For art lovers who spend their days traipsing from gallery to museum, that means the air is crisp during the walk or ride from one to the other, and the sidewalks with bag-laden shoppers. During a recent visit, no one museum exhibition towered above the rest, although one medium, color photography, seemed to be dominating the galleries. As usual in this hub of the arts, you're sure to find something to suit any fancy. Retrospectives of important past artists help fill out the feast. Mary Jane shoe sprouting long black hair, the Museum of Modern Art jumps into the unsettling art of the last 40 years.
People can complain that the juxtapositions are too obvious or too obtuse.
If the themes are well-chosen, they can help make sense of a chaotic scene. Instead, you have pre-teens burning down a tree in the back yard in a Nic Nicosia photo and sexually charged images of youths by photographers Jock Sturges and Sally Mann. You have an untitled lithograph, probably autobiographical, by the late David Wojnarowicz, a portrait of a typical-looking boy whose homosexuality will cause him, the artist savagely predicts in the accompanying text, heartbreaking troubles. This is youth as innocence lost. Associations ricochet around the galleries and into the art world.