
The massive Frieze art fair landed on Manhattan’s Randall’s Island and not everyone was happy. Pro-union protestors and members of Occupy Museums showed up to protest but they were pushed so far away that you have to wonder if anyone noticed.


The reemergence of Pocket Utopia — not in Bushwick but on the southernmost lip of Manhattan’s Lower East Side — in partnership with the uptown fine prints and drawings dealer C. G. Boerner, might strike some as an offbeat, even aberrant choice. But having gotten to know Austin somewhat after writing about her solo show at Storefront in 2010, it made sense to me that she wouldn’t attempt to repeat herself.

The most galvanizing room, hands down, in the current Whitney Biennial is the Forrest Bess micro-retrospective put together by sculptor Robert Gober. And on Tuesday, in what could be a trend, another museum-quality exhibition opened, organized by another sculptor — Matthew Day Jackson’s “Science on the back end” at Hauser & Wirth.

National Poetry Month reminds us that some words can boogie, and dance they do at two exhibitions on the Lower East Side. A fiery tango between word and image takes place in solo shows by both Natalie Czech and Jeff Gibson. This tango — like when a caption twists an image’s meaning, or an illustration shapes how you picture the words you’re reading — can be tense, competitive and at times even semiotically combative. But just as the tango feeds off of two partners’ intensity, this art benefits from the back and forth.

The recently deceased Thomas Kinkade may have had barely any effect on the contemporary art world (beyond a thoughtful essay or two), but the influence of the artist I’d call the original painter of light, Claude Monet, has waned little over the past century. And currently two Monet-inspired exhibitions are taking up the same subject of artist’s passion: his gardens at Giverny.