Visually, the show is pitch-perfect. Occupying the main showroom on the gallery’s sixth floor and two side rooms, “End of an Era” looks like the proverbial million—better make that $50 million. Twelve photo-realist paintings of the famed diamonds line the walls, hung in obtrusively flashy gold frames. Does it matter that the paintings are (a) terrible (they look like they were ripped from the pages of a jewelry store catalog) and (b) probably made by the artist’s team of studio assistants? From the view of the market, no. (People really shell out for this stuff.) Hanging on the far wall is Judgment Day (2009): an enormous glass and gold-plate-fronted cabinet containing 30,000 diamonds, twinkling, cracking and otherwise light-refracting in their trays. Don’t get too excited, though. The diamonds are actually “cubic zirconium.”

At the center of the room, mounted on a marble plinth, is End of an Era (2009)—a decapitated cow head submerged in a tank of formaldehyde. The cow wears a pair of golden horns and a solid-gold headset. For all its gruesomeness, the cow is actually a little goofy-looking, its tongue sticking out. You can almost hear Mr. Hirst chortle. End of an Era comes by way of detachment from the bovine body of a 2008 artwork, The Golden Calf. Forget the Old Testament. Such mocking morbidity is Mr. Hirst’s stock in trade. The artist offers up incredibly expensive objects for art collectors at the same time as he puts a moralizing spin on them, invoking art historical themes of vanity, luxury and death. Mr. Hirst has an attitude. What else is the show’s title but a clever way to get out in front of the criticism that his work is heavy on sensation and short on—what’s the word for it—soul?

Maybe that’s why, in New York, at least, Mr. Hirst has never felt like a leading artist. His brand of cold aesthetic perfection—the sliced-up sheep, the pharmaceutical styling, the butterflies pinned to the canvas—was never the kind of thing other younger artists ever seemed to argue about or particularly aspire to. The market and publicity pages in the glossies are where the ardor for Mr. Hirst has been felt. His career has been one succès de scandale after another, from the famous shark with the head-spinning title of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) to the platinum skull encrusted in diamonds. So far, Mr. Hirst’s instincts have been profitable if not faultless. His forget-the-gallery-I’ll-go-it-alone sale at Sotheby’s in November 2008 raised $200.7 million. That this occurred the same week the stock market tanked makes it a record that will not be beat anytime soon. A detour to the Gagosian Gallery’s fifth floor features several of the artist’s greatest hits: the spin, dot and butterfly paintings. Mr. Hirst has previously said he is going to discontinue several of these series, which were produced in an unnumbered run. Despite that fact—or maybe because of it—they were especially prized among the newly rich during the money mad aughts.

But with “End of an Era,” Hirst seems to have outsmarted himself decisively. This show is historic, a period room that’s instantly of a time and place. Only the time and place is 2007. If art historians of the distant future wanted to re-create the past decade’s craziness, they could do it with this one show, should the work of Richard Prince otherwise perish from the planet. In a way, this is instructive. We are in the first months of a new decade and already are feeling the inevitable fading of last year’s fashions into the historical long view. The current cultural moment, in art and otherwise, is juiced, jumpy and uncertain: a live wire for all those involved. It’s a moment for experimentation, low-cost living, the young. Established reputations are due for swift, sudden revisions. Mr. Hirst is on deck. Apropos of its title, “End of an Era” really does feel like the end of an era, a period style that, now passed, can hardly be believed.

ataylor@observer.com

Since the early 1990s, Mr. Orozco has created a body of conceptually driven art of ad hoc form that reliably adds a deft and surreptitious element to the art-festival circuit of jet-setting cognoscenti and crowd-crushing installations.

This one, organized by Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, gathers 80-odd sculptures, photographs and drawings ranging in size from a fist-size lump of clay to an excavated whale skeleton. So how important is he, really? Stature of Mr. Orozco’s kind still counts for something in the scattered present tense, although less than you might think.

Born in 1962, Mr. Orozco grew up in Mexico City in a family of left-leaning artists and intellectuals. After graduating from art school, the artist left for Madrid, where he was introduced to the work of Manzoni and John Cage, among others. The first supplied a slouchy wit; the second, an ideas-driven asceticism. Moving between New York, Mexico and Brazil, Mr. Orozco traveled light and learned to improvise. Early on, Mr. Orozco, who does not have a studio, hit upon a practice that put a premium on the artist choosing, shaping or otherwise subtly altering an object—say, a ball of clay rolled through the streets of Manhattan, or debris scavenged from a dumpster and made into an on-site sculpture.

Often Mr. Orozco made art out of nothing. In 1993, at the age of 31, he had his first one-man show at MoMA as part of the museum’s “Projects” series spotlighting younger artists. A decade and a half and innumerable debuts later, people are still talking about Home Run, Mr. Orozco’s best-remembered contribution to the show. For the piece, Mr. Orozco arranged fresh oranges in the apartment and office windows across 54th Street. There is something infinitely touching and consoling about the gesture, as though everything in the world were on its way to becoming sculpture. But if one asks why Home Run has lasted, the answer probably has to do more with generational romance.

It was the early 1990s. A show by a contemporary Latin American artist at the modernist temple was deemed a political event.

In any case, Mr. Orozco’s appearance heralded a future era—ours, or just about—when art would move seasonally (Miami in December; Kassel, Germany, in June) and hometowns no longer counted. At MoMA, that sense of youthful traveling to improbable places has settled into something that looks a lot more familiar—call it mid-career success.

Ms. Temkin includes a selection of his most successful works and a couple of his less successful ones, too. See the whale skeleton hanging in the museum’s second-floor atrium. See also Mr. Orozco’s more recent series of circle paintings in tempera and gold leaf. Ask yourself why. Beauty occurs on a case-by-case basis. The best of Mr. Orozco’s work intensifies or alters a familiar or mundane object such that it registers with the force of strangeness.

This is the case with La DS (1993). To make it, Mr. Orozco cut a 1960s-era Citroën DS sports car into three horizontal slices and removed the center: streamlined to obsolescence.

What may tip Mr. Orozco in the balance of your favor is this idea of him as a one-man street team for the beautification of aesthetic byways you didn’t know existed or, more likely, had never taken the trouble to think about before. Or maybe not. Part of the exhibition re-creates Mr. Orozco’s debut, in 1994, at the Marian Goodman Gallery on East 57th Street. For the show, Mr. Orozco pinned a clear plastic Danon yogurt lid, price tag included, onto each of the gallery’s four walls. That’s all, folks.

A couple of thoughts about Yogurt Caps. The first thought is that pinning a yogurt lid onto the gallery wall was a brave thing for Mr. Orozco to do, a gesture of irreproachable purity that focuses the viewer’s attention on issues like setting, context and perception.

The second thought, which follows harshly on the heels of the first, is, so what? Didn’t Duchamp do something similar, albeit at the start of the last century rather than its played-out end? Can you think of a more time-honored tradition than the Duchampian ready-made? Mr. Orozco may be a major artist, but he sometimes seems stuck playing in minor key.

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Organized by senior curator Neville Wakefield, MoMA photography curator Eva Respini, and MoMA archivist Michelle Elligott, "1969" is drawn entirely from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, of which P.S. 1 is an affiliate. The show recasts the convulsions, scene-making and palace revolts that probably weren’t nearly as vivid in their own time. (This critic admittedly wasn’t there.) But that’s the way history works. Could the curators have picked 1968, the worst year in modern American politics, and gotten the same or similar results? Probably. Mr. Nauman actually had his New York debut that year, at Leo Castelli, before he rolled tape for Pacing Upside Down and other endurance tests.

Forty years later, Mr. Nauman, regarded by many as the most influential artist of his generation, is as much a part of modern art culture as a Rodin sculpture. So what the hell happened? Without going into too much detail—apart from a day-by-day timeline, the show is wanting of solid wall-texts—"1969" comes across as the trashing of several precious tastes. One of the first galleries in the show includes a Color Field painting by Helen Frankenthaler. Titled Commune, it’s one of the big, lyrical stain paintings that were championed by some critics, most prominently Clement Greenberg, as the future of painting. Today, we know better. We also no longer have anything resembling a "movement." Styles change with the leaves in New York, if not more regularly.

Antiwar politics plays a big role in the show. One piece, titled Q. And Babies? A. And Babies (1970), consists of posters of the My Lai massacre, distributed by the Art Workers’ Coalition. The radical and troublemaking group—was there any other kind back then?—protested other things, too, like museum trustees who helped underwrite them. History is unclear on this point, but the Art Workers’ Coalition may be the only group to actually spill blood, albeit of the animal kind, at MoMA. To the barricades. Fluxus, too, makes an appearance, in a series of ironic kits. The civil rights movement is given less attention. One exception is the work of Emory Douglas, the official artist and minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, and a maker of agitprop par excellence. Feminism and gay rights appear barely at all in the show, although feminist art would exert an enormous influence on the next decade of art. "1969" is mostly white and male. So, depressingly, was the art world back then.

Other works summon the era’s stoned, sullen mood, like East Coast, West Coast, a filmed conversation between the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Or Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, an engrossing account of the courtship between Factory regular Louis Waldron and Viva.

Spend an hour or two at P.S. 1, and one becomes aware of a general tilt in the direction of avant-garde toward the obscure. Advanced art requires an advanced degree. It’s taken for granted that a work by the great Nam June Paik appeals more to the inner cerebral track than the eye, unless you a have a Lou Reed–like thing for metal machine music. An artist like Robert Barry makes even fewer concessions to, say, the casual museum visitor or gallery-goer.

Forty years later, contemporary artists still have to come to terms with this stuff. The Bruce High Quality Foundation art collective has installed five noisy, attention-grabbing installations, called "portable museums," to critique the way museums work. The question they raise is indeed fatal, although not the way their creators might think. How much history can you fit onto the cutting edge before you have to start calling the cutting edge something else?

But in spite of Man Ray’s fame, his biography is missing the sort of facts and anecdotes that normally fill out an artist’s legend. A satisfying new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Invention,” attempts to fill the gaps. Organized by the curator Mason Klein, the exhibition displays paintings, photographs, sculptures, films and dusty Dadaist hijinks, more than 200 in all.

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the eldest child in a close-knit family of Russian Jewish émigrés. His father was a tailor who worked in a garment factory; his mother was a seamstress.

The show’s thesis is, in part, that Man Ray’s life and career were shaped by his experience as the son of Jewish immigrants. At some point, Manny was streamlined to “Man Ray,” a commercial tactic of assimilation not uncommon for children of immigrants aspiring to artistic success. (Andrew Warhola, a Slovakian kid from Pittsburgh, did the same.) Later, as an adult traveling through Paris, Man Ray went to great lengths to suppress his background, swearing family members to secrecy and writing a 1963 biography, gamely titled Self-Portrait, that left out almost all mention of dates.

As a young man, Man Ray fell hard for Europe’s modern gods, starting with the 1913 Armory Show. Early works in the show display the artist’s apprentice efforts to master Cézanne, Fauvism and Cubism. MoMA’s The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916), a semi-abstract canvas, is generally thought to be his best, combining piquant color—rare for the artist—with jittery energy.

Around that time, Man Ray was introduced to Marcel Duchamp. The two became close friends and would later collaborate on New York Dada, the house pamphlet for the otherwise short-lived New York Dada scene. Surviving works from that period, like L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse (1920/71), a tied-up sewing machine in a blanket, looked outrageous once but may no longer provide such a thrill. Man Ray left for Paris in 1921, where he met some of the most important figures in the vanguard of art.

“Alias Man Ray” is unlikely to alter the view that Man Ray’s chief talent was in photography. The standouts are the artist’s rayographs—X-ray–like images made on photographic paper without the aid of a camera. The works brace visual flair against obdurately un-poetic objects—a pistol, a key chain, a comb and so forth. The show also features a handsome suite of Man Ray’s work in fashion photography, which he later insisted he did just for the money. But his portrait of his assistant, Lee Miller, is lovely—a solar aureole the way of angels. At the same time, Man Ray’s imagination has a nasty side. His female nude montages put a chilly hold on Eros.

It’s worth noting that Man Ray felt more comfortable living in Paris, then a hotbed of anti-Semitism, than he did in his hometown. After the war, the artist returned to Paris and spent the next 20 years working quietly in his studio on rue Férou. Some documentary footage from the period included in “Alias Man Ray” show him as a carousing grandfather figure with a weakness for cigars, French berets and cornball anecdotes about Andre Derain. Go figure. One leaves the show thinking Man Ray is a subject that can’t help but remain unknowable.

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To doubt Mr. Hockney as a lightweight (and some critics do) is to doubt the value of stylishness and spiritual ease in art—not ecstasy, exactly, but brightness conveyed in the artist’s delectable line and catchall of quotation. It’s why “David Hockney: Painting 2006-09,” a two-venue show of the artist’s foray into landscape painting, keeps packing in the crowds at PaceWildenstein’s midtown and Chelsea galleries.

The show, which runs through Dec. 24, is advertised as a return to oil painting. Aside from his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial beside some slackly languorous work by Elizabeth Peyton, Mr. Hockney’s has not been seen much in recent years. In 2005, he decamped from his longtime home in Los Angeles to Bridlington, a summer resort town in East Yorkshire, England, not far from where he grew up. There the artist began painting pictures of the countryside, of all things: plain air scenes of effulgent foliage and bloblike trees under bluebird skies, reportedly at a rate of two to three canvases a day.

The paintings seem very English, going back to Constable and the countryside visions of the lesser-known 19th-century Romantic Samuel Palmer. Mr. Hockney’s drawing on diverse sources here.

The landscapes are the latest act in a 40-year career that has been full of acts. In an otherwise affectionate catalog essay, Lawrence Weschler, a friend of the artist who happens to be the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University writes, “It was as if, after over twenty years of myriad wanderings, he’d found a figurative (non-abstract) way to clean past the monocular optical vise.” 

Mr. Weschler may be onto something here. There is a widely felt sense that, for all his talent and energy, Mr. Hockney’s work fell off sometime in the late ’70s.

Mr. Hockney’s first act is still the one we keep coming back to, the moment in 1964 when the already successful painter bleached his hair blond and left England for Los Angeles. Early on, Mr. Hockney was loosely associated with Pop, but his evocations of Southern California, the pools and the pool boys, were unshadowed in a way Pop was not. (The seasonless azure sky of A Bigger Splash (1967) is still the all-time great advertisement for California living.) Then there were the portraits: of friends, family and (male) lovers. If his openness in presenting his own gay love life is not to be considered rebellious, then there was little else in his arsenal to support a revolt, a source some critics may say of his popularity; but that is unfair, because his paintings of this era deserved to be popular.

And anyway, by the late ’70s, Mr. Hockney had detoured in a half-dozen directions: theater sets and costume design, where the artist showed himself to be a virtuoso; photography, where he did not; and farragoes into Cubist collage, Chinese philosophy and “fax” drawings, as well as the artist’s crazily overpublicized theory that from the Renaissance onward, artists used optical devices to paint in perfect one-point perspective. In hindsight, Mr. Hockney’s interests could also be seen as an extended riff on the difficulty of fixing sight in a three-dimensional world, as if the artist had figured out that reality was, in the end, overdressed. Today, Mr. Hockney sends pictures to friends on his iPhone. He also paints portraits on a Wacom tablet, before running them through Photoshop. (A selection is included at Pace Prints.)

Which brings us to the landscapes. They are as pleasurable as you’d expect, gorgeous without being great. The twinkling surface of a work like May Blossom on the Roman Road (2009) addresses itself purely to the eye. Mr. Hockney is in a woozy, bee-loud season these days, saturated in color: deep purples, greens and pinks. The broken, brushed upon energy of Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 6 (2009) and a dozen of the smaller pictures remain stylistic feats of speed, conveying engagement in broken brush stroke surfaces and compositions the vigor of which isn’t always immediately apparent at the first look.

The big production paintings, like Winter Timber (2008)—actually many separate canvases fitted together in postproduction—are stagy, and you may tire of its empurpled sweetness. That said, Winter Timber drew audible wonderment from gallery-goers at a recent visit, and the gallery was full.

It may be better to believe that when a major artist engages a large audience, there is evidence that something perfect or profound has been made. But the glory of Mr. Hockney and his shortcomings are all part of the same package: unconfounding delight.

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One sees about a dozen big names—the great Mexican muralists of the 1930s, Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros; the singular Frida Kahlo; and Yanquis modernists like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell—but twice as many unknowns. The best thing about this intensely enjoyable show is its reach into minor figures and archival material, giving a wide introduction to lesser-known chapters in the city’s complicated life as an art capital.

Organized by the museum’s director, Julian Zugazagoitia, and its chief curator, Deborah Cullen, the show sprints and doubles back over the 50-year period between the turn of the century and World War II. The curators put a premium on artist-to-artist networking, as artists from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico and others introduced Latin American art to a prewar cosmopolitan circle hot for foreign influences. One of the lessons of the show is that artists, especially the good ones, have mysterious ways of discovering similar talents.

To summarize only one line of personal and professional connections: In 1880 the Uruguayan artist and illustrator F. Luis Mora moved to New York and took up teaching at the Art Students League. For a time, Georgia O’Keeffe was a student. O’Keeffe would go on to marry Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz would go on to partner with Marius de Zayas, a Mexican-born mover and shaker, to organize the first Picasso show on American soil, at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in 1915. Future work by curators may be needed to fill in the gaps on de Zayas (who gave Diego Rivera his first one-man show) or other underrated or neglected figures, like proto–Pop artist Joaquín Torres-García.

For the most part, “Nexus New York” gives you all you think you need to know, like how during one of the worst years of the Depression, John D. Rockefeller commissioned Rivera, a pan-socialist and egoist’s egoist, to paint a mural demurely titled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, for the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Guess what happened to that. But “Nexus New York” also makes you want to know more—to get the lowdown on the bohemians and creative types with a curse on them, like Dorothy Hale. Hale, a Ziegfeld gal, threw herself a going-away party at her apartment on Central Park South. When the party was over, she threw herself out the window.

A more familiar figure, Alice Neel, delivers the show’s biggest jolt. The American-born Neel met her first husband, Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, at art school in Pennsylvania in 1925. They were married a year later, lived abroad in Cuba and settled back in the United States, where they lost a child to diphtheria, and later split up. Neel had a nervous breakdown, painted murals for the WPA and later moved to East 107th street with her second husband, Puerto Rican musician José Negrón.

She spent more than two decades in the neighborhood, barely getting by and painting some of the finest portraits of the century. The Spanish Family (1943), of a tired-looking mother and her three kids, is as unsentimental a picture of family as any in art. If you’re looking for hard luck and a tough talent, Neel’s your woman. Her legend has been on a steady rise since her death, in 1984, and her appearance at El Museo del Barrio memorializes an aspirant of transnational culture who just happened to live up the street. Perhaps that’s why this show felt so much like a homecoming.

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 “Nexus New York: Latin / American Artists in the Modern Metropolis” is on view at the El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, till Feb. 2010.

The exhibition and an accompanying catalog edited by Mr. Holzer don’t tell us anything radically new about Lincoln. Its picture of Lincoln is our picture of Lincoln—morally upright, politically shrewd, anguished over the war’s toll. The 16th president is never that far away, either from history museums or even the public’s thoughts. Lincoln is one of two communal touchstones binding our turbulent democratic society together. The other being TV, God bless it.

This year, Lincoln’s bicentennial, has shined an especially pious light on the Lincoln legend. Headed into the late months, you could be forgiven for a bit of Lincoln fatigue.

And perhaps this exhibition needs a little forgiveness for the awkward historical conjunction that provides its premise: Lincoln visited New York only five times during his life, and only once during his presidency. (Events kept him elsewhere.) But this is the New-York Historical Society, after all, and perhaps one of the great reasons to see this exhibit is the unstinting portrait of New York’s wickedness in the 1860s.

Even then the promise of New York was that here rustic talent grew best, and nowhere else.

When Lincoln arrived in New York in Feb. 27, 1860, to deliver an hour-and-a-half-long speech on the issue of the Constitution and slavery to a sellout crowd of 1,500 at Cooper Union, he was the favorite son of western Republicans (back when the West meant Illinois and Indiana). But he hadn’t won an election in more than a decade and his record in office consisted of a single, mostly undistinguished term in Congress.

Two months after the Cooper Union Speech, which ends in a double-barrel blast of “Let us have faith that right makes might,” Lincoln had won the Republican nomination for president. An overnight success, to borrow some showbiz jargon.

We made Lincoln look like a winner the way the folks back home in Springfield never could. One of the fascinating subplots of “Lincoln and New York” is that New Yorkers were wise in the ways of media and the power of pictures way before it was wise about anything else.

The morning of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln stopped by photographer Mathew Brady’s studio for a photo portrait. Brady asked Lincoln to yank up his collar, so as to appear less scrawny for a potential national audience that had no idea what he looked like.

The image of a suited and stately Lincoln polished the prairie rail-splitter’s image. (The photo is included in the show, along with the actual lectern used in the shoot.) Lincoln reportedly said, “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me president.”

You may be gratified to think that in the crucial hour of our nation’s history, this sometimes unimaginably superficial city “made” one of our most astounding statesmen.

New York was in fact a bastion of pro-slavery opinion, trailing upstate New York in progressive politics. “Lincoln and New York” includes a gallery detailing the screaming headlines, partisan rags and editorial kingmakers of the era’s press: some 174 daily and weekly newspapers in 1860. Lincoln’s famous letter to the editor addressed to Horace Greeley, the Quixote behind the pro-Union New York Tribune, is included. That, and the editorials, satire and political cartoons that ran in anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery papers like The World and The New-York Daily News.

They still carry a shock—of what? Recognition, maybe, of the directions democratic discourse often takes.

Hard as it is to imagine of our present-day city, which prides itself on its (mostly) liberal political convictions, but Cooper Union speech aside, Lincoln was deeply unpopular in New York. He lost the city in 1860 by about 25,000 votes. He also lost Brooklyn and Westchester. In 1864, facing a collation of antiwar Democrats, called Copperheads, and an Irish immigrant bloc enraged at the possibility of competing against African-Americans for jobs, he lost again. “Lincoln and New York” takes us out of the cosmopolitanism of the Bloomberg II era and reminds us of a time that was probably far worse than the cauldron of Tammany sachem and the Five Points slum combined.

Along the way, the exhibition hits a couple of blind spots of local historical knowledge. Like Fernando Wood. Don’t recognize the name? In an era of scandals big and small, but mostly big, Wood is my candidate for chief scoundrel: the mayor who, at the start of the Civil War, proposed the city ditch the Union and declare itself open to Southern trade. Read it; believe it.

The picture becomes clearer, and more complicated, with every step.New York State sent more men and suffered more casualties as a state than any other in the Union. And here the Draft Riots of July 1863 left more than 140 dead, mostly African-Americans, in the worst racial violence in American history.

With his assassination, Lincoln became an overnight sensation in New York.

On April 17, three days after the assassination, more than 150,000 people turned out on Broadway to pass Lincoln lying in state at City Hall. Profound mourning did not get in the way of the hustle: Lincoln pictures, Lincoln plates, Lincoln ribbons, Lincoln lockets, every piece of penny crapola big enough to fit the martyred president’s image.

Is it worth reflecting on at a time when, after nearly a decade-long turn as America’s City, New York, or at least Wall Street, is again nationally reviled? Some semi-corrupt strand wound deep in our cultural DNA? Beats me.

Either way, this exhibition reminds one of New York’s greatest traits: The city will not be shamed.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Frank found his subject in the national demotic: bikers; Hollywood starlets; Park Avenue worthies; Oral Roberts; New York City drag queens; newlyweds in Reno; small-town cretins; rodeo dudes adrift in the Big City.

Then there were the recognizably iconic places, like a Motown assembly line, but also byways of poverty, backsliding and despair.

Mr. Frank spent the better part of the next year editing a thousand or so rough prints down to 83. Then a book: The Americans, first published in France in 1958. Fifty years and more than seven editions later, it remains one of the great achievements of postwar art.

This show—which previously stopped at the National Gallery of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was organized by Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, and the Met’s Jeff L. Rosenheim—runs until Jan. 3. Their thesis, to be somewhat reductive about it, is that Mr. Frank chronicled a ballooning consumer culture riven by social, political and economic inequality—and “helped the nation see itself more clearly.”

This feels right in the general and wrong in the specific. After walking through the exhibition—which gathers together The Americans’ photos with Frank’s lesser-known prior work in Europe, and archival material such as contact sheets and letters—you may feel you have a less sure grasp of the photographs than when you started.

But this, too, may be a reductive assessment. Even today, The Americans registers an unfathomable strangeness. I have long since given up trying to get the “message” of Parade–Hoboken, New Jersey (1955), the first photograph in the book and one of Mr. Frank’s best-known images—if it has a message. The photo depicts, in part, a lady staring out from a window, her face cut off from view by a breezing Stars and Stripes. This is not at all like the big picture spreads in Life, with their easily scanned, socially conscious reportage.

Born in 1924 to German-Jewish parents, Mr. Frank moved to New York City at the age of 24. What he saw of his adopted country, he saw with the eyes of an outsider. Early critics despised The Americans for this same reason: its harsh cast and coarse grain. Other photographers—Americans—had found their subject in the dispossessed, including Walker Evans, whose American Photographs, published in 1938, chronicled Dust Bowl–era down-and-outs. But Evans ennobled—in feeling and in technique. Mr. Frank did not. As the curators note, many of Mr. Frank’s photographs are out of focus, blurred or teetering, as though the photographer hadn’t looked through the viewfinder at the raw stuff in front of him. The lens becomes a metaphor for Mr. Frank’s critical distance.

This new freedom, formal and thematic, to photograph what catches one’s eye, or, more likely, gets under one’s skin in a bad way, constitutes Mr. Frank’s enormous influence on the generation of American photographers that followed: Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus. In terms of range and ambition, Mr. Frank was photography’s Jason of the interstate highway, as good in his medium as Robert Rauschenberg was in collage. And there is more than a little in common between the train of narrative associations let loose by The Americans and Rauschenberg’s Combine series of the mid-to-late 1950s.

“Looking In” makes an expert’s case for Mr. Frank’s careful curation of the book’s picaresque momentum. Often the pairings create dislocation; say, a picture of an African-American preacher kneeling with a cross on the banks of the Mississippi (Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana [1955]) turning onto a statue of St. Francis blessing the Los Angeles strip (St. Francis, gas station, and City Hall–Los Angeles [1956]).

In one of the fortuitous meetings that give the history of art such a nice shape, Mr. Frank asked Jack Kerouac to write the introduction to the book’s American edition. He and Kerouac had not met until after Mr. Frank’s trip, but they moved in the same circles, and Mr. Frank was friends with Allen Ginsberg. The introduction is one of the finest tributes ever from a writer to an artist, a hosanna of two fellow travelers’ affinity for one another. The closing lines of Kerouac’s second draft:

“Robert Frank, a Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, he roamed America and sucked a poem clean out of it, right on film, and here it is. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.” He sure did.

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Today, however, there are actually nine in town, thanks to a visit from Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1657-58) at the Met. The painting comes by way of the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, in part to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s trip to New York. (The lady has been to the city once before, for the 1939 World’s Fair.) The Milkmaid hangs as the centerpiece among the Met’s five other Vermeers and a selection of Dutch paintings and prints from the museum’s permanent collection for an exhibition organized by Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings. The show runs through Nov. 29.

A half-century of scholarship has aimed at replacing the hidden, personally opaque Vermeer with the historical Vermeer, the man from Delft. “Vermeer and the Delft School,” an epochal, large show organized by Mr. Liedtke in 2001, situated the artist among a hometown cast of artists and the cross hairs of a go-for-broke entrepreneurialism that bankrolled the Dutch Golden Age; bankrupted its best painter, Rembrandt; and left the slow-moving Vermeer to get by, just barely, with loans from his mother-in-law.

As in that earlier exhibition, Mr. Liedtke does us the favor of seeing The Milkmaid in the context of Dutch genre paintings by Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch and Gabriël Metsu. (For the especially curious, there’s a gallery of prints explaining the role that servant girls played in the private imagination of a Dutch male audience, including a disquisition on the slang meaning of “milking.”)

IN THE MILKMAID, the subject tips a jug of milk into a wide handled bowl. The maid is sturdily built. Her sleeves are rolled up. She is wearing a blue apron and standing in front of a tabletop loaded with a wicker basket and crusty bread. The show authoritatively lays out the cultural currents, themes and emblems of upper-middle-class Dutch life, the whitewashed tidiness but also the peeking feelings of desire, as seen in the tiny figure of Cupid sketched on a wall tile in the background of The Milkmaid. That is the subject of an earlier Vermeer, the wine-soaked A Maid Asleep, circa 1656-57, also in the show.

In an accompanying text, Mr. Liedke notes that The Milkmaid is not really “timeless,” but a genre scene. Really, it’s about a house servant making bread pudding or, possbily, porridge. Mr. Liedtke also notes that the 18 x 16.5 inch painting is one of the last works of the artist’s formative years (Vermeer was all of 25 when he painted it). The young family man was keenly interested in how well similar scenes by other artists, like the supremely gifted ter Borch, living nearby in The Hague, were selling. Still, one comes away with the feeling that history stops short at Vermeer’s feet—at least, it doesn’t come close to accounting for the painting’s sacerdotal stillness, or Vermeer’s talent, which is hard to grasp even today. Really great artists remain alone in the world, and there is nothing to be done about it.

Take, for example, the effects of light in the The Milkmaid, which filters through a glass-paned window on the painting’s far left and settles over the room, glowing like softly focused gold manna. Vermeer paints in ways that continually confound our eyes and sense of form. There is nothing else in art quite like his ability to load liquidly a household object—say, a crust of bread or a string of pearls—with photorealistic details that simultaneously form and break down before the eye into pointillé dots of silver and gold. A visit? Hardly. This was a visitation.

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This used to take time. No longer. Today, the social moment lasts longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly. But not by much, and just wait until the money pumps back into the market sometime next year. Please, a quick show of hands. Who remembers “Lessness,” the shrugged off spiritualism evinced at the last Whitney biennial? How about the 10 big up-and-comers from the not very vivid year of 2006?

This is a critical slide area, and a problem to sort out. Still, there are gallery shows that capably center an artist for the audience, while setting out some definitive idea of what the artist has been working on since we last saw them and what direction he or she is headed—which is to say, definitive for the next six months. Two such shows are currently up at Deitch Projects.

At the gallery’s 18 Wooster Street location, a show of artist Tauba Auerbach, titled “Here and Now / And Nowhere,” runs until Oct. 17. This is Ms. Auerbach’s second solo show at the gallery. Earlier this year, the artist, who was born in 1981 and works in New York and San Francisco, appeared in “Younger than Jesus,” the instant-youth survey at the New Museum, with well-made paintings that approximated, in two dimensions, the surface of shattered glass.

“Here and Now / And Nowhere” is a multiplex array of the artist’s work since then. It includes the artist’s Static series of photographs, Crumple and Fold paintings, a sculpture and—center stage—The Auerglass, a two-person wooden pump organ created by Ms. Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow, of the Los Angeles group Glasser, and constructed at Parsons Pipe Organs in upstate New York.

The Static works are big color photographs of analog interference patterns, i.e., the roll on the picture of your landlocked grandmother’s outdated television set. The Static series—eight are on view—bank fast acting, acidic colors against grainy backgrounds. Just stick with the fact that the photos are beautiful.

The biggest paintings in the show, Crumple VI and Crumple VII (2009), look like a crumpled sheet of paper, greatly enlarged. On closer inspection, the works’ surface break down into head-spinning grids of benday dots, as in the style of Bridget Riley’s Op paintings from the 1960s. Close are a suite of Fold paintings which look—get ready—like a folded sheet of paper but are actually carefully handled paint.

How about that organ? You can find the artist there, every Tuesday through Saturday, at 5 p.m., until Oct. 17, playing on the goofball pipes. I caught one performance on the Friday before Labor Day. If I tried to resist it, resistance failed. Without cohering, “Here and Now / And Nowhere” is alert sorcery.

Around the block, at Deitch’s space on 76 Grand Street, is “Black Light,” a show of 18 photographs by the well-respected Kehinde Wiley that runs until Sept. 26. Mr. Wiley paints photorealistic portraits of contemporary African-American men in lordly postures à la Van Dyck. We’ve seen a lot of the lordly Wiley in recent years. The critic Roberta Smith, writing in The Times last year, numbered the artist’s solo shows since 2003 at 15.

“Black Light” may be the first time we’ve seen Mr. Wiley’s photographs, but the show—his sitters were found at the Fulton Street Mall—does not budge one’s idea of Mr. Wiley, his powers as a painter or the sense of an artist hitting an agreeable formula. Mr. Wiley’s photographs, like the painting, are lustrous on the surface, technically gleaming, and airless.

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