fee's LIST (through 4/27)

WEDNESDAY
* Lee Bul @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. Lee's sculpture remains as meticulously constructed as before, but she continues to eschew her earlier super-futuristic motif for a decidedly metaphysical, abstract direction.

* Micachu & The Shapes @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. FINALLY some good news of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcanic ash spewing out the Icelandic glacier that locked down trans-European travel for like a week and, in LIST-related events, caused many many band cancelations. In the case here, Sweden's The Mary Onettes are stuck in Europe + UK's Micachu are stuck stateside SO...we lucky ducklings get a fab, poppy Micachu & The Shapes show!

THURSDAY
* Lynette Yiadom-Boakye "Essays and Documents" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Large Expressionist-ish portraits locked in by flowing brushstrokes and the subjects' intense gazes.
+ Carrie Mae Weems "Slow Fade to Black". The historical drama as portraiture, via soft-focus, treated photography.

* Shirazeh Houshiary "Light Darkness" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Veiled and layered abstract paintings, like the sky at dusk, plus her related video animation and works on paper.

* Mohamed Bourouissa "Périphéries" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. The French photographer's (and member of the 'Younger Than Jesus' triennial at the New Museum) subject is the suburbs of France, where W. and N. African-descended youth take on classical poses in their environment.

* Joan Linder "Cost of Living" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Linder's mastery of the large-scale ink drawing — her sprawling duplication of a dive bar at a previous exhibition comes to mind — is peerless. This time, a pun on the show title, she takes on her junk mail and garden weeds w/ the same loving detail.

* Garder Eide Einarsson "Another Modern Moment Completed" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. The reappropriated image, specifically in terms of reproduction as theft, are as much a subject of Einarsson's new paintings as is the history of modern art, w/ themes of Malevich, Lichtenstein and Parrino throughout.

* Patrick Lee "Deadly Friends" @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Draftsman-quality graphite works on paper of 10 years worth of Lee's LA-based subjects: a Noah's Ark of roughly masculine dudes.

* We Are Country Mice + White Wires @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. The final week of We Are Country Mice's twangy-rock residency at Cake Shop/Bruar Falls is a biggie, w/ inclusion of Ottawa effusive garage-rockers White Wires, whose catchy "Ha Ha Holiday" is on constant repeat at my place.

FRIDAY
* Ryan Mrozowski @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg, 7-9p. There's a certain strange folklore to Mrozowski's slightly twisted oil on panel paintings: crowds of people, everywhere, at the theatre, yes, but then paired w/ cattle floating in the sky and against much taller, Daliesque versions of themselves. It's a bit like the urban lore in Jonathan Weiner's moody portraiture, only w/ a middle-Europe twist.

* Jeon Soo-il Retrospective @ NYU (various locations). I great primer for the cerebral Korean director's oeuvre. I've only seen his 2007 film "With a Girl of Black Soil", during the 2008 New York Korean Film Festival, but it still resonates in me and I'm totally planning to check out the other two in the show. Visit the event site for further info.

* "With a Girl of Black Soil" (dir. Jeon Soo-il, 2007) screening @ Cantor Film Center / 36 E 8th St (RW,6 to Astor Place), 6p. Part of the NYU Cinema Studies' retrospective on Jeon, who will attend the screening for a Q&A (always dope). I've copied, verbatim, my take from the 2008 NYKFF on the film: I think the choice for first proper film of the 2008 NYKFF (bypassing the historic drama "Hwang Jin Yi" only because that was a one-off gala event 'off campus' and featured cocktails and all sorts of non-film hubbub) is especially telling of the climate of contemporary Korean cinema. As in, it is an independently produced feature by a realist director, it features mostly non-actors (including the lead Yoo Yeon-mi as the wonderful, precocious Yeong-rim), and it is set in a mining town in the Gangwon-do region (not exactly metropolitan Seoul). And while there is the requisite K-horror feature, the hyper-saccharine romance, the over-the-top action flick, this stark, docu-style drama is the lead film. Jeon uses a lot of sustained and tracking shots in this somber portrait of a little girl (the cutest thing, really) who has to act as parent to her elder, mentally handicapped brother and her ex-miner, spiraling alcoholic father. 'Tough viewing' doesn't even cut it here, and the barren landscape of snow, rocks and soot doesn't give us much to escape the painful family situation. Nor is there much of a soundtrack, though Jeon is deft with the occasional piano chords and fretlass bass lines. The buildup to the conclusion reminded me of Pedro Costa's docu-style "Colossal Youth" and the changing Fontainhas neighborhood in Lisbon. Jeon was on-hand for a great Q&A following the feature, which brought the audience back to reality quite gently, I think, since we were all feeling a bit emotionally fragile when the screen blacked out. And to the girls sitting next to me with the shrimp crisps: thank you for sharing!

* "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2010) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The Korean Spaghetti Western isn't an entirely unknown art-form — think Ryu Seung-wan's "Dachimawa Lee", sort of — but Kim's gunpowder-lit caper, starring the multifaceted Song Kang-ho as 'The Weird', should set the standard.

* No Fun Productions presents Noveller, Okkyung Lee, MV Carbon + more @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 9p/. I'm coming to terms w/ the fact that No Fun Fest is not happening in NY this year. But this night, feat. noise-inclined artists who really pull everything out of their respective instruments (Noveller's searing/enchanting drone guitar, improv cellists Lee and Carbon) will help me deal.

* MEN @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Are you ready for MEN, the Brooklyn-based art/performance collective feat. members of Le Tigre and other delightfully noisy projects, as they celebrate their album release party? w/ Nomos and Nashville's Mlu, appropriately punk for the occasion.

SATURDAY
* Simon English "Full English" @ Robert Goff Gallery / 537B W 23rd St. Delicious show-title aside, this abstract-ish collection of oil paintings and mixed media works on paper remind me a bit of George Condo's twisted portraiture, only w/ the appropriately cheeky resonance of this Londoner.

* Bruar Falls 1 Year Anniversary w/ Beach Fossils + special guests!! @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Has it really been a year? Bruar Falls, the little-sister to LES stalwart indie venue Cake Shop (while lacking a bit in floor-space but never in ace programming), throws a bash, w/ easy-breezy surf-rockers Beach Fossils (debut album out in May), "twin" DJ cuties Peggy Wang (of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Shirley Braha (of NY Noise) + special guests (quiiiite possibly Micachu & The Shapes!). MAYJAH (and, resurrecting the adjective, kick-ass)

* Saturday Sessions feat. Real Estate @ PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G/7 to Courthouse Square) 4p/FREE w/ admission. PopRally hosts this new weekly performance series, which sounds artsier and hopefully enduringly cooler than Warm-Up — which I dig, mind you, esp. in the height of summer, when it avoids the weak rave-like mentality. Artists incl. Glen Baldridge, Donna Chung and Tim Lokiec take inspiration from the Christian Marclay "2822 Records" installation at PS1, screen-printing on blank LP sleeves w/ participants (maybe you??). And at the same time, NJ's finest surf-rockers Real Estate provide live audio! An afternoon of printmaking and surf tunes sounds like just the thing for an early summer.

MONDAY
* Child Abuse + Grooms @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Album release party for anarcho-noiseheads Child Abuse (think grindcore amplified by a Casio keyboard). And the mighty Grooms, amid the sludge and atonal chords, are sounding wickeder each time I see them live.

TUESDAY
* "Picasso in the Met" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). What I'm calling 'part three' or 'the compendium' of the Picasso shows of late (two fab printmaking shows at MoMA and Marlborough NY, read under CURRENT SHOWS) is, almost undoubtedly, the best for last. This is the Met, after all, and they've pulled out all the stops, i.e. their ENTIRE COLLECTION of Picasso's paintings, sculpture, and ceramics, plus loads more drawings to total 250 works. And considering the roof installation, opening the same day (weather permitting!!), the Met is going to get some mad traffic, son. See you there.
+ Doug + Mike Starn on the roof "Big Bambú". The Met's roof installations are super-dope, ushering forth the official beginning of warm weather, in my opinion. The sun blazing on your face as you traverse whatever it is up there, drinking some sort of alcoholic beverage as Central Park extends out in three directions. Where else can you get this experience? The Starn Bros present, in full title, "Big Bambú: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop", an always-in-progress monumental bamboo architectural marvel, that you can climb! And that name! It sounds like something I would have come up with.

* Anamanaguchi + Soft Circle @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Feed your addiction for punk-NES jams (Anamanaguchi) and trippy psych grooves (Hisham Akira Bharoocha aka Soft Circle) tonight!

CURRENT SHOWS
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. I was transfixed for about 20 minutes in this show, Yuen's four new short-film works. Maybe it's her honeyed voiceover, even when she reads Virginia Woolf's suicide note or a missing person's report. Maybe it's the artist acting onscreen as a stand-in for her mother ('Don') or idiosyncratically concocting new laborious hygiene methods ('Clean'). Or it's the dreamy soft-focus that pervades all these tightly edited, surreal encounters, over like a daydream just as you're falling deep into them.

* Almagul Menlibayeva "Daughters of Turan" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Consider me totally enlightened to the contemporary video art scene. Menlibayeva's enchanting, emotive duet "Milk For Lambs" and the pop-ish "Butterflies of Aisha Bibi" marry mythological narratives of the artist's heritage in Kazakhstan. The spiritual cycle of life on the steppe and an ancient love story like C. Asian Romeo & Juliet, staged in two vivid short films, w/ a strong selection of C-prints and lightbox prints in the adjacent gallery. Girls w/ flowers in their mouths, wrapped in iridescent patterned fabrics. Little kids holding goats. It's dope.

* Pablo Picasso "Celebrating the Muse" @ Marlborough NY / 40 W 57th St. Part two of the triumvirate Picasso shows descending on NYC, the others being the FIRST print-related delight at MoMA (see my write-up here) and the forthcoming collection-related exhibition at the Met. This is a golden time for art-lovers and casual art-goers: if your working knowledge of the imminent artist is "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" (and/or "Three Musicians"), these exhibitions, particularly, in my opinion, the gorgeous variety of printmaking, are a blessing. As it's billed, the Marlborough show — museum-worthy in all ways — is full of women, focusing on Picasso's many muses/lovers throughout his oeuvre. And while that's so, there's a lot of bleedover w/ the MoMA show (which necessarily has the muses in it as well), incl. the recurrence of bulls, Minotaurs and saltimbanques. As in: there's a fine "Minotauromachy" etching/grattoir here, just as there's an extensive look at "La Feeme qui pleure" (aka Dora Maar, abstracted). Unlike MoMA, this one contains a brilliant early-career etching "Tete de femme" and a haunting series of artists and muses in varying aquatints and other mediums, like "Femme assiste dans un fauteuil". See this one and MoMA's broader show in tandem — they're only so many blocks apart — and you'll have a fine grasp of Picasso's printmaking.

* Amy Sillman "Transformer" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. If you don't count the rather wittily rendered series of lightbulb-transformation works on paper in the side gallery, about half Sillman's paintings are a lovely huge squarish size, blurring the architecturally geometric and figurative path w/ crisscrossed lines that could signal a human form, and lots of bold expanses of color. They're enough to lose yourself in but not overly, unapproachably large.
+ Anna Sew Hoy "Holes". With a glance, I could see the relation b/w Hoy's utilitarian sculpture and Sillman's expansive works, primarily in the latter's works on paper, like Hoy is transmitting those images into her denim- and fabric-works.

* Jim Campbell "Exploded View" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. The man is doing some wild stuff w/ LEDs. Take the 'standard' Campbell, a bustling street-scene in grayscale that looks like a blurred photograph, and upgrade that to still photography (a rocky beach) w/ 'waves' or 'rolling mist' composed of a crafty LED sequence. Then knock that sucker totally out of the park w/ a suspended grid of exposed lights, blinking on and off that, from a distance reveal themselves to be a figure running down a hill.

* Joel Shapiro @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I've felt that Shapiro's soaring 'stacked box' sculpture had a certain weightless to it, regardless of the heavy medium he used in its construction. That's entirely appropriate here, in this excellent exhibition of his new works. Using brightly painted wood planks, wire and — at least indirectly — ambient space, he has achieved a sort of graceful, exploding ballet, or tropical birds in flight, from these five powerful pieces. The larger ones, like "Was Blue", you can actually walk into, around the planks suspended in space, as your shadow interacts w/ the multitude of the work's own.

* Karel Funk @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Funk's portraiture continues to disquiet, in that the hoodie'd subjects are always turned away, and the backdrop remains stark white, but the lighting effects on the folds and wrinkled fabric deserve a second look.

* Jennifer Poon "A Temporary Space" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. A really impressive exhibition of Poon's (self) portrait watercolors, incorporating collaged paper into a like Garden of Eden landscape. Maybe its the preponderance of lush foliage as Poon's semi-abstracted nude figures cavort and explore. But then we have her 'Untitled Dream' installation, a cast-muslin figure w/ her explicitly rendered eviscera nailed to the wall behind her. That aside, her dreamy cut-paper gouache- and watercolors have me convinced she's very dope.

* Tatiana Trouvé @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. 1st thing that should tip you off to Trouvé's installation on the gallery's 5th fl is the exposed pipes in the entryway. Maybe that or the collection of shoes. Don't make the mistake of removing YOUR shoes too! Inside, she has created a sort of industrial portrait (slightly a la Mark Manders, w/ "Being John Malkovich" thrown in for good measure), mattresses and shoes lashed against pillars, oil-spattered glass sheets and little un-enterable cubbyholes.

* Roy Lichtenstein "Homage to Monet" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. The inaugural exhibition in this W.Chelsea space doesn't waste any time! What w/ the impending Gagosian one-two Lichtenstein still-lifes and Monet late-works, let's get our fix NOW w/ Lichtenstein's reverence to the plein-air Impressionist, which in itself is further testament to the Pop artist's inventive techniques. His 'Cathedral' and 'Haystack' multiples are effectively trippy, but its his takes on the beloved water lilies, w/ and w/o Japanese footbridge, that really knock this show up several million notches. The works were silkscreened onto stainless steel, but not before Lichtenstein took a drill-bit to the metal, hand-carving this whorl pattern (not entirely unlike enlarged Ben-Day dots) that trippily echo rippling water, integrating rather effortlessly w/ the water lilies.

* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic large-scale works done in Zucker's signature applied-cotton style, dabs and tears of the stuff heaped into wetly textured gobs that, from across the room, reveal themselves into chilling antebellum scenes, and the beauty of "Amy Hewes" paddleboat can't quite overcome the visions of the slaves laboring w/ carts of cotton.

* Siobhan Liddell "Ordinary Magic" @ CRG Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. I sensed a kindred spirit in Liddell's delicate cut-paper objects to the intimate late-career works of Eva Hesse at Hauser & Wirth (ending this weekend, read below in LAST CHANCE). There's a deliberateness to Liddell's works, whether the tautness of string augmenting a clay or paper work or extending through one of the artist's handmade tables, a plinth supporting the work plus an inherent link to the piece as a whole. Also: her choice in colors: gold-leaf folded paper with a royal blue underside, a textured acrylic- and cut-paper canvas like a shark's epidermis, nearly monochrome white w/ sneaky dabs and undersides in green.

* Jac Leirner "Osso" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Make what you will of the Brazilian artist's hoarding of plastic bags, stuffing them and cutting them into a stylized cross b/w designer handbags and photo frames, and displaying these valueless objet behind plexiglas. Think Freitag (thanks to the bold colors) only recycled into art. Leirner display is overlong but she manages a surprising range w/ the bags, some of which are relegated to handles and sewn bases only, leaving a great void and only an impression of containment.

* Fiona Rae "Special Fear!" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. I tweeted that Rae's exhibition reminded me of manga on acid, shortly after viewing the show, even though I don't read manga. But I think the comparison is appropriate, since these exuberant, large-scale, many-colored and -textured canvases conceal in their cloudy swooshes stuff like speed-lines, flowers and PANDAS. There's even like butterflies or something in the violet-hued "Build a fairyland for you" — all Rae's works have lovely names like this. Bit sugary viewing, but very very cool.

* Adrian Paci "Gestures" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. Paci is focusing on brief, unscripted 'everyday life' occurring at ritualistic festivities, specifically those from his Albanian heritage. But one of the most compelling pieces — and one of the two video works, the strongest of the various mediums on display here — is two kids chasing a car. Though what Paci's done that relates it, in a greater sense, to the rest of his exhibition is snagging a second of the action, the kids on a dirt path, forest behind them, in mid-dash, and stretched the 'event' out to over five minutes. It reminded me of Jacco OlivierTKTK's show at Marianne Boesky Gallery that just concluded a few weeks ago. Paci's video takes on an incredible painterly effect, as the two figures blur out and draw back into sharp focus, as the road and trees stipple out into a Van Gogh-textured landscape before smearing off into total abstraction. His other video, "Last Gestures", more closely relates to the subject of 'off-moments' caught on camera, here an Albanian wedding as the bride says goodbye to her family. The four screens run in super slo-mo, though, amplifying the rift forming as she receives a kiss on the cheek from her brother and embraces a baby.

LAST CHANCE
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 519 W 19th St. This is indeed the entire Crumb book of pen & ink woodcut-like drawings based on the Book of Genesis, but just b/c you've seen the whole thing laid out on the gallery walls doesn't mean the publication deserves a 2nd look. I was a bit skeptical going in, that the show would reveal everything and leave the publication irrelevant, but Crumb's work — each and every one of these text and image pages — is so lastingly detailed that, if you're engaged w/ it, you need something portable to refer back to, multiple times, to fully appreciate it.

* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. Dumas wields a sense of tension and foreboding in her typically ghostly/ambiguious suite of new paintings, set approximately from media imagery of Israel and Palestine. "The Wall", probably the 1st canvas you'll see upon entering the gallery, sets the tone: a group of Orthodox Jewish men in front of what appears to be the Western Wall in Jerusalem, though it's actually an Israeli security fence in Bethlehem. This stark reality recurs in the other wall works, women lined up against a wall not in prayer but to be searched by armed soldiers, and the unsettling, De Chirico-esque "Figure in a Landscape", where the constriction of the lone woman to the looming security wall 'landscape' is practically echoing. Dumas' close-ups manage to capture this feeling of permeating isolation and lack of human communication, whether the painful "Resurrection" or the mysterious "Olive Tree", whose foliage cannot totally blot out the barriers in the distance.

* Eva Hesse @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A very special exhibition of Hesse's late-period postminimalist works, shortly before her premature passing at age 34. I stress the importance of this collection of mostly unseen pieces, as Hesse had achieved — and was furthering — a transcendent 'non-art' trade that was unlike anything else at the time. That said, however, the majority of this 14-piece offering is a collection of 'improvisational test pieces', wisps and husks of papier-caché (often combined w/ cheesecloth and sometimes a type of adhesive), displayed on a spotlighted work-table, throwing dynamic shadows and resting there simultaneously like archaeological artifacts (they are a boon for us to investigate Hesse's work process) and potentialities for her never-realized future sculpture.

* Ed Paschke @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Jeff Koons, Paschke's studio assistant in the '70s and curator of this career-spanner, notes the 'neurological effect' of Paschke's paintings. That's adept, as this array of druggy, acid-colored anti-Pop portraits, w/ their either collage-y or hallucinogenic (often both) effects, are a particularly fierce trip. His earlier works fuse celebrity w/ kitchy wrestlers and cartoons — like the Marilyn in "Pink Lady" (1970), the gender-bending "Ramrod" (1969). But then they get weirder, as Paschke nears and bypasses 1980, adding test-patterns and neon glows to this increasingly psychedelic bunch. "Gestapo" (1970) feels like a scene from David Lynch's "Inland Empire", and the terrific trio "Ambrosia" (1979), "Fumar" (1979) and stunner "Violencia" (1980), w/ its disembodied lips and saturated electrical singes, is like diving into your favorite '80's cyberpunk film — though the proliferation of blank-eyed, identical, vaguely sinister, suited dudes could be interpreted as a precursor to "The Matrix".
+ Alberto di Fabio. I recommend immersing yourself in Di Fabio's fractured abstract acrylic paintings (most of smallish to medium-sized scale) and works on paper, w/ their purplish and pinkish hues that mimic both ice crystals, frozen tree branches, and somehow neural synapses and aveoli, AFTER pulling yourself from Ed Paschke's intense, but rewarding, exhibition.

* Janet Cardiff & George Burnes Miller @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I drop terms like 'heady trip' a bit too often, but that is precisely what this show is, beginning w/ the sensorially-disturbing "Carnie" installation, a very disturbing, sonically treated carousel, which plays like cut-up, backwards merry-go-round tunes w/ sped-up kids' voices and a sporadic snare rush. Oh: and the carousel animals have speakers tethered to their faces like gimp masks. However...in the next gallery, "The Cabinet of Curiousness" is extremely cool, and lighter-hearted: a circuit-bent card catalog that plays various musical/operatic loops depending on which drawers are pulled out.

* Simon Hantai @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. An excellent mini-survey of the Hungarian-born/Paris-based Abstract Expressionist's unique oeuvre: 'folded canvases'. This includes his heyday works from the '60s, like the stained-glass-like "Peinture", through his reductive monochromes from the '80s that fuse a pattern b/w the paint and bare canvas.

* Meg Webster @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. I'm calling this 'sensory minimalism'. Webster coated squares of paper w/ various kitchen ingredients and other media — ranging from onion powder, chocolate and wasabi to cement and soil — into ostensibly 'monotone' works. The textured surfaces, think Yves Klein stippled (chocolate) or Brice Marden flat (cement), are half the fun. The smell, the unique bouquets embodied in each work, welcome interaction and deep breaths.

* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A full-frontal assault of Abakanowicz's deconstructed-human sculptures in cast aluminum from the late-'80s march toward the windows facing 25th St, an artillery of smaller-to-larger than lifesize torsos and legs. It's a pleasantly off-putting experience, as is the rest of the show, composed of her newest pieces (a creepy morgue-like space of cast-burlap appendages, a wall of crudely welded steel bird 'paper-airplanes'), incl a massive cast-alumimum seated figure, run through w/ poles.

* "Pastiche" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. AKA a group show of a bunch of colorful stuff slopped together. The roster is only heavyweights but that doesn't mean it can't quickly veer into nauseous eye-numbing territory. I preferred the older works as a whole (a fine watery Jim Dine, a strong-lined Jean Dubuffet, a Cubist sewn-fabric Lucas Samaris) to the newer models (gratuitous Keith Tyson and much as it pains me to write I cannot get down w/ James Rosenquist's motorized canvases).

* Liz Craft "Past and Present" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A sort of 'best-of' from the super creative figurative sculptor, from her gorgeous bronze "Tree Lady" to a distorted field of checkered fiberglass and an outsized porcelain egg in a bronze baby carriage.

* Keith Haring @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. The 20th Anniv. of the downtown NY icon. You can't hate on Haring unless you're an absolute Philistine, but if you are you're probably not reading this LIST. Shafrazi created a career-spanning exhibition of Haring's oeuvre, the Day-Glo paintings, the silkscreens and works on paper, the graffiti, Haring's bent-metal sculpture — and despite the fact I've seen a lot of this stuff (and probably you have too, if you followed Haring), there are some nice additions. One: the totemic carved-wood monoliths, painted in searing Day-Glo orange or yellow, and two: the black-light room. Oh yes, a black-light room, way out on the north gallery, outfitted w/ several of Haring's particularly psychedelic works and an '80s techno soundtrack, interspersed w/ Haring's commentary. But beware: you enter the black-light room, you might spend 15+ minutes in there like me b/c, even though I was born in the 80s and missed much of this stuff, it still acted as a sudden flashback.