These are tight croppings from “Windows, Ponte City” and “Doors, Ponte City”, by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, now in  the International Center of Photography’s latest triennial, which previewed today. Curators are calling the show “A Different Kind of Order” – referencing the collapsing verities of photographic art, and of the worlds it points to. The triennial gives an excellent overview of the vast range of “lens-based” work being made today, from “straight” views of people living with the world’s rising waters (by Gideon Mendel) to distinctly arty, hand-made objects that use photos as art supplies (by art-world regulars Wangechi Mutu and Huma Bhabha). In between are projects like “Ponte City”, which is based in photography’s ability to document the world but doesn’t simply take it for granted. Subotzky and Waterhouse made a close study of a residential tower in Johannesburg, designed for white South Africans under Apartheid but now occupied by the country’s majority, and they present their images as lightboxes that recreate, in miniature, the tower itself. Other standouts in the show include A.K. Burns (with reperformances of ultra-esoteric YouTube porn) and Rabih Mroue (whose video about death-by-sniper was a gem of the last Documenta).

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A drawing of a seated “priest”, made in 1517 by Albrecht Dürer and now in the great Dürer exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, which the Daily Pic won’t be done with until the show closes.

What specially interests me in this image is how the old man’s face seems so carefully observed from life, with a clear sense that we are below him looking up into his eyes, and yet the drapery of his robe is so clearly based on late-medieval stylizations. I think this is about much more than a “holdover” of archaisms in Dürer’s newly naturalistic art; I think it gives a crucial clue to his art’s fundamentals.

Bear with me – and click below – while I try to explain.

My overwhelming reaction to the Dürer show was one of immediate, simple pleasure and amazement at his art’s excellence, even beauty. And yet it so happens that I don’t believe in the inherent excellence or beauty of any work of art – I’m not even sure they are coherent concepts – just as  I don’t believe in a work’s ability to directly and simply and inevitably tickle some aesthetic sense that we have. Art is so complex and bizarre in its rules and games, it seems the clearest of all candidates for  being socially constructed. (I’m a believer in what philosophers call “institutional” and “anti-essentialist” theories of art.) So here’s my reading of my own reaction to Dürer: I think what he does, more than almost any artist, is “naturalize” (sorry for the jargon) the excellence of his own art. Through details such as this priest’s credibly real face, captured live by Dürer’s pen (or claiming to be so), the artist convinces us that all he is doing is reporting on the way the world is. And then that naturalism has a kind of contagious effect on the rest of the image, so that the evident artifice of its stylizations also end up reading as natural, and inevitable – and so as excellent, even perfect. It’s not that his scene is built to look like a simple view into some new and improved reality, as  Raphael managed in his “Alba Madonna”, a few years earlier than this Dürer drawing. In the Dürer, even things that are obviously artful and unreal – the entire making of this image, in fact, including its stylizations  – feel necessary and natural.

Italy has long been identified by its cultural treasures; Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is but one. Its ancient cities—Rome, Syracuse, and Pompeii; jewel-box towns—Venice, San Gimignano, and Urbino; places of worship—St. Peter’s Basilica, Florence’s Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore), and Padua’s Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel; and iconic monuments—the Colosseum, Leaning Tower, and Ponte Vecchio, have been so studied and admired through literature, verse, and image that they have become the shared heritage of all mankind.

As events in Milan demonstrated, World War II and the new technology of aerial bombardment—in particular, incendiary weapons—posed history’s most lethal threat to that heritage. When the Allies landed in Sicily on the night of July 9–10, 1943, another threat emerged: ground warfare. The Germans were determined to concede not an inch of Italian soil. How many more monuments, churches, libraries, and immovable works of art lay in the path of war? Even then, as the bombing of The Last Supper illustrated, the Western Allies were not immune from mistakes in judgment and execution.

War is many things, but above all, it is messy. Rarely does it unfold as planned. Prime Minister Winston Churchill once observed: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.” Ethical dilemmas arise. Loyalties are tested, but loyalties to whom? Country, cause, or self ? The effort to protect Italy’s cultural treasures during war lived up to Churchill’s admonition.

While it may not be the most conceptual public art installation of all time, a six-story-tall traveling rubber duckie is causing a frenzy along the banks of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour.

The massive bath toy, created by the Netherlands’s Florentijn Hofman, was first pulled into town on May 2 by tug boat. And it has already created a rubber duck craze in the city, with many street vendors selling armfuls rubber duckies both big and small. Hofman told CNN that he thinks his piece’s success has something to do with nostalgia. "I see it as an adult thing. It makes you feel young again. It refers to your childhood when there was no stress or economic pressure, no worry about having to pay the rent," he said.

This is not the first of Hofman’s installations to reference childhood iconography. He’s previously staged a giant floppy rabbit at Sweden’s 2011 Open Art Biennale and a suspended pig with Mickie Mouse ears in Strasbourg.

Since launching in 2008, the rubber duck project has traveled to Osaka, Sydney, Sao Paolo, and Amsterdam. It will remain in Hong Kong until June 9, before moving on to a secret location in the United States—once which will be announced only a week prior to launch time.

A piece called “Pendulum” by the artist Jorge Macchi, and now in his solo show at Alexander and Bonin gallery in New York. I like how Macchi makes an I-beam do the one thing it is absolutely meant not to do: bend. Another crucial component: The cheap plastic stools that can only barely support the steel, and show slight signs of buckling that prove its weight. And yet the sight of a curved I-beam seems so unlikely that there’s always some suspicion that the piece is trompe-l’oeil.

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This pairing represents the strangest, most interesting moment in “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio and Dubuffet”, which just closed at the Phillips Collection in Washington. The show was about contacts between its three titular artists, but a wall of Pollocks is what stopped me. The picture on the left is a photographic screenprint after a painting, and Pollock wasn’t happy with the result. So he made not one but two very, very close painted copies of the print – one is on the right here – for reasons I can’t quite figure out. I guess he was trying to put back in the spontaneity of the original canvas, but the act of copying itself negates the unmediated expression that the AbEx “hand” is supposed to be about. It looks as though process is less important than final result, even for an action painter like Pollock. Or maybe he wanted to play with perfect handmade seriality, decades before others were trying that move. (Or just one decade before Warhol did, with his soup cans.)

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"$450,000," called the auctioneer, pointing to a bidder in the crowd at Christie's.

He wheeled around to another: "$500!"

Then back to the first: "$550!"

"Do I hear six?" he asked solicitously. "Six hundred thousand?"

This is Ansel Adams’s “Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California”, shot in around 1944 and now in a fascinating group show called “Expo 1: New York” that opened yesterday at PS1 in Queens. The show comes at issues of ecology and our planetary fate from all sorts of classically avant-garde angles, but its most daring move may be its inclusion of several rooms of photos by Adams, not normally a name to conjure with out on the cutting edge. Rather than rehearsing  standard notions about the beauty and formal brilliance of Adams’s photographic art, the show treats him as a real purveyor of ideas and information about the American environment and our place in it. (The inclusion of multiple shots of single sites is especially clever.) One thing I think the curators left out: The place in Adams’s art of an ethos and aesthetics of mechanization. If such notions seem out of place in a discussion of Adams, take a look at my essay on a show of his landscapes held a few years ago  at the Corcoran in D.C. – it may be   the best thing I’ve written.

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