The shift owes something to feminists like Linda Nochlin, who, in a well-known 1971 ARTnews essay, asked if Picasso would have been called a genius if he were born a girl. But most people don’t know Nochlin. They know Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who took up Picasso in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, going so far as to say he “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped think up Cubism, a movement that prized a multiplicity of perspectives.

Gadsby is even more unsparing than that in the audio guide for their new Brooklyn Museum show, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opens to the public on Friday.

Gadsby notes that Picasso was a “monumentally misogynistic and abusive domestic authoritarian dictator,” and that he “takes up too much space.” To further underscore the point, perhaps in homage to Hughes, Gadsby lends Picasso the nickname “PP.” You can do the work figuring out that very unsubtle pun.

“Picasso is not my muse of choice,” Gadsby later says of organizing the show. “I regret this.” They should.

Organized with Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, “It’s Pablo-matic” aspires toward a new kind of Picasso scholarship that better accounts for his misogyny, his bad behavior, and his colonialist impulses. Gadsby and the curators intend to accomplish this by weaving in more recent works by pillars of feminist art, a noble gesture meant to “unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves,” per Gadsby.

The show’s problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. That is the appropriate lens for discussing much of Picasso’s oeuvre in 2023. It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practiced, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.

The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery. Above the show’s loud red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.

Inside the show, there’s Jo Baker’s Birthday (1995), a Faith Ringgold print featuring a reclining Josephine Baker beside a bowl of ripe peaches. This is a direct allusion to paintings by Henri Matisse like Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923), not to Picasso. (A better Ringgold selection would’ve been her 1991 quilt Picasso’s Studio, which takes on the artist more directly.) Likewise, there’s Nina Chanel Abney’s Forbidden Fruit (2009), in which a group of picnickers are seated around and atop watermelons. It’s a composition that specifically recalls Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), not any particular Picasso painting.

There’s no question that Ringgold and Abney are highlighting the limits of modernism—they replace white figures with Black ones, whom they suture into European images. But this exhibition is not about the modernist canon as a whole, which is itself an extension of a male-dominated Western art history that spans centuries. It’s specifically about one man, per the show’s title: Picasso, whom “It’s Pablo-matic” flatly offers as the only modernist worth critiquing. He isn’t.

Ironically, one of the few Picasso-focused works comes courtesy of Gadsby themselves. It’s a ca. 1995 copy of Picasso’s Large Bather with a Book (1937), depicting a blocky, boulder-like figure crumpled over an open volume. Gadsby painted their reproduction on the wall of their parents’ basement. Looking back on it, they now call it “shitty.”

“Picasso once said it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Gadsby writes in the wall text. “Well, I don’t want to call myself a genius … But it did only take me four years to be as funny as Raphael.”

“Funny” is debatable, but comedy is used as a curatorial device throughout the show. Gadsby’s quotes, which are printed above more serious art historical musings, are larded with the language of Twitter. “Weird flex,” reads one appended to a Picasso print of a nude woman caressing a sculpture of a naked, chiseled man. “Don’t you hate it when you look like you belong in a Dickens novel but end up in a mosh pit at Burning Man? #MeToo,” reads another that goes with a print showing a minotaur barging into a crowded, darkened space.

Most of the works in this show are by Picasso, strangely enough. This in itself constitutes an issue—you can’t re-center art history if you’re still centering Picasso.

But if the curators must, they have at least brought some impressive works to the US for the exhibition. There are several paintings on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, some of which are enlisted in savvy ways.

One of them, Corrida: la mort de la femme torero (Bullfighting: Death of the Female Bullfighter), from 1933, shows a woman tumbling across two colliding bulls. Upon impact, her breasts spill out, lending the scene an unseemly erotic quality that courses through so many of the Picasso works in this show. It’s all the more disturbing to learn that this female toreador was based on Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was romantically involved with Picasso at the time. I agree with the curators’ assessment that this painting emblematizes Picasso’s brutal tendencies. I only wish it wasn’t paired with this quote from Gadsby: “If PETA can’t cancel Picasso … no one can.”

It’s key that the show repeatedly references Gilot and Walter, as well as other women from Picasso’s love life, like the artist Dora Maar and the dancer Olga Khokhlova. These women were previously written off as Picasso’s “muses,” and “It’s Pablo-matic” suggests that historians still have trouble talking about them. While the show is frank about the negative aspects of these women’s relationships with the artist, they are always discussed within the context of Picasso, who continues to exert a strong gravitational pull.

I detected a disingenuous sentiment amid it all. Gilot and Maar both produced art of note. Where was that in this show? It would’ve been instructive to see their work placed on equal footing with Picasso’s. Or, for that matter, pretty much any female modernists. The only ones who make the cut are Kathe Köllwitz and Maria Martins, both of whom are represented by unremarkable examples of their remarkable oeuvres.

These women didn’t make it into history books for a long time, and that’s the subtext of Kaleta Doolin’s Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2 (2017), a piece included in this show. The work takes the form of a famed art history textbook that has, in every one of its pages, a vaginal oval cut out of it. An image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was sliced by Doolin during the work’s making, its lower left-hand corner now lopped off.

Doolin’s work is about removal: she leaves parts of Janson’s book absent to make clear that women artists, for so many centuries, were kept out of the picture. This was a painful, violent elision, and Doolin makes steps toward rectifying the carnage by acknowledging all that contributed to it. If only Gadsby had done the same.

Why does this show contort art history so? There are numerous Picasso works here that portray threesomes, rapes, and bestiality. The wall text doesn’t hide the sources of these images: Ovid’s poetry, Greek mythology. When Picasso represented a minotaur kneeling over a nude, sleeping woman who can’t consent, he was glorifying sexual assault, using classical art as a limp justification. He was hardly the first male artist to do that, however: Bernini, Titian, Correggio, Poussin, and many more did it too. Yet this exhibition directs its aim only at Picasso.

Many of the women in this exhibition are responding to centuries of misogyny, not just Picasso’s. Betty Tompkins has a grand, grisaille painting showing an erect penis entering a vagina in close-up—an image that recalls a certain Gustave Courbet work—while Joan Semmel takes a lighter approach, with a painting of a post-coital couple shown from the woman’s point of view. Ghada Amer is showing a terrific embroidered work in which pools of red thread reveal pairs of splayed-open women’s legs, and Rachel Kneebone has a porcelain piece that looks like a fountain of limbs. There’s no specific reference point in these works, because the male gaze is omnipotent. It wasn’t found only in Picasso’s studio.

The final gallery, the sole one without any Picasso works in it, brings “It’s Pablo-matic” into even squishier territory. There are some great works here—Dara Birnbaum’s classic video skewering Wonder Woman, an Ana Mendieta photograph of an abstracted female form sculpted into the ground, Dindga McCannon’s painting of a multihued revolutionary with real bullets fixed to the canvas—but they have almost nothing in common, beside the fact that they are all owned by the Brooklyn Museum.

The supplement to this exhibition, available on the Bloomberg Connects app, includes an interview with one artist in this gallery, Harmony Hammond. Asked about her feelings on Picasso, she says, “Truth be told, I don’t think about Picasso and his work.”

It would’ve been nice to have more artists who were thinking about Picasso, or whose work, at least, has something to do with him. But this seems like too much to ask from the curators, especially Gadsby, who greets that line of thinking with a big, fat raspberry. “Humans are not doing great,” they say on the audio guide. “We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That’s a little joke. Or is it? I don’t know.”

For the first time ever, “New Photography” has a geographic purview. All the photographers included this time have ties to the Nigerian city of Lagos, otherwise known to Yoruba speakers as Èkó. That alone would make it notable, since MoMA has rarely given African art, and in particular African photography, the spotlight.

But the art itself matches the ambitions of the show’s curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who is challenging what it really means for photography to document a city, let alone the people who reside in it. She has made the wise choice to go with just seven artists, a much smaller group than the past two editions of “New Photography.” Doing so allows her to dive deeper into their practices, each of which finds intriguing ways to pay homage to Lagos’s citizenry and history, by means both conceptual and other. Guiding all the artists’ explorations is a fascination with photography itself as a medium—what it does, whom it’s for, and what it can reveal.

Logo Oluwamuyiwa, the strongest of these artists, trains his lens on the streets of Lagos, which he sometimes photographs using oblique angles that distort his images beyond recognition. Oil Wonders II (2018) features an upside-down shot of two standing people, their feet visible at the bottom. Look above them to see a puddle reflecting their upper halves. He literally reorients our view of Lagos, then does it again and again in an array of prints, vinyl wallpapers, and films shown nearby.

Oluwamuyiwa’s lush black-and-white photography finds a neat corollary in the work of Akinbode Akinbiyi, an artist roughly half a century older. Working in a mode that’s likewise devoid of color, Akinbiyi turns his attention to Bar Beach, a seaside locale popular at one time with Lagosians. These photos act as records of what once was, with women lounging, men running, and, in one quaint image, a dog slumbering, seemingly unaware of the activity around it.

Akinbiyi started this series, “Sea Never Dry,” in 1982, a little more than a decade after the Nigerian Civil War ended. His works are serene, mellow, and dreamy, and so too, are most of the works in this show. But the churning forces of history are still palpable, even in the cases where evidence of them isn’t always visible.

Some of Amanda Iheme’s photographs seem at first glance to be archival documentation—they appear to be straightforward pictures of vintage cassette tapes, yellowed public transit tickets, and decaying buildings. Yet pictures such as these represent history that is being lost, especially in the eyes of people who can’t see the erosion taking place.

One of Iheme’s photographs from 2015 features the Casa de Fernandez, a structure built in the 19th century by formerly enslaved people, beneath a sunny sky. It stands unassumingly, its walls streaked with signs of age. The year after Iheme took this picture, the building was demolished under mysterious circumstances. Now, Iheme’s photograph stands as proof that it existed at all.

The past is a fragile thing, a fact underscored by the thin, vulnerable chiffon that Abraham Oghobase uses in his installation Constructed Realities (2019–22). These pieces of silk are printed with centuries-old British texts about “primitive tribes” and the mining of coal in Nigeria; they are then placed atop re-photographed images from the colonial period. Some of those pictures have portions removed, so that the people in them appear to slip away, leaving behind ghostly half-presences.

Similar specters appear in images collected by Karl Ohiri, whose Lagos Studios Archives project has involved amassing old studio portraits and presenting them in their damaged state. Many of Ohiri’s scanned and re-photographed images have lost the battle with time—they bloom with unnatural bruise-like splotches and have turned different hues. In their current state, they contain their own haunted beauty. They pair nicely with works by Kelani Abass, whose family’s pictures from decades past are used as raw material for her own work, which sets these snapshots into letterpresses.

Only one artist here contributes what’s conventionally understood as documentary photography: Yagazie Emezi, a photojournalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and TIME. Her works capture protests against police brutality held in 2020 as part of the #EndSARS movement. These invigorating pictures take viewers into the streets, one featuring a woman who stoically walks between rows of cars while waving a flag.

But the more effective works are those that find less obvious routes into Lagos’s roads. Those avenues lead not only to the rest of the city but to the whole of Nigeria—and, ultimately, to many other faraway places.

This much is implicit in Oluwamuyiwa’s Lagos Hosts (2014), a shot of the backside of a dusty bus, the title coming from a sign in the window: LAGOS HOSTS THE WORLD. Oluwamuyiwa has printed the shot as a poster that MoMA visitors are free take home. Hold on to one of Oluwamuyiwa’s posters, cherish it, and let the influence of this Nigerian hub wind its way into the place you call home.

With that being said, once you’ve endured Frieze New York this week, make sure to head just a few blocks south from the Shed to Chelsea. There you’ll find airy, sunlit galleries and mercifully streamlined shows that promise a welcome respite from all that hustle and bustle.

Below, a look at six stand-out offerings around the neighborhood. 

More than 30 years on, here comes the Met’s “Van Gogh’s Cypresses,” which suggests something very different about blockbusters today. Even though it includes just 44 works, the show, which opens to the public on Monday, is likely to attract big crowds all the same. Perhaps quantity is no longer as important as it once was.

Among those 44 works, there are some bona fide masterpieces. The Starry Night (1889), van Gogh’s famed image of a swirling night sky with a dominating cypress tree, has made the short trip from the Museum of Modern Art, journeying 25 blocks north. It’s been a decade since that painting left MoMA, and it’s a joy to see it share space with gems that have traveled much farther, from locales as distant as São Paulo, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen.

Sure, “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” is modest, occupying just three galleries in a museum that spans four blocks. And sure, it’s not a retrospective either. But you simply cannot beat the spark felt when this many paintings of this high a caliber are assembled in one space.

The show is organized around van Gogh’s depictions of trees he saw throughout Arles and Saint-Rémy, the Provençal communes where he spent his time between 1888 and his death in 1890. Susan Alyson Stein, the show’s curator, passionately stumps for the importance of these conifers to van Gogh’s oeuvre, going so far as to write in the catalogue that they have gone sorely “unrecognized.”

Stein’s fascination with van Gogh’s arboreal obsession is totally understandable. Almost always, the cypresses are the real stars of the paintings here, trumping the warping wheat fields, flowerbeds, and people beneath. Take Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), a gem of the Met’s collection, in which a tree shoots upward, spearing wispy clouds that roll across the sky like waves. Van Gogh has applied his pine-colored paint so thickly, the tree’s leaves take on a sculptural quality.

The version of this painting that van Gogh termed the “definitive” one, on loan from London’s National Gallery and also from 1889, is boring by comparison, his violent handling of paint dulled by the decision to render it relatively flat. It’s a sharp composition that’s impossible to deaden entirely, however. It’s been well over a century since these two paintings have been reunited, and let’s hope we don’t have to wait another for them to come together once more.

Van Gogh, whose mental health continued to waver as he painted these works, once said that he had rendered the trees “as I see them.” That’s telling: he painted them tall and firm amid landscapes that roil with intense, curlicuing strokes, as though they were the only things he could count on to remain largely unchanged in a world exceeding his grip.

More often than not, van Gogh’s trees even appear to come alive. One gorgeous 1889 drawing in this show features a cypress whose leaves, rendered using a reed pen, slither upward like licking flames. Even the cypresses pushed to the background of the Seurat-like Orchard with Peach Trees and Cypresses (1888) shudder with life, threatening to distract from the gorgeous pops of apricot and baby blue that can be found throughout.

What, exactly, did van Gogh see in his cypresses? It’s hard to say. He explained so many things in his letters to his brother Theo, but not the symbolism of these evergreens. As a result, the show resorts mainly to context clues for possible interpretations.

“Van Gogh’s Cypresses” starts with his arrival in Arles in 1888, and notes that the artist initially painted these French trees with ones seen in the Netherlands, his home country, in mind. Based solely on what’s in the galleries, this is an obscure point, since the exhibition includes nothing painted before his time in Provence, but it is true that a work like Landscape with Path and Pollard Willows (1888), with its trunks zagging diagonally away from a road, features the same kinds of trees seen in works from van Gogh’s Dutch era. That there is a connection at all implies a search for fixity in a fluid world.

Within a year, his compositions had undergone a significant change. His skies and fields, once neatly balanced, were thrown out of alignment, as they are in Landscape under Turbulent Skies (1889), in which gloomy clouds descend above trees that may not withstand the storm they augur. The clouds are far larger than anything else in the canvas—with the exception of some cypresses toward the right whose pointy tips seem to ward them off, like a knife pointed at a potential assailant.

Van Gogh painted that work in April 1889. The next month, having already sliced off his ear and experienced hallucinations, he checked himself into an asylum in Saint-Rémy. His palette turned darker; deep greens, slathered on so heavily that they approach blackness, prevail in the subsequent works.

Not all hope is lost, however. A Walk at Twilight (1890), a stunning image of a couple traversing a landscape sparsely populated by bushes, has at its top a vermilion sunset. The day may be disappearing, but light isn’t entirely gone. Some cypresses stand watch, ready to weather the long night.

Van Gogh’s cypresses don’t evolve much as presented in this show—it’s tough to understand how, or even if, he thought differently of them in the months leading up to his death by suicide in July 1890. As curatorial endeavors go, the exhibition isn’t exactly the most rigorous exercise. But it’s also tough to complain when the Met has managed to wrangle rarely seen masterpieces from private collections, if only temporarily.

Trees in the Garden of the Asylum (1889), one of those works typically kept out of public view, may just be one of the most beautiful van Gogh paintings I’ve encountered. It depicts a view from the window of the Saint-Rémy institution where van Gogh stayed, although unlike another painting nearby in this show, it does not portray the pane’s borders. Instead, what we get is a cypress above a grassy garden, along with two kinked trees pressed into the foreground that obstruct our view of Edenic nature.

This is a very strange compositional choice, and a richly rewarding one, too. It’s a work that suggests that nature is unyielding—we may gaze upon it, searching for meaning, as van Gogh himself did, but it exists according to its own rules. Van Gogh accepted as much.

The Starry Night is likely to steal the spotlight in “Van Gogh’s Cypresses,” but the true stars ought to be Trees in the Garden of the Asylum and the other remarkable pieces from private collections. They’re works that encourage slow, patient viewing, and when crowds bottleneck before MoMA’s masterwork, those pieces will likely go largely unseen. Herein lies the beauty of a small but potent blockbuster like this show: there are still treasures for everyone.

Correction, 5/17/23, 3:30 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated details about the 1990 van Gogh retrospective. It was held by the Van Gogh Museum, not the Met. Additionally, the Met show includes 44 works, not 43.

Excepting Henry Street, which has suddenly become home to a scrappy grouping of galleries, the map is now quite spread out. This means two things. First, expect to walk relatively far distances between exhibitions—the norm in art world hotspots like London and Paris, but something New Yorkers who frequent Chelsea and Tribeca probably aren’t used to. Second, you’ll have to know where to look.

In an effort to point you in the right direction this Frieze week, here are five shows to see on the Lower East Side right now.

By this point, Barney has tugged the plastic padding from his helmet and affixed it to the outside. If he were really playing the game—he isn’t, in Secondary, which never once features a football onscreen—he’d be putting himself in extreme danger.

Even that protective gear didn’t help the real-life person Barney is playing: Ken Stabler, a quarterback for the Raiders who, many years after his retirement, was diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by trauma to the head. CTE, as that malady is known for short, is becoming increasingly common among football players. The sport thrives on violence and bodily collapse, and yet, Barney, like millions of other Americans, is drawn to watching it. He wants to know why.

Secondary, which runs at Barney’s studio in Long Island City through June 25, is his epic answer to that inquiry. Set across several screens, the installation would be easy to write off as another macho, pretentious moving-image work from an artist who dabbles in them. Yet it is so hypnotic that even those repelled by Barney’s machismo will fall under its spell.

With Secondary, Barney returns to what made him famous during the ’90s—sticky substances, surrealist rituals, erotically tinged body horror—while also meeting the moment by exploring death as a form of spectacle. This is a triumphant return to form for Barney, whose icy gaze has rarely felt so personal.

Across the installation’s 60 minutes—you will want to stay for all of them—oozy fluids fly, rabid football players scream, athletic bodies twist and turn, and a trench built in Barney’s studio gradually fills with muddy water, the sole reminder of all the shit and vomit that pervaded his last big swing in New York, the five-hour slog River of Fundament (2014).

Secondary, by contrast, is much cleaner. Its mise-en-scène, a dazzling red AstroTurf-like carpet that acts as the video’s football field, is left intact in Barney’s studio for viewers to lounge on. Because of it, this space becomes something like an arena, with big screens hanging overhead at its center like those that loom over the court at NBA games.

The carpet contains an ovular form bisected by a rectangle—a symbol that appears throughout Barney’s art, most notably in The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2003), his famed suite of five videos exploring sexual development. With Secondary, Barney is returning to his past in more ways than one.

It’s Cremaster 1, in which an elegant ballet routine is enacted on a football field and inside two Goodyear blimps, that hangs most heavily over Secondary. Cremaster 1 is buoyant: it features smiling dancers who kick their legs up and down, and a Jonathan Bepler score that recalls the tunes heard in 1930s Hollywood musicals. Secondary is comparatively downcast, its jagged soundtrack, also by Bepler, filled mainly by clanking and ominous humming, along with a lot of heavy breathing and shouting when the music isn’t playing.

That work, like this one, drew on Barney’s training as a football player while he was in high school. He’d planned to be a professional athlete, then abandoned his dream while he was an undergrad during the ’80s at Yale, where he started out as a premed student before becoming an art major. Football, it turned out, couldn’t satiate an artist whose senior thesis project involved entering a gym, donning little more than cleats and a harness, and moving about above a mass of Vaseline shaped into the symbol that would ultimately recur throughout The Cremaster Cycle.

Secondary also relates to something that haunted a teenage Barney: the paralysis of the New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley, who was injured on live TV in 1978 when he collided with Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Raiders. Gradually, it becomes clear that Secondary will restage that play.

This dialogue-free video tensely moves toward its climax, guiding its viewers through game-day festivities, pre-kickoff preparations, and that fateful quarter. The dreadful possibility of death haunts the whole affair, a fact underlined by the appearance of one performer dressed as Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most who, at one point in the 1988 Tim Burton film, animates deceased linebackers.

Much of Secondary is composed of Barney’s cast going through the motions of something between experimental dance and a warmup routine. Tatum (energetically played by Raphael Xavier, a dancer who practices a style called Breaking) is shown tethered in a harness, rocketing back and forth. This choreography recalls exercises that are meant to strengthen one’s muscles. If done too many times or performed the wrong way, those same movements can wear down one’s body beyond repair.

The video’s big ending sees Tatum and Stingley (David Thomson, who also served as the video’s movement director) slamming their chests together several times over, with ribcage-like sheets of soft plastic between them. The last time around, they move at each other with a sheet of clay between them. Barney’s camera fixates on this mass as it falls to the ground and shatters in slow motion. It’s a piercing metaphor for how Tatum’s body was brawny and toned until it wasn’t.

This heartbreaker of an installation is fraught with suspense, and not only because a ticking timer is frequently shown. Much of Barney’s cast is not white, and the brutal encounter between these two men feels like too much to bear. Secondary is so abstract that the crunch of snapping bones is only implied, but even still, it’s visceral in a climate where filmed depictions of Black death proliferate on social media.

It’s worth noting, too, that the only women in this video exist on the sidelines as referees, a gender imbalance that’s not likely to sway Barney’s critics, who have claimed he has lifted liberally from feminist art, only to glorify the patriarchy. It’s a fair point: a surfeit of penile imagery recurs throughout Barney’s most well-known works, particularly in The Cremaster Cycle, which is named after a muscle that controls a testicular reflex. Secondary seems to be guilty of propping up the same beefy masculinity until you realize something more subversive is taking place.

Note the video’s best sequence, an anthem is sung by Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a Two-Spirit Chiricahua Apache and Isleta Pueblo soprano. Deshchidn, wearing a feathered black coat, fills the spot in a football match where “The Star-Spangled Banner” is usually heard. Rather than balefully intoning words of patriotism, however, they voice a mix of yelps, sobs, and operatic crooning. At a certain point, Deshchidn says the video’s only audible word over and over: “Bombs!” Afterward, they stare at the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis (Thomas Kopache), who watches the performance from a viewing booth, and laugh at his stony face.

Herein lies the crux of Secondary, a suspenseful confrontation between people of vastly different stripes moving on a collision course. Barney offers the standoff as America in miniature. He seems to tell us we must not look away.

Correction, 5/15/23, 2:50 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated details about the collision between Jack Tatum and Darryl Stingley. It was Stingley who was left paralyzed, not Tatum.

Last week, Spring/Break, the bicoastal bazaar of aesthetic excess, announced to its 30,000-plus Instagram followers that it was doing a “special secret superlative” salon exhibition in its original headquarters, a stately brick house on Prince Street.

The atypical event gathers 100 artists and curators from past editions for a presentation that deviates from Independent and TEFAF, the two big fairs taking place in New York this week, both in style and sentiment. Enter through the front door, and proceed to the airy rooms to the left or right: each holds a smattering of paintings (the flat and sculptural sort) and ceramics (alien fungus forests and molting figurines), in addition to works made in more fluid mediums: painted wall hangings illuminated from within, a moss-covered table sprouting flowers, a delicate painting of devils at work, framed by a cushion. 

Don’t expect wall didactics or a discernible hierarchy; you might as well have wandered into the abode of an especially eclectic collector. It’s not a groundbreaking gathering, either in terms of the actual art or the idea, but it’s fun—a quality sorely missing from the season’s fussier affairs.

Spring/Break has grown impressively since its founding in 2012 by Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly. This venue, a former parochial school (once upon a time, Martin Scorsese was allegedly enrolled there), is quaint compared to 2022’s New York location, two sprawling floors at a Madison-avenue office building. 

The self-referential “secret” show is a teaser for the fall New York edition, which has been obliquely announced as a “Wild Card exhibition”. According to a statement from Spring/Break, it will be a “a new grab bag show” that encapsulates the show’s ethos.

Below are a few favorite pieces to keep an eye for at 32 Prince Street. 

That’s been the case since at least 2013, when the artist had her first exhibition with David Zwirner in New York. And it will likely be the case again with her latest one at the gallery, which opens Thursday evening and runs until July 21. This latest show is spread across three connected spaces on West 19th Street in Chelsea, making it David Zwirner’s biggest show by her to date.

The grand scale is likely to be met by huge attendance numbers. David Zwirner’s 2021 Kusama show welcomed over 94,000 people. If that’s any indication, this one will likely to break the 100,000 mark. (The gallery will once again offer updates across its social media platforms for expected waiting times for this first-come, first-served exhibition.)

The works on view in the current New York show are certainly recognizable as Kusama’s. There are works in the vein of her well-known spotted pumpkins, sculptures depicting whimsical flowers, and, of course, an “Infinity Room.”

Still, this show represents a significant departure for the 94-year-old artist, who proves she is still in fine form. These works are pared down, approaching the minimalism that Kusama utilized when she first arrived in New York in 1958. This contrast will likely come as a surprise to the casual Kusama fan, but for those familiar with her extensive and expansive oeuvre, it may be less shocking.

As you approach the gallery from 10th Avenue, you’ll notice that the garage-like doors have been raised, giving a sneak preview of the work inside. In this space are three towering sculptures of flowers, with multiple layers of petals and brightly hued dot decorations. These are playful reminders that, during this second week of May, spring has sprung and summer is just around the corner. 

As Kusama writes in the press release for the show, titled “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers”: 

I’ve Sung the Mind of Kusama Day by Day, a Song from the Heart.
O Youth of Today, Let Us Sing Together a Song from the Heart of the Universe!

Down a short hallway is the second gallery, which contains the long-awaited new “Infinity Room” (more on that in a bit) and a suite of 35 new paintings, the majority of which are titled EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE and dated to either 2021 or 2022. 

Recently, Kusama’s longstanding painting practice has come into clearer focus, no doubt in part due to Zwirner, which is likely capitalizing on the fact that paintings are much easier to sell than large-scale installations. Kusama, the painter, is still woefully under-known. She got her start creating sumptuous paintings, first as part of her “Infinity Nets” series begun in the late 1950s; they reward close looking, begging viewers to gaze obediently at each slightly varied brushstroke. She’s a formalist whose use of repetition, often deployed as a way to find inner peace and assuage the hallucinations she experiences, is sublime.

The paintings on view here are less technically precise than ones Zwirner has previously shown and the ones on view at her current M+ retrospective, which includes several completed in 2019 and 2020. In some cases, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a looseness to these works, the kind that can only be achieved in the later stages of one’s career, when an artist has mastered their medium.

One of these paintings in particular caught my eye: a vertical canvas with a light blue background covered with vibrantly orange uneven specks. The use of opposites on the color wheel causes this canvas to vibrate. Upon closer inspection, you begin to notice some of the work’s deliberate messiness: almost spectral traces of orange pigment that fade into blue. When you move your head to stop the canvas from pulsating before your eyes, you’re left with exquisite afterimages. It is really something. 

That effect mirrors what visitors will experience when they step into the latest “Infinity Room,” titled Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023), one of Kusama’s largest to date. For the first time, the room, which you enter by crouching down through a half-semicircle door, is illuminated entirely by the natural light that pours in. 

This “Infinity Room” is relatively minimal compared to the others most people will be familiar with. It consists of various circular cutouts in red, yellow, blue, and green, evoking something between a ’90s-inflected clubhouse—I mean that in a complimentary way—and the stained glass of a cathedral, brought down from the clerestory level. Because there is nothing else in the room, it is a contemplative space. The piece isn’t so much reaching for infinity but something beyond it. 

The final room of this exhibition is a tour de force. It features three gigantic pumpkins that appear to undulate. Any sense of motion is stilled: they look frozen in time. They tower over viewers, with the tallest of the three rising to well over 11 feet. 

The three sculptures, all titled Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart (all 2023), are arranged in such a way that they form a path for visitors to navigate. In a way, they are reminiscent of Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, but where his are claustrophobia-inducing, Kusama’s have a lightness and joy to them. 

Bringing airiness to the monumental is a feat that only an artist like Kusama can accomplish. It speaks to the restraint exhibited in the show. Gone is the all-overness for which she has become increasingly known, and now, in its place is something new and utterly transcendent. 

Spoiler alert: the source of all this noise is nothing quite so dramatic. Rather than an explosive weapon or an apocalyptic countdown, the ticking comes from a set of jerry-rigged devices that have been cut in two, then reassembled, courtesy of Josh Kline, who is currently the subject of his first US museum survey at the Whitney.

One of these works, titled Alternative Facts (2017), features a Samsung flip phone and an iPhone attached to each other by red duct tape. Primly shown on a chintzy display, the piece evokes gadgetry repurposed for warfare. The sculpture’s title implies that the conflict in question has been necessitated, and possibly even exacerbated, by the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.

There’s a tendency in mainstream media to catastrophize recent events, like that election or the current pandemic, and claim that they signal a grand finale to life as we know it. But the world already ended a long time ago for the many who face climate change, racism, and economic freefall daily. Kline seems to agree with that line of thinking. For him, the apocalypse is now.

His Whitney survey, “Project for a New American Century,” attests to his foreboding vision, filled as it is with dismembered limbs and late-capitalist junk. It’s dark stuff—you don’t exactly leave a Kline exhibition feeling good about the state of things. But oh, how intoxicating it all is. This terrific show is further proof that Kline is one of our great living artists, a true master at spinning nightmarish visions of worlds to come.

Ugly as it may be from a conceptual standpoint, Kline’s art is quite beautiful to look at, which is no small part due to the way he installs it. Kline treats art spaces the way film directors approach sets, stylizing every imaginable element so that his fictions feel real and lived-in. Accordingly, there are no white cubes in this exhibition, which is arranged non-chronologically and into environments related to an ongoing saga about where we’re headed.

In this exhibition, in lieu of the Whitney’s smooth floorboards, there are now flattened Amazon boxes and raw balsa wood. One gallery is lit gleaming white like an Apple Store, while most others are cast in varying degrees of darkness. It’s all immersive, creepy, and totally unlike the traditional mid-career survey.

The most notable intervention in the Whitney’s architecture is The look, the feel, of Patagonia Nano Puff® (2012/23), which covers a pristine wall facing the Hudson River. It’s a long stretch of black polyester fabric and insulation that was originally produced by Kline in collaboration with the titular outerwear company. With its rows of black rectangles and its recurring Patagonia logos, the piece offers a curious breed of Minimalism and luxury fetishism.

Familiar logos proliferate in Kline’s art. Walking through the show, I amassed a long list of the products invoked: Lays, Jarritos, FedEx, Eastsport, Barbour, Lysol, Walmart, Purina, Levi’s, Gold Medal, Rubbermaid, Advil, Amazon Prime, and many more. There’s a seductive comfort in discovering each label—and an ambient fear in knowing that the act of brand recognition is now a condition of life as we know it.

The earliest pieces in the show, from the late 2000s and early 2010s, attest to this. A looped animation from 2013, titled Forever 21, features digital pills raining down on text spelling out the retail chain’s name. The capsules are red, white, and blue: the colors of the American flag. It is presented alongside refrigerated coolers containing pouches of blood doped with drugs like Wellbutrin and IV bags filled with cocktails of Vitamin C, Red Bull, Ritalin, and more—creepy reminders of how we pump ourselves with trademarked substances in order to work harder, better, faster, stronger.

Nearby, there are two videos whose titles, Forever 27 and Forever 48 (both 2013), imply a bond with that animation. They depict actors playing the musicians Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston, respectively, as though they had never died young. These stars’ faces are crudely superimposed via open-source AI technology, and periodically, their eyes, mouths, and noses stutter, offering glimpses at the real people beneath the computer-generated masks. Underneath, there are living, breathing beings who are getting squeezed out under the weight of a celebrity’s identity—a brand of a different sort.

When humans do show up in Kline’s sculptures, they are made to seem like refuse. Six brutally effective sculptures from 2016 feature people in business casual garb. These office workers look oddly organic as they lie in a permanent slumber, but their 3D-printed plaster forms, with their waxy, pallid coating, betray any signs of life. Curled up in the fetal position, they have been spat out by the capitalistic companies that once employed them and returned to their embryonic state. Now, their amniotic sacs have been replaced with knotted plastic bags, causing them to appear like yesterday’s trash.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say like last week’s recycling, since Kline’s sculpted bodies are often exhibited in parts intended for reuse. Some assembly may be required.

Severed heads, arms, and hands can be found in the janitor’s cart enlisted for Cost of Living (Aleyda), 2014. They’ve been 3D-printed based on the likeness of a real housekeeper who worked at a Manhattan hotel; she allowed herself to be scanned by Kline’s team. After Aleyda was turned into a data file, she became an object whose pieces now lie alongside plaster renditions of her toilet brushes and spray bottles. She has been literally objectified—she is turned into the tools of her labor, perhaps to represent the perspective of her employer—but Kline does not entirely deprive her of personhood. Nearby, the real-life housekeeper can be seen in a confessional-style video in which she discusses her ambitions and the conditions of her work.

Kline’s freakish surrealism is unsubtle in a way that can be jarring. It is unsparing; it cuts through the politesse that typically abounds in conceptual art. It seems directed less at the art-world elite, who may regard its lack of subtlety with a circumspect eye, than it does at the general public, which will find much to gawk at in this show.

Its curator, Christopher Y. Lew, has created an experience that likewise feels accessible. He isn’t keen to position Kline with respect to recent art-historical developments, skirting entirely the issue of post-internet art, a movement of the 2010s whose purveyors glibly ported the look of Web 2.0 into galleries, as Kline did in early works that assume the guise of stock photography. And, unless you read the catalogue, you wouldn’t know that works like Cost of Living (Aleyda) are intentionally paying homage to the tapes of video art collectives like TVTV and Videofreex. Instead, Lew mainly connects Kline’s art not to his peers but to ChatGPT, DALL-E, and deepfakes, which he claims Kline foresaw.

These are sloppy comparisons—Kline’s art doesn’t really have much in common with any of them. It is true, though, that Kline has pointed the way forward for many who came up after him. A case in point: a recent sculpture by Andrew Roberts from 2022’s Whitney Biennial that featured a lopped-off silicone arm with the Amazon logo on it. This isn’t all that dissimilar to Kline’s 15% Service (Applebee’s Waitress’s Head), 2018, in which a server’s 3D-printed neck contains, on its hollow inside, the eatery chain’s apple icon.

If Kline’s art has proven predictive, we probably ought to expect a lot of tech-minded artists to go analog soon. The most recent works in the show, a new group of installations from the series “Personal Responsibility,” list 3D-printed elements among their materials, though I must admit I had trouble spotting them. They mainly consist of freestanding cloistered spaces—a vehicle redolent of the #vanlife trend, a bunker-like cell—that each contain a screen. These screens play videos of fictional characters offering testimonials about leaving society and starting anew; they’re interspersed with hypnotic shorts showing reversed footage of denim, sugar, and more going up in flames.

The “Personal Responsibility” pieces, which lure in issues related to land rights and systemic racism, are unusually knotty for Kline—perhaps too much so for an artist who is best when diagnosing one symptom of societal collapse at a time. But there is something compelling about how stridently un-digital they are, at least compared to the early works on view not far away.

I much preferred the three-channel video installation Another America Is Possible (2017), which envisions a July 4 celebration held in 2043, the year that the US is slated to become a minority-majority country. Across the three screens, Black men and women are shown ceremonially burning a Confederate flag as children run freely. Shot on 16mm film, it reclaims the aesthetic of Levi’s commercials, peddling leftist politics instead of straight-cut jeans.

Kline’s sour worldview and any notion of optimism seem opposed, but this work suggests that the two can be squared. So too does Adaptation (2019–22), in which a group of climate-change seafarers navigate waterlogged Manhattan by boat. The Doomsday clock has already struck midnight; disaster arrived a while ago. But the tone is not all so dour. As the actors in it look out at the deluged landscape they traverse, their gazes seem to express something unexpected: hope.