Mr. Hammons is arguably the most famous living African-American artist, and a serious cult figure in the art world. It's not that the second half of the 20th century doesn't have others, like Martin Puryear, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon or Mark Bradford. But face it, they are far too few: The art world is sadly still a white man's world.

So walking into a David Hammons show at the very grand L&M Gallery on the Upper East Side is a weird anomaly on a few fronts. Since he makes objects and avails himself of "ready-mades," the notion of a Hammons painting show is a question mark in itself. And this show of paintings, by an artist who doesn't paint, relates quite literally to homelessness. I braced for a lecture: artwork that revolves around issues of race, politics and inequality can get didactic, reductive and really boring. David Hammons has been working since the late '60s, but, today, I'm living in the age of Obama.

To be frank, why would collectors like me, who are for the most part wealthy and white, want to buy work that tells a story that's not their own? Too often, we, the "oppressors," are supposed to come into a gallery, understand the work's importance and collect it because it's "meaningful," and perhaps as a way to show compassion. I'm really not into buying self-indulgent work by artists who are going to lecture the bourgeois society about the realities of life. That's stuff that dealers can pawn off on some overeager naif or stick back in storage.

But when I walked into this show, a very familiar room took on a completely different vibe. The work hung with tremendous gravitas, and I could feel something important was happening in this building. The new show at L+M is indeed a show of Hammons paintings, but very unusual ones, because each painting is draped in a dirty plastic tarp, to the extent that one cannot see the picture and can only glimpse at it through the tears and the rips and the dirt. Think of them as paintings draped in dirty plastic, the kind of objects a homeless person rolls up in on a cold night before they go to sleep near a subway grating or a church stoop.

Mr. Hammons is no painter and doesn't care to be; he's making fun of painting altogether, because when you lift the tarp, you find the same kind of splashy colorful inane gestural painting that you can find hanging in many Chelsea galleries right now. He is indifferent to them; he covers them and gives them shelter, but what convinced me was the beautiful effect the ripped and dirty draped plastic creates as it cascades over the canvas and rolls down the wall, spilling onto the floor.

There are plenty of art historical references we can find here, from Alberto Burri's "Plastico" masterpieces, to the plastic sheets in Robert Rauschenberg's combines, and yes, I did detect a little Steve Parrino and a touch of Rudy Stingel, too, but the homeless, dirty, discarded, left-out-in-the-cold painting hanging in this Upper East Side gallery is all Hammons.

The work is about class, and the strange intersection of the aesthetics of poverty with Arte Povera and Abstract Expressionism. The whole concept of art and money and class is a phenomenally complex one, too often over-sensationalized and oversimplified. Mr. Hammons gives it to us in its full complexity, presenting the queasy idea of paying six figures for a painting that hangs under a dirty tarp while nearby on 65th Street, homeless people are showing up in real dirty tarps and getting fed dinner in the basement of the Park Avenue Armory.

Of course, it may be be perverse to begin with for an artist to use this entire socio-art-gallery system to make a lot of money. Unlike most artists who produce work and consign it to their gallery for sale, Mr. Hammons reportedly makes the dealer buy the whole show for cash up front, so he makes out whether it sells or not. This all might be viewed as a part of his perverse and complex relationship with the art market, or perhaps he just can't bear the idea that something he makes doesn't sell. But it doesn't much matter, because the work and the show, for those who are willing to think it through, puts him at the very top of his generation.

That's not what other people I spoke to took away from it. One well-known collector told me he hated the show because it required too much explanation--but Mr. Hammons' work speaks for itself. A savvy dealer even told me he didn't like it because he couldn't see the encased pictures--but you weren't supposed to. All of this leaves me to conclude that David Hammons has to be one of the most misunderstood artists working today.

This is definitely going to be considered one of the best shows of the year, so go see it (It's up through Feb. 26). One of the show's triumphs is that it makes me think perhaps we should all also stop in at a homeless shelter and learn something there, too.

editorial@observer.com

Because of the lenses, they aren't merely images. They're singular, fully formed views. Window (View of the Gowanus Heights #2), the only piece not set in a field, has us looking out through an apartment window, but it isn't a doubling-it's an opposition. There's no question of choosing what we're interested in looking at. What interests us is the dandelions, mushrooms and fairy rings that crowd up to the glass. (A fairy ring is a circle of darker grass formed by mushrooms spreading underground, or a gateway by which fairies can enter or leave our world.)

In Fairy Ring (with Dandelions), Fairy Ring with White Clover and Fairy Ring with English Daisies, a single inviting ring lies directly in the center. The rings in Three Fairy Rings (in Monochrome), alone in the back room, retreat across a dark gray landscape like craters on the moon. And in Small Fairy Ring Mushroom Cluster, Small Fairy Ring with Mushrooms and Dandelion Cluster, the usually inconspicuous fungus and weed proudly pose for us. The mushrooms look like family portraits-in each case there are two tall and two short-but the yellow dandelions, leaning out tightly from an older white chieftain in the middle, are like a posse of young blades on their way out to a fight.

If you lean down close to them, the lens will distort the scene so that you're looking at it underwater. If you stand up again, you can almost see one of the flowers, frozen in the moment, reaching up to smooth his hair. If you take a few steps back, plants and sky mesh into a static nature scene. From across the gallery, the bright circle leaps out from the wall, like a globular teardrop in space, or a view of heaven, impossible to enter or touch.

People who don't believe in fairies think they're romantic, but people who do believe try not to mention them by name. In fact, Mr. Jacobs is not a photographer. In a tour de force of what you might call insider outsider art-the technically brilliant execution of a strange, obsessive idea-he's constructed detailed dioramas out of plastic, wood and hair. Through a window behind the back room, you can see the box housing one such diorama sitting on two-by-four struts. Fluorescent bulbs illuminate a paper sky through a plastic clamshell roof. For the past 500 years or so, we've been trying to make two dimensions into three, but now, it seems, it's time to try the other way around. It's hard to tell whether you're looking at these fairy rings or into them.

At Paula Cooper, Beatrice Caracciolo's "Cercare nella Terra" ("Searching the Earth") begins with eight gorgeous photogravures of Mediterranean fields and trees. Lush and heavy and dry, so lucid that they have no gray but only tones of black, they look like assemblages of woolly shadow. From a high, respectful distance we see the different stripes of different furrowed fields, or a single field with lines of growing plants receding like hand-spun yarn, or a field of white sunflowers under a broad gray sky. Untitled (Tree) (the rest of the pieces are simply Untitled), a regal, old-fashioned, full-length portrait of an enormous oak appears both as a small photogravure and as a six-and-a-half-foot-tall inkjet print.

Accompanying and inspired by the photos are a dozen etchings in which, with a thoughtful, hesitating, repetitive line, Ms. Caracciolo diagrams the skeletons of her Mediterranean fields by building shapes out of intersections and fragments. The etchings and photos are like reversals of each other. In the photos, empty space is black, and in the etchings, white. In the photos, mass is stronger than line, and nature is slightly blurred, as if it's nighttime during the day. The white sunflowers look like a contamination of the plate, and the oak like a Rorschach blot. But the etchings are nothing but edges and wire, outlines that seem to have body only because, like lightning, they move more quickly than we can see.

editorial@observer.com

Bending down to make sure, I lifted one pink corner of one page of the newspaper I edit. "Do not touch!" The hipster guard swooped down on me. "This is an extremely valuable piece of art. It is like touching a MONET!"

So this is what print journalism has come to--a museum curio that just might crumble without extraordinary care. While a lot has been written about the end of newspapers,  and the digital tablets that will replace them, this exhibit is, as far as I can tell, the first from a major museum looking at modern newspapers in retrospective.

Except that it's not. As provocative as the title is--and as defensive as it made me and my journalist wife feel as we stepped inside--"The Last Newspaper" isn't about that. In fact, the problem with the exhibit is in determining precisely what it is trying to say. While we both left relieved that the curators hadn't found enough material to nail down their premise, the exhibit suffers from a randomness that reminded me of a bad small-town daily, a mixing of spaghetti dinners and Eagle Scout announcements I do my best to avoid. (By the way, I'm sorry I touched the artwork. "First time at a museum?" one of my colleagues later asked.)

Which is not to say there aren't some intriguing ideas at play here. One recurring theme is the packaging of news and how that affects our experience of it. At the entrance to the exhibit, visitors are encouraged to cut and paste the day's newspapers together, leading  to some compelling mash-ups (a headline from the Afghan war, for instance, slapped over a story about the weekend box office results).

Francois Bucher, in a piece called Forever Live, lays out the front pages of four British newspapers to show how differently each of them handled a U.K. espionage story. The placement and size of the photographs, the kind of pictures used and the location of the story on the page produces dramatically different narratives. While those of us in the news game know this instinctively, seeing the results splayed out gives me new empathy for subjects who complain that photos and headlines conspired to make them look bad.

In a similar approach, a piece by Pierre Bismuth remakes the front pages of U.K. newspapers (which are disproportionately represented here) to simply repeat the main photo on the page, so that it runs twice. The work effectively shows how a single change in packaging the news can entirely alter how we view an event.

Other works are more forceful in their commentary. On the top floor of the exhibit, Thomas Hirschhorn fits mannequins in dresses made of news photographs on a single theme. The work is riveting; the juxtaposition of the fashion world and, say, the Gitmo detainees or murder victims captured my own queasiness in reading the Sunday Times some weeks. The contrast between the real world and Madison Avenue's version of it can often feel uncomfortably jarring.

Dash Snow, as was his wont, produces the most provocative piece of the exhibit--a series of New York Post front pages about Saddam Hussein, including his capture and beheading. Mr. Snow does us the favor of splattering semen on the images, then dusting that with glitter.

Much else about the exhibit seemed off-point. There was, for instance, an installation of video screens showing weather reports and forecasts from other cities, which succeeded in telling me nothing. Similarly, Hans Haacke installed a printer that unspooled news from the world's wire services; spent paper piled up behind the machine. While the piece had nostalgia value for me--my first job at The Wall Street Journal was to stand next to those printers, read the wire reports and pass the newsiest ones around to my colleagues--I'm clearly a niche audience. (Unfortunately, I visited on a Sunday, and missed Eating the Wall Street Journal by performance artist William Pope.L, no relation. Apparently the work features actors in Barack Obama masks lingering among the patrons and eating copies of the financial daily.)

While some of the works here certainly have something to say, it remained unclear to me why they were in this particular exhibit and how they fit in with the rest of the pieces. Political commentary mixed with nostalgia mixed with the digital future.

To add some interactivity to the exhibit, the museum commissioned a series of free newspapers, produced in the exhibit space and distributed as amped-up guides. Seeing the young staffers at their quaint little desks churning out their little stories-as-art had the same effect on me as the pile of newspapers I dared to finger at the beginning. Is my industry really that far gone?

Downstairs in the lobby, I flipped through the free paper, which had the wry title "The Last Post." The stories included an interview with the curators of the exhibit and a filmmaker's take on the woes of the Los Angeles Times. I set the paper down and looked at my fingers, blackened by the ink. I had to smile.

kpope@observer.com

So it was a good couple of hours after leaving her newest show, at Luhring Augustine Gallery, before I stopped wondering about what sort of underwear people were wearing, and what it might tell me about them.

The artwork that occasioned that unlikely train of thought was Massachusetts Chandelier. Hung above the heads of gallerygoers, it consists of a tiered metal framework ringed with rows and rows of underpants. The floating panties make for an absurdly intriguing anthropological study. There is lace embroidery here, odd buttoned inserts there and strange and presumably functional pocket arrangements somewhere else. In both men's and women's varieties, they tend toward vintage in style and commodious in size. (The formal description of the piece specifies, with reassuring precision, that they have been "previously worn and cleaned.")

Intimate yet enormous, the piece is more reminiscent of a hot-air balloon of innuendo than a lighting fixture. The garments are lit prettily from within, almost embodying them, and over the whole thing there runs a brightly colored, ever-changing abstract video. In the background, a somewhat mesmeric soundtrack plays--a slow, tuneless music box. The exhibition is one of the loveliest examples of artistic eccentricity anywhere in New York City.

It's been a little over a year now since Ms. Rist's installation Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) transformed MoMA's atrium into a trippy pleasure dome. For most New Yorkers, that show, and its fizzy success--gallerygoers lounged in it for hours, like a nightclub--was when they first became conscious of her artistic efforts. But Zurich-based Pipilotti (her tongue-twisting name is a fusion of her given name Charlotte and that of her childhood heroine, Pippi Longstocking) has been teasing the art world for some time. And, though she is now in her 40s, she maintains a refreshing air of rebelliousness.

Like all of Ms. Rist's work, this new show has to be taken on its own very particular terms. She is, somewhat unfashionably in a jaded time and a jaded art world, one of life's instinctive celebrants. She loves the natural world as much as she enjoys punching its colors well into the realms of psychedelia. In the gallery's main space, for example, viewers discover the show's most substantial piece, Layers Mama Layers (2010). A series of long gauze drapes hang from the ceiling, forming parallel translucent tunnels. Scenes are projected onto them of sheep gamboling in an alpine glade. It is a technological meadow, and the evening I was there, no one seemed to wish to leave it

The least successful work is at the show's entrance: All or Nothing (alles oder nichts) (2010), a sort of welcoming altar. Lit in an ambient pink glow is a small video triptych of semi-abstracted body parts. (These videos are actually the least attractive part of Rist's work. The one in the center of this triptych--all scrubby pubic hair and dangling penis--is a particularly unpleasant example.) The videos are flanked by a vase of spider chrysanthemums, a shallow bowl of rice grains, a plate of apples, and--somewhat jarringly--a water cooler. You'd like a cup of water or an apple to refresh yourself before venturing into the show? Go ahead, the theory seems to be, help yourself.

Ms. Rist, refreshingly, doesn't worry that some people will find her enthusiasm merely silly. She doesn't want you to stand stiffly observing her art, but rather to relax and participate in it--walk through those tunnels, eat that apple! She provides the very best kind of evidence that in the 21st century, artists can put anything they like into their art and not necessarily end up with chaos.

Pipilotti Rist's "Heroes of Birth," Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th Street, through Oct. 23.

The pioneers of photography discovered one thing almost immediately: Statues make ideal models. Because they never twitched, much less moved, during long shutter exposures, a bust of Patroclus or a Roman portrait hung in the British Museum allowed early masters of the medium, like William Henry Fox Talbot in 1846 and Roger Fenton a decade later, to render light, space and viewpoints without exasperating sitters. In 1844, Talbot wrote, "Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic Art."

Curator Roxanna Marcoci, in "The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today," an exhibition that opened Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, sets out to prove exactly that. Ms. Marcoci has brought together more than 300 prints, publications and other items by 100 artists that illuminate, in 10 distinct categories, what Talbot was talking about.

The exhibition offers a refreshingly unconventional presentation and breaks some conventions, if not rules, along the way. For starters, this history of art dispenses with a chronological approach. Though the exhibition spans 170 years, it doesn't proceed from A to Z. It wanders far afield, digressing often. Some sections treat general themes, such as photography's early days; others hone in on specific topics, including the way both Auguste Rodin and Constantine Brancusi used cameras to clarify how their bronze and marble statues should best be perceived.

Approaching prints by a trio of wayfarers active in different eras as cultural and political icons-Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and David Goldblatt-sheds new light on their impressive bodies of work. There's even a look at sculpture in the expanded field-that is, Earth art by the likes of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Richard Long. Through unconventional and mixed-media prints, the viewer gets a better grasp on how, as Ms. Marcoci puts it, "sculpture no longer had to be a permanent three-dimensional object" because of the advent of photography. Much as they would with three-dimensional art, the visitor regards the exhibition's engaging subject from a variety of angles. As a result, this show fundamentally alters the way we respond to photographs of sculpture. 

"Original Copy" (which is accompanied by a terrific reference book of a catalog) argues that photography changed not only the course of art history but how the art that predated it was perceived. Previously, visual information regarding antiquity and the Old Masters was transmitted through hand-drawn graphics that would occasionally omit salient details. Art history became a more viable area of interest, more popular, essentially, when the acuity of the camera lens provided details that were all but invisible to the naked eye. The equipment involved was heavy and cumbersome, yet someone like Charles Negre could make, as early as about 1853, views of the gargoyles of Notre Dame that allowed Victor Hugo's readers to see, close up, the haunts of the novelist's hunchback.

Taken over the course of several years, Eugene Atget's haunting scenes of a park in Saint-Cloud that is peppered with decorative objects remind the viewer time doesn't stand still. Seasons change. In his photographs of sculptures at Versailles, the sun is always moving. We see that shadows engender sensations as evocative as Proust's madeleine.

In an exhibition that melds the distant past with the present, small prints with large, black-and-white images with ones in color, well-known photographers with many that are less familiar or downright unknown, the visitor is constantly intrigued, itching to learn more, wanting to return to MoMA for another look, and above all, astonished to discover that sculpture and photography have had such a symbiotic relationship for more than a century and a half.

editorial@observer.com

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