Four stills from the brilliant nine-screen video projection called “The Visitors”, produced by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and now showing at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York. One day not too long ago, Kjartansson and eight of his Brooklynish friends occupied nine rooms and sites in and around a shabby-chic mansion called Rokeby Farm, upstate in New York. Together (but apart), and in one 53-minute take, they recorded a slightly sentimental, nouveau-hippy song, each one contributing a separate musical line on voice, piano, electric bass, accordion, drums or some other classic-rock instrument. Rokeby Farm says that it is set up to “welcome bohemia and spirituality in all its forms”, and the video made there risks bathing in the same kinds of sentimental cliche. But as the sound weaves together in the gallery space, and the images remain discrete, you realize that Kjartansson’s  romantic excesses are perfectly balanced by his technophilic rigor. The technology seems to provide its own ironic gloss on the song’s mawkishness.

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Darren Almond shoots landscapes by the light of the full moon, including this one, titled “Fullmoon@Eifel.6” and now in his solo show at Matthew Marks gallery in New York. Of course, what’s most important about these images is that exposure times measured in minutes yield results that look like perfectly normal daylit scenes, or something very close. That means that the subject here is photography, its truths and deceptions, rather than nature itself. Any photo can be exposed and processed to affect the “reality” of its subject: A day scene could be shot to be as murky as any typical night shot. “Normal”, “correct” exposure is a notion imposed by us, not by the world being shot. 

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These are stills from Steffani Jemison’s video called “The Escaped Lunatic”, now on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem in “Fore”, a group show that presents emerging black talent. (Click on the image to watch a clip from the video). The video is straightforward but powerful: It presents a scruffy urban landscape, across which run a series of almost identical Young Black Males, and the action loops ad infinitum. Jemison says that the piece is based on early  silent-film chases, and sees the piece as being about “persistence and futility” amid cultural, social and geographic constraints. But I read it  differently: It seemed to be about the stereotypes we associate with running black youths, and the TV-bred image we have of them as always fleeing a crime, or perpetrating one. 

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This is a Damien Hirst “spot” print called “Ferric Ammonium Citrate”, done in woodblock and now on view at Carolina Nitsch in New York, in a show of all 40 works from the same series. It’s easy to see the project as a retro return to formalist issues of shape and color, of figure and ground and of variations worked on a theme. Hirst’s simple instruction-set – never repeat a color; place the spots one spot’s-width apart – does in fact yield surprising perceptual dividends, if you spend the time looking. On the other hand, it may be more interesting to see the series as a riff on market dynamics – as much about how the woodcuts sell as about what they look like. Hirst’s signature may be the deciding factor in any reading: The only function it plays, on the surface of the prints – there are 48 of each image – is to tie each one to the history of unique, certified, hand-made (or hand-signed) commodities. The messy signature actually detracts and distracts from a formalist reading of these otherwise pristine works.  But then, plenty of rigorous formalists, including Barnett Newman, also defaced their works by signing the front. Does that make their paintings comments on the market, or sell-outs to it?

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This is Michael Benson’s “Northern View of Saturn and the Darker Side of the Rings” based on data collected from the Cassini spacecraft on May 9, 2007. It is now on view at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in New York. You could say that Benson’s spacey images are too eye-catching for their own good – like a painting you’d see on the cover of an old sci-fi novel. But what interests me is the idea that, while these images purport to show the solar system “as it really is”, it seems that there’s a a fair amount of artifice and number-crunching involved in making them look that way. In that sense, they are indeed as close to a sci-fi painting as to the sunset you shot on your last vacation. The more cliched they are in their picturesqueness, the more obvious that becomes, and the more questions get raised about what pictures can show. 

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“Skylight 1” is one of my favorite pieces from Diana Cooper’s solo show at Postmasters gallery in New York, which locals have one more day to catch before it closes.  In this piece and others, Cooper takes a real feature of the Postmasters interior and shifts the place and shape it takes up.  This new tactic gives a firm, real-world grounding to the fantasy that Cooper’s always revealed in her work. It’s also a kind of homage to Postmasters itself: For almost three decades, in one space after another, owners Magda Sawon and Tamas Banovich have given artists room to do the most daring work they know how. It’s nice that there’s now work that’s about the room given.

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This image, titled “Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse, State Tretyakov Gallery”, was shot by Andy Freeberg, and is now on view in his show at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York. Freeberg visited Russia’s great museums, photographing the almost-babushkas charged with guarding the country’s artistic treasures. Even when Freeberg finds women whose look rhymes with their charges, or – as here – where contrast is the point,  what strikes me most is the size of the gap between lived life and the worlds found in art. Now what I’d like to see is a photo of a Chelsea gallerina standing by one of Freeberg’s prints, to see if the gap would be as striking.

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A neon piece called “Ba-O-Ba II”, made in 1969 by Keith Sonnier and now refreshed for a solo show at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. I’m old enough (just) to remember how neon seemed the Next Big Thing in the early 1970s, and plenty old enough to remember how out of place those neons seemed in museums in the 80s,  when we’d collectively decided that the way forward for art would have to do with content rather than color and shape, line and light. And now, after the passing of so many years, vintage neon’s looking good again, as the last but powerful gasp of the modernist tradition, and as more deeply rooted in social realities than we’d been able to see when first it went out of style. As Sonnier says in the press release, “Our type of work was somehow counter-culture. We chose materials that were not 'high art' …. We were using materials that weren’t previously considered art materials.”

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For a foodie, trumpeting the crème brûlée doughnut from the Doughnut Plant, in New York, is like saying that you rather like the Sistine Ceiling. But, on the assumption that not everyone who reads the Daily Pic is a food fanatic, I’m still willing to proclaim this sweet, with its crisp-caramel outside and crème-y filling, one of the great aesthetic creations of recent years. My only problem with that proclamation is that I’d never rave about  fine art that was so mild-mannered in its innovation: I ought to demand a blood-flavored cruller with durian foam. Can I take refuge in the thought that the mash-up of French and American pastry idioms gives this donut some postmodern cred? Surely it thematizes globalization and post-colonial cultural collisions, with a nod to neoconcrete anthropophagy?

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A "recycled" sofa by the artist-designer Florian Borkenhagen, who shows with Gabrielle Ammann gallery in Cologne. As a one-off piece, it will hardly make much of a dent in our problem of overproduction and overconsumption, but it works, art-wise, as a fine pointer to both. It's also a rare pleasure to see a new piece of furniture that isn't just a rehashing or reheating of modernist cliches.

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A lovely altarpiece, almost 13 feet tall, painted in about 1520 by the ultra-obscure Veronese artist Girolamo dai Libri, now standing out in almost comic relief  against the grim architecture of the Lehman wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Click on the image to see it in detail.) I love the way Girolamo managed to stick to the sweetness of a 15th-century style while including some of the “modernizations” of 16th-century Florence and Rome. Of course, the central conundrum of this painting is the massive area given over to the foliage at its center. There are obvious iconological solutions to its unbalanced composition, but I like to think that in fact it’s all about how Girolamo was taken with the idea of fixed perspectival viewings of “modern” pictures: he imagined his tree would only ever be seen in peripheral vision, convincingly and impressively looming overhead as a “roof” of green, as our eyes kept their focus on the Mother and Child. In other words, he didn’t buy into the idea of painting as a composition in 2D, but thought instead in terms of giving us access to a three-dimensional world, where issues of “balance”, and of what appears where, have to be thought of in entirely different terms.

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An untitled 1949 painting by Mark Rothko, from the National Gallery’s collection and until recently on view in a show at the Columbia Museum of Art. I’ve written a few times about the effect of black-and-white photoreproduction on Matisse and Picasso. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if the rise of color plates in art books, after World War II,  affected the color-full and color-field abstraction that came to be made then. Who wouldn’t imagine their art forward to the day that it would be reproduced? Of course, there wasn’t color repro in Renaissance Florence, but that didn’t stop Botticelli and others from going for chroma. (Or is chroma/non-chroma only a salient binary after Daguerre?)

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This image of Rudy Giuliani was done in glass mosaic by Nils Grossien, and is now in the show called “Playing with Fire” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. It woke me up to a fact that I should have noticed long ago: Mosaic is the original digital medium. (My friends Alex Nagel and Chris Wood made good use of that fact in their great study of Renaissance ideas about time and the moment of creation.) Interesting, though, that Grossien made this piece in 1995, before most of us were thinking too much about the digital. Of course, using the digital and thinking about it are two different things: Not sure the mosaicists of Saint Mark’s in Venice were obsessed with bits and bytes.

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“Friday Evening”, painted in around 1920 by the Jewish-Austrian artist Isidor Kaufmann, who specialized in genre scenes of life among the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It’s on view in a permanent-collection show at the Jewish Museum in New York. Producing images so deeply entrenched in the European pictorial tradition must have been part of this community’s profound attempt at assimilation, although here that’s in interesting tension with subject matter that tries to assert its separateness. Neither assimilation nor separation made any difference in the tragic decades that followed.

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A series of silk-scarves designed for Hermes by the great Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, on view at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. The premise of the project is that Sugimoto took Polaroid shots of the color bands dispersed from daylight by a huge prism reflected by a mirror onto a wall. He then got Hermes to devise a new process for jet-printing the images onto silk, as a kind of representation of natural color at its most pure.

But as with everything Sugimotesque, I think his trickster self is at work. After all, the gap between the original light and the final scarf gets bigger with each intermediary step, thanks to the distortions of prism and mirror and wall and film and scan and computer processing and digital printing with chemical inks onto a substrate of machine-woven silk. (Read Sugimoto’s artist’s statement to get a sense of his conceptual tergiversations.)

Many of Sugimoto’s series pretend to get at essences but are really about the failure to do so. His two-hour photos of movies being screened elide the films they pretend to reveal. His images of seas at night, with their near-arbitrary exposures, don’t really substitute for being there. His blurred building shots are about the misdirections of pseudo-technique (he claims to focus them at a meaningless “twice infinity”).