The work in question was Yogurt Caps, which Mr. Orozco, the Mexican conceptual artist, had installed at the Marian Goodman Gallery in 1994 as part of his first solo show in the United States. The installation was a provocative one, consisting as it did of nothing more than four clear, blue-rimmed Dannon lids, each attached to one of four walls of an otherwise empty room in the gallery.

“We had a little panic, my colleague Paulina Pobocha and I, because suddenly we had this flash, like maybe they don’t have those yogurt caps at Marian Goodman’s anymore,” Ms. Temkin said at a MoMA press breakfast earlier this fall. She added later: “I was curious if they had just been thrown out at the end of the exhibition.”

The idea of it was upsetting, as Ms. Temkin really, really wanted Yogurt Caps in her show. Though the piece “obviously involved no craft on the part of the artist, no hours of apparent labor, and no decisions that would have seemingly been considered aesthetic choices,” the curator said, it was nevertheless an important work: one that got people to contemplate their relationship to the gallery walls and the nature of empty space. “It was an astoundingly audacious move, to just nail those yogurt lids onto the four walls of the main gallery and call it a show,” Ms. Temkin said. “In many cases people walked into the exhibition and didn’t even know that anything was there at all!”

Critics at the time were divided: a review in Art in America called the show “yet another tedious effort to wed neo-conceptualism to commodity critique”; Frieze went with “disarming articulation of emptiness.” As Ms. Temkin put it: “There was some appreciative commentary, but I’m sure on a head-count basis there was a lot more head-scratching than ooh-ing and aah-ing.”

The panic over the yogurt caps was swiftly allayed when Ms. Pobocha, the MoMA curatorial assistant who is working on the show with Ms. Temkin, called the gallery director and confirmed that the lids were indeed safe and sound and in their possession.

Or, well, they basically were.

The truth was that the original set of lids—the four that were used in the Marian Goodman show—were sold long ago to a private collector. What the gallery had on hand instead was a set of exhibition copies—decoy lids, you might say—that Mr. Orozco had purchased and put into storage just in case a need for them ever arose.

As discussed in last week’s Observer, the use of exhibition copies in museums has lately been the subject of energetic debate among curators, conservators, art historians and others in the art world. A colloquium on this subject was held at the Tate Modern in 2007, and more recently, a committee devoted to rigorously exploring it was formed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The central questions under discussion concern the circumstances under which it is ethically and legally acceptable to create exhibition copies; the proper way to label them when they are displayed before the public; and the art-historical ramifications of their use for concepts like authenticity and originality.

In interviews, neither Ms. Temkin nor Ms. Pobocha seemed terribly concerned about walking into that mess of uncertainties.

“I don’t remember if we ever thought they were the originals or not, or if that question ever came up,” said Ms. Pobocha last month. “It was never really talked about in [those] terms.”

Which is to say, if you’ve seen one blue Dannon yogurt lid, you’ve seen ’em all! What does it matter if those in the MoMA show aren’t the same ones that Mr. Orozco used when he first mounted the piece 15 years ago?

“The importance of the work, I think, lies in the gesture more than it does in the actual artifact,” Ms. Pobocha said.

Goodman Gallery director Andrew Richards, who has worked with Mr. Orozco for many years, agreed. “It’s not so much the object that matters in this instance—it’s the idea.”

Fair enough! Except that the principal motivation behind using the exhibition copies instead of the originals, at least according to Mr. Richards and Ms. Pobocha, is that because the lids are so small and delicate, they could get damaged or even stolen in the course of the exhibition.

“You can’t just lift a painting off the wall and walk out of the museum with it. These are just much more fragile in that sense,” Ms. Pobocha said. “I’m not saying anyone’s going to steal them, but they could, if they wanted to. Also, if you think about how crowded MoMA gets on Friday nights, one of them could easily just be knocked off the wall and stepped on.”

As far as the regular viewing public is concerned, in other words, all yogurt lids are the same. But when it comes to the collector who paid good money for the original set, distinctions must be made. Such are the contradictions one must tolerate when monetizing conceptual art.

Most of the objects in the MoMA show will be originals. Ms. Pobocha said one other exhibition copy might be used: an empty shoebox that was first shown in Venice more than a decade ago.

“It could potentially get kicked around,” she said.

lneyfakh@observer.com

Ms. Kravis, wearing a gold coat with a fur neckline, walked slowly through each room, looking on as her husband occasionally wondered off to see the paintings and sculptures up close.

“The importance of this artist is incontestable,” Ms. Kravis told the Daily Transom. “I saw many stages of the show as it came together; I think it came out very well. When you see an artist like Kippenberger, and you see the variety of the production and the quality of what he did, it’s just such a wonderful inspiration.”

At the center of the room, the museum’s new chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin--appointed in September following a six-month search to replace John Elderfield—was greeting guests as they arrived.

“You could have done this show 100 different ways,” Ms. Temkin said, looking around at the works. “This is probably only five or 10 percent of his work. You can decide to present what you think is the greatest or you can present variety, and Ann Goldstein, who’s the curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. who originated the show, chose variety. An important part of Kippenberger’s work was bad art and if we just showed the beautiful amazing works, it would’ve been a distortion.”

In fact, Ms. Temkin thinks that today’s artists could learn something from Kippenberger, who died in 1997—something especially relevant to the current economic climate.

“I tend to believe that the high commercial emphasis of everything is a good thing to lose a little bit,” she said. “When Kippenberger first came on the scene, it was a heavy commercial art boom of the '80s. His art was really reacting against that and trying so hard to prove that art can be unappealing. And it’s true that in a time when there is plenty of money, a lot of artists can be distracted by it.”

Ms. Temkin’s attention was drawn across the room.

“Oh, look, it’s Amy Cappellazzo!” she said, spotting the Christie's senior vice president and international co-head of postwar and contemporary art.

Ms. Cappellazzo had just returned from the auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection in Paris, which had brought in $262 million.

“There was like this chair that was kind of rounded and it had the horns and a sun and moon on each of the handles. It was estimated at $4 to $6 million,” Ms. Cappellazzo told Ms. Temkin. “You know what it made today? $28 million!

“We all had a feeling that it was going to be successful and we knew that it was a special kind of sale,” Ms. Capalazzo told the Daily Transom. “Yves Saint Laurent was a special person with special tastes.”

And who were the buyers?

“This was a pretty active global event,” she said. “It was people across the board.” (Nice dodge!)

We wondered if Ms. Kravis and Ms. Temkin found the Paris auction figures encouraging.

“It’s such a one-shot occasion, like the Jacqueline Onassis Sotheby’s sale,” replied Ms. Temkin. “It’s as much about the sociological situation as it is the aesthetic one. But it certainly gets people into a good mood.”

Ms. Kravis was less enthused. “Well, we’re not in the auction market,” she said.  

In the catalogue of The Art of Alice Neel , currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I am described as one of the artist's "enemies." It's true that I wrote some unfavorable notices of her work, and Alice–as I shall refer to her here–took unfavorable criticism very hard. She considered it a kind of lèse majesté . Her customary response to such affronts was to attempt an amateur psychoanalysis of the perpetrator.

"Hilton, I know why you hate my paintings," she once said to me. We had run into each other in the lobby of the Whitney. "It's because you hated your mother." In fact, as I patiently explained to her, I was very fond of my mother; it was Alice's paintings that I disliked. But this was a distinction that Alice couldn't fathom. She preferred her explanation to mine, though, of course, she knew nothing about my mother–or about me either, for that matter. Nor did I hate her paintings; I just didn't think they were very good.

Many people liked Alice's style of impudent, aggressive talk, and she was used to getting away with it. They liked it for the same reason they liked her paintings. It was part of her act: playing the role of the sassy old lady to the delight of her proper bourgeois admirers. As a performance, it was certainly a huge success. It was far more entertaining than her paintings, too. The old boys at the Whitney used to lap it up, and much that we read in the catalogue of the current exhibition is a recycling of familiar stories about her verbal audacities.

The current show at the Whitney is the third that the museum has devoted to Alice's work. Even so, it has proved to be insufficient for her hard-core fans–among them Roberta Smith, who complained in The New York Times that the Whitney had done Alice wrong by failing to devote more than one floor to the current exhibition.

Well, as you might expect, one floor has proved to be more than sufficient for me. After all, the style (really an anti-style) of Alice's portraits–and it is only in her portraits that her work makes an even minimal claim on our attention–is badly handicapped by the incessant and apparently involuntary repetition of certain unlovely pictorial gimmicks. There is that bug-eyed look she gives to the faces of so many of her subjects, whether they are children or young men and women or geriatric ruins. She even waited until she was a geriatric ruin herself before attempting her first self-portrait at the age of 80–and in the nude, of course. I don't count as self-portraits the 1935 drawing of a naked Alice sitting on the toilet while her naked lover pisses into the sink, and similar mementos of la vie de bohème .

Then, too, there is the buckeye paint-handling, which has all the delicacy and charm of an apprentice mason applying mortar with a trowel. In lieu of anything resembling a pictorial structure in her portraits, moreover, Alice was hopelessly dependent upon a few illustrational formulas for modeling her subjects. To these she added color for flashy effect–the kind of effect that creates its own pictorial monotony in any sizable showing of these portraits.

Her principal talent, in my judgment, was for rendering a likeness, and people do so like a likeness. The downside of this was that she turned every likeness into a type. Ann Temkin, who organized the current show at the Whitney, gets it exactly right when she observes that Alice painted "with the eye of a caricaturist." Which is to say that she turns almost all of her subjects into something freakish, misshapen and ill-fated. There are exceptions, to be sure: The portraits of her son Hartley and other members of the family are respectful, flattering and affectionate. Certain artists and art-world figures were similarly exempted from the caricaturist's impulse to mock and defame–among them, Faith Ringgold, Marisol, Henry Geldzahler and Annie Sprinkle. But as Ms. Sprinkle, the porn star who became a performance artist, is herself a caricature, no mockery was needed. True, she comes off in Alice's portrait looking a little stunted, and the picture itself is little more than a painted cartoon, but Ms. Sprinkle was an ideal subject for Alice–a ready-made, so to speak.

Other subjects were not so lucky. "Neel zooms in on a person's physical imperfections," writes Ms. Temkin in a remarkable understatement. She might have added that at times Alice was given to exaggerating or even inventing imperfections. I wonder if I'm really alone in finding the second version of her portrait of Frank O'Hara (1960) and her later portrait of Meyer Schapiro (1983), to cite but two of many examples, really appalling.

But everyone loves Alice's paintings anyway. As Jean Cocteau once said in another context, she knew exactly how far she could go in going too far. Alice socked it to the art-world suits, and they loved her for it. Six years after her death, she is a success, suitable entertainment for the summer-tourist season at the Whitney on the first stop of a national tour.

The Art of Alice Neel remains on view at the Whitney Museum through Sept. 17, and will then travel to museums in Andover, Mass., Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Denver.