Author: Jerry Saltz

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact transform both and create a third thing.

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open tall-ceilinged super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures should the need arise. It has arisen.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes in galleries on the walls of auction houses and off the walls in museum storage.

When money and hype recede from the art world one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

Works of art often last forever or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves especially gallery exhibitions are like flowers they bloom and then they die then exist only as memories or pressed in magazines and books.

While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement – movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation a desire for art to be more than showy effects big numbers and gamesmanship.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations that tries to transform decay into something generative that is replicative in a baroque way that isn't about progress and wants to – as Walt Whitman put it – 'contain multitudes.'

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection the bar has been set pretty low.

The last time money left the art world intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries and a few of them have become the best in the world.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992 an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling money was scarce and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings performance art John Cage Joseph Beuys and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile a new art world was coming into being.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.