchen in New York. They get at Lassry's trademark amalgam of old and new styles, which has made him one of the most exciting artists to come along in the last decade. Sometimes Lassry seems to be channeling photographic manners from the past (as in the color picture at left) and sometimes he appropriates an image actually shot years ago (as seems to be the case with the black and white). It's all about how photos play out in the material world, but I'm still working out what exactly that means and why I care. But that's work I don't have to do with 99 per cent of the art I see.

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These two images were shot in 1978 by Daniel Joseph Martinez, an L.A. artist who’s gone on to be known for installation art with a strong political edge. They’re in a show of his early photos at Simon Preston Gallery in New York. I’m told that Martinez essentially infiltrated an early bodybuilding event, and got its contestants to pose for him as a “straight” photographer. They couldn’t know that his cropping and lighting would make them look like strangely artificial specimens, in a peculiar relationship with photographic art. Martinez’s shadows could almost come from Edward Weston, but instead of making the photos seem more abstract, they underline (almost literally) the images’ documentary strain. Of course, these photos also emphasize the artifice that lies behind documentation.

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“Five Doors II”, painted in 1967 by Gerhard Richter, sold at auction on Oct. 11 for a paltry $3.5 million, compared to a Richter abstraction from 1994 that sold the next day for $34.2 million, setting a record for any living artist.   I wrote about the Richter record on today’s Daily Beast, and argued that the abstraction fetched its price because it was so much less challenging that Richter’s earlier figuration, while still bearing his august name. (Although I’ve since found out it’s a kind of fake record: A Lucien Freud sold for more while he was alive, but because he has since died, that sale is being ignored. That is, the auction houses are defining the record as being for an artist alive now rather than for an artist alive at the time of the sale of his or her work.) What I left out of my Beast piece was any discussion of “Five Doors” as a work of art. Several expert sources, speaking like old-fashioned connoisseurs, dismissed it as weaker than Richter’s landmark photo-based paintings of the 1960s. I guess I can’t go to bat for “Five Doors” as a masterpiece, but I do think that its very oddness will some day have museums eager to have it, as an example of the range of Richter’s early experimentation. The late, sort-of-record-breaking abstraction is too much like other Richters of its moment to be especially preferred over them.

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Unlikely as it may seem, this 1942 reclining nude by Picasso is photographic—or at least that’s the conclusion I come to in this week’s Newsweek, where I take on the show called “Picasso Black and White”, now at the Guggenheim museum in New York. I don’t see how it’s possible to recognize how much the monochrome meant to Picasso, and not recognize some  reference to photography in all his blacks and grays and sepias. Think of Cubism as the greatest-ever Instagram filter.

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”At Work (Triple Portrait): Frida Kahlo” is a little work in oils by  Joe Fig, from his show called “Cinematic Paintings” at Cristin Tierney gallery in New York. Fig often makes art about the cliches we hold dear about art, and for this show he’s pulled moments out of artists’ biopics and rendered them in paint. I like the fact that his images are about the size of old Hollywood lobby cards. I also like how his standard illustrator’s technique stands for the artistic cliche that bold oil paint has become, piling bromide on bromide.

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The Beatles meet Ghaddafi and his peers, thanks to a new project by Michael Rakowitz, titled “The Breakup” and on view now at Lombard Freid Projects in New York. The objects in the show (including this collaged album cover) are mementos, almost, of a ten-part radio series that Rakowitz did for an art center in Jerusalem: He mashed up the story of the rise and fall of the great British band with the story of hopes, and hopes shattered, in the Middle East during the Beatles era. At Lombard Freid, I especially liked a video of the final moment in the Jerusalem project, in which aging Palestinian rockers played Beatles songs in a Middle Eastern style, on a rooftop overlooking the multi-confessional Dome of the Rock – echoed on-screen by shots of the Beatles’ last performance on a rooftop in London.

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This 3D map of China, made of wood salvaged from Qing Dynasty temples, is in the new Ai Weiwei survey at the Smithonian’s Hirshhorn Museum. I wrote about the show yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to address one crucial issue: Ai’s relationship to Chinese nationalism. Visiting China, you are struck, sometimes troubled, by sentiments you hear that come close to jingoism. I guess it’s not any  worse than some Americans’ flag-waving, but it feels more dangerous coming from a developing authoritarian state possibly poised for some kind of – soft power? – world domination. (Although look at its growing hard-power crisis over those islands off Japan). At any rate, given that almost everything Ai makes has some kind of explicitly Chinese content, I wonder if we should read it all as probing the idea of Sino-superiority – piling on so much Chinese-ness that it can’t quite read straight.

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This so-called “Madonna of the Magnificat” was painted in Florence around 1485 by Sandro Botticelli and his team. It’s from the deluxe collection of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, whom I profiled in the latest Newsweek. These days,  few billionaires venture into Old Master territory, so I’m impressed that Allen did. (He also owns the obligatory pictures by Monet and Rothko). I’m especially impressed with what an interesting Botticelli Allen got his hands on, since the sheer curvaceousness of this picture – the circle “thematized”, as an academic might say – makes it unusual. I’m sure there’s a good theological reading for it, but I want to dwell on how the image reflects on reflection. Curved “shaving” mirrors were a fabulous new technology at this moment in history, and Botticelli’s picture, with its weirdly swooping architecture, looks like it was painted from one. If art is supposed to hold a mirror to nature, as the cliche went even then, how better to demonstrate an artwork’s success than by depicting mirroring itself? And the only way to do so was to use a mirror whose signature distortions could be captured with your brush – a painting of a flat mirror image would, after all, simply look like any other picture. (I am not buying into David Hockney’s wacky “painting-with-lenses” theory, by the way, which has been utterly discredited by scholars.) 

Of course, if we’re looking into a mirror when we’re looking at this painting, that makes us the Virgin Mary that we see “reflected” in it. Want to bet that this panel, like many other circular pictures in Florence, was painted for a young mother or bride?

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This photograph is titled “Siberian Tiger”, and it’s from a series shot by artist Feng Mengbo in Shanghai’s natural history museum, and which is now on view at the for-profit Shanghai Gallery of Art. Feng is hardly the first artist to photograph old museum dioramas – Hiroshi Sugimoto beat him to it by several decades – but the subject has special resonance in China. On the one hand, the grossly decrepit museum could stand for the neglect of basic science education in Shanghai’s wealth-obsessed culture. On the other, the museum has a hugely colonial flavor, so its neglect can seem like a suitable revenge of the colonized. What does it mean for a Chinese tiger, stuffed by the English, to be left as moth-food today?

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