John Currin has also said, of his career, “It’s not a quest for money.”

Mr. Currin’s work is back at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, where he got his start, but these are not the paintings that have made him famous and rich. Those are now dealt exclusively by Larry Gagosian, the gallery to which Mr. Currin jumped as his traveling mid-career retrospective in 2003-04 raised his prices tenfold.

This is instead a mostly loaned show of Mr. Currin’s works on paper; at a time of widespread gallery closings, there is some obvious wisdom in reattaching the gallery to one of its most famous artists. The show is titled, as if to court some of the controversy that surrounded Mr. Currin’s work almost two decades ago, “A Fifteen Year Survey of Women.”

Yes, there was a time (arguably a simpler one) when John Currin was thought to be antipathetic to women. In 1989, after getting his M.F.A. at Yale, he showed for the first time in New York, a series of paintings based on yearbook portraits; three years later, he had his first solo show, at Andrea Rosen. The paintings, nudes of middle-aged women, arrived like a spitball from the back of the class in an era of political correctness and culture warfare. Kim Levin in The Village Voice famously declared, “Boycott this show,” and a star was born, a star which burned more brightly with each critic’s invocation of Mr. Currin’s “misogyny.”

But 2009 is, to say the least, not 1992. His work is now more lauded for its tireless references to art history—from the Old Masters to 1950s pinups—than derided for any misogynistic undertones. By now, even Ms. Levin is on board, having reversed herself on the occasion of his 2003 retrospective. “Our premier mannerist,” she called him, and “the most profound observer of the follies, foibles, and deformations of our shallow times.” So thorough was Mr. Currin’s success by 2003 that she had to exaggerate the self-evidence of her “Boycott this show” error: “I was wrong, of course.”

This new selection of drawings concentrates on the ’90s and has no work from after the retrospective; the show culminates in five studies for Currin’s 2003 masterpiece, Thanksgiving. Indeed, the works on paper are overwhelmingly directly related, and subordinate, to Mr. Currin’s paintings. This is one way in which he’s indisputably more an Old Master than a contemporary artist; perhaps he’s also a canny businessman, loath to glut the secondary market with stand-alone drawings when the paintings are the real draw.

The show contains memorable drawings of the two extraordinary images Mr. Currin has created: an ineffably sad, beautiful picture of a girl gesturing to her shirt, which has a large heart-shaped cutout; and Thanksgiving, an end-of-empire trio of emaciated women, the center figure with her mouth gaping open, ready to receive a piece of uncooked turkey offered by one of the others. The drawings don’t add appreciably to our understanding of his work or practice, but, with softer lines and gentler, sketchier imagery than the sometimes hyperrealistic paintings, they do participate in a general smoothing-over of Mr. Currin’s reputation that might make him easier to take for some collectors. As the catalog for Sotheby’s November 2008 contemporary art auction stated, “[Currin’s] paintings are less about socio-political commentary and more about the beauty and form of the female body.” Far from the artist you boycott, he’s now the one you go home with.

Mr. Currin was born in 1962. In that catalog last November, Sotheby’s reminded us that this was “the same year as Roy Lichtenstein’s first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.” This seems an odd and irrelevant coincidence until you are reminded that Sotheby’s at the time was trying to sell paintings by both. There is no other artist as completely a creation of the New York art world as John Currin. He has the flawless technique. He has the content, edgy enough to be heard over the din but studiously silent on any real “socio-political” question. He has the dizzying roster of art-historical references, the identification of which has metastasized into a parlor game. No one’s work more perfectly reflects the mores and aesthetics of the gallery set, and there’s no one for whom a show at Castelli serves better as a sort of astrological marker of his birth.

And the best evidence of that: His is surely one of the most financially successful non-quests for money on record. The Currin being sold by Sotheby’s ended up going for $5.5 million, within spitting distance of one of those Lichtensteins.

editorial@observer.com

The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly informed us that florals for spring are not groundbreaking. (Whites, on the other hand, are worth a peek—at least that’s the word over at Style.com, which today posted a lookbook of chromatic-free runway fashions—79 of them—for the season when trees blossom, Paris looks pretty and such.) When groundbreaking is called for, it’s Marc Jacobs, tastemaker du jour, people call—or at least look to for consistently thunderous threads. Indeed, he alone seems to set the cutting-edge standards for spring, summer, fall, et. al.

According to Ms. Horyn, Mr. Jacobs has planned a spring that encompasses much more than a mere color trend—be they present, absent or of a pastel persuasion. The apparent gist of Mr. Jacobs collection is, kind of like the designer himself, a paradox: sexy yet not sexy.

These days, when art and fashion run in the same circles in Miami and just about everywhere else, it’s worth looking more closely at the aforementioned comment made by Mr. Currin, who is profiled in this week’s New Yorker by Calvin Tomkins—an article pegged on the painter’s passion for porn. Is it possible that Mr. Currin and Mr. Jacobs are, at the end of the day, doing precisely the same thing? Take a look at the similarities…

Of Mr. Jacobs, Ms. Horyn wrote:

Of Mr. Currin, Mr. Tomkins wrote:

On Jan. 31, Janet Robinson, chief executive of the New York Times Company, opened an earnings conference call by addressing the bad news first: a $648 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The Times Company wrote down the value of its New England Media Group—which includes The Boston Globe—by $814 million, resulting in the substantial quarterly drop.

“Despite this charge,” Ms. Robinson said on the conference call with analysts, “we continue to view these properties as important assets of our company, and we remain acutely focused on improving their performance and value.”

That takes care of jittery investors. But what about The Globe’s rank and file, which has endured speculation that its parent company is slimming the place down in preparation for a sale—possibly to a moneyed suitor like Jack Welch, who has, according to reports, expressed interest in buying?

That’s the agenda for a couple of “town meetings” that Ms. Robinson has scheduled with Globe employees on Feb. 8 and 9.

The Times fended off speculation about Mr. Welch buying the paper at the end of 2006, when Ms. Robinson addressed a conference of Boston leaders. But since then there’s been that giant write-down, which had been preceded by other ominous signs.

On Jan. 11, the Times Company announced 125 jobs would be cut at The Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, first through voluntary buyout packages. Two weeks later, The Globe announced that three foreign bureaus—Jerusalem, Berlin and Bogotá—would be shuttered.

And this past week, 10-plus-year staffers were notified about the buyout packages, with 90 days to decide whether to stay or go.

“There’s no question that these sorts of things can be distracting, but I think people are focused on their work, on their journalism,” said Martin Baron, The Globe’s editor in chief, by phone on Feb. 6. “Ultimately, that’s what matters.”

The upcoming “town meetings” will be run as Q&A sessions, with Globe staffers “welcome to attend and ask Janet about issues or topics of interest relating to our business,” according to a staff memo.

Such obvious distractions—buyouts, layoffs, outsourcing of classified jobs to India, closing of foreign bureaus and rumors of an impending sale—will provide plenty of Q&A fodder.

“I expect we hear her say that there are some reasons for hope, especially in the Boston economy,” said a Globe staffer.

(Indeed, if Ms. Robinson’s speech to analysts is any indication, there will probably be an emphasis on an expected rebound in print advertising in the region.)

But outside Boston, there are lingering concerns.

“Obviously, [the closing of foreign bureaus] limits the kind of jobs that young reporters aspire to,” said a Globe staffer. “Nationally, it arguably diminishes our stature.”

“I think there’s going to be a lot of questions about where The Globe fits into the Times portfolio,” said another staffer.

The New York–Boston relationship was somewhat strengthened last December, according to one Globe staffer, when The Times sent up its research and development staff to give a presentation on technologically advanced ways to spread the news—iPods, cell phones and various electronic devices. Michael Rogers, The Times’ futurist in residence, was among the presenters.

But not everyone is convinced that the Times Company will continue its stewardship of the newspaper it bought for $1.1 billion in 1993.

“The fear, as you probably know, is that The Times will unload The Globe, given its poor recent performance,” said a Globe staffer. “I suppose the first thing we’ll be listening to Janet R. for is assurances that we’ll remain in the Times family. Developments at the Philly Inquirer have soured people on the notion of private ownership by a rich-guys consortium.”

And long-time Globe columnist Alex Beam also isn’t convinced that said rich guys are the answer to quandaries in the newspaper industry.

“Jack Welch and David Geffen’s idea of journalism is like a Charlie Rose interview,” said Mr. Beam. “‘Gosh, Mr. Welch, tell us more about your fabulous career.’ That’s not our idea of journalism.”

Portfolio Launch Nears, Staff Atwitter

“Very few startups have the kind of bankroll behind it that this one does,” said Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer and investigative reporter at Portfolio.

Mr. Eichenwald was speaking by phone on Feb. 5 from Dallas, Tex., a safe distance from the magazine’s perch on the 17th and 18th floors of the Condé Nast building.

There, Si Newhouse’s much-hyped new business magazine and Web site are getting off the ground, with prototypes circulating and staff writers currently under deadline for the inaugural issue, scheduled to hit newsstands on April 24.

But the glossies on the stands will only be part of the launch. What appears to be emerging is a test case for Condé Nast, which has struggled to make its presence felt on the Web.

Portfolio will follow the path laid down by Glamour, Men’s Vogue and Vanity Fair (which relaunched in October with significant Web-only content). As with those sites, Condé Nast has teamed up with Avenue A Razorfish to develop Portfolio’s Web site.

But once it’s set up, it’s the editorial staff from the magazine that will be keeping things moving.

“Print writers are definitely writing for the Web,” said a source with knowledge of Portfolio’s Web strategy; however, “not every single writer is going to have a blog.”

“Portfolio is a magazine being born in the 21st century,” said Mr. Eichenwald. “Any magazine coming out now cannot look at the Web as just something to put an article on; it has to be viewed as part of the whole.”

That’s certainly true for Mr. Eichenwald.

He spent two decades covering the business world for The New York Times before joining Portfolio this past October.

In December 2005, Mr. Eichenwald wrote an investigative piece on child pornography for The Times that included a video segment. “It really added a lot for people to actually see the person I was writing about,” he said. That video segment was later nominated for an Emmy, and sparked Mr. Eichenwald’s interest in thinking beyond print.

Shortly after arriving at Portfolio, he pitched a video supplement for his first piece. In December, Mr. Eichenwald delivered the demo video, which, he said, is tentatively scheduled to be released for the April launch.

(Already on the Portfolio.com placeholder up now, there is a sample video interview between Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.)

Last October, Chris Jones, managing editor of the Portfolio Web site, gave a presentation to the Portfolio staff and provided “very early impressions” of the Web site, according to a staffer present. The Web editor attends each staff meeting, providing updates and answering questions. Also, a voluntary editorial meeting specifically for the Web site was initiated this past week.

Another staffer added that the site would look vastly different from the Big Three business titles: Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek.

Matt Cooper, Portfolio’s Washington editor and previously Time.com’s political editor, has been rumored among possible bloggers when the site launches.

“We’re all going to do a lot for the Web and print edition,” said Mr. Cooper, declining to confirm the rumor. “It’s a seamless garment.”

And recently, Web editors have made the rounds of the office, according to a staffer, inquiring about which staffers are interested in blogging on swanky side interests—such as art and travel.

But even Portfolio’s seamless garment has had a few tears along the way.

On Jan. 30, the New York Post’s Page Six column reported that the startup was in shambles and that Mr. Newhouse was losing faith.

In that morning’s editorial meeting, to dispel any rumors of chaos, Ms. Lipman said that advertisers were “banging down the door,” according to a staffer present.

Multiple editorial sources have said that the business side of the operation has made reassurances that ads are selling very well, and that the first issue can be expected to run about 250 to 300 pages.

And certainly Si Newhouse, in his usual fashion, will be upstairs counting ad pages and charting the progress of his team—several of whom have a lot riding on Portfolio’s success.

Print, schmint, right?

“We have really ambitious aspirations,” said a Portfolio staffer. However, there is one caveat: “The first magazine that is going to be published is not going to change the face of magazine publishing.”

—M.C.

The New Yorker Will Run Your Correction, Not Its Own

In its Feb. 5 issue, The New Yorker published a message describing factual errors in a Jan. 29 “Talk of the Town” piece by Nicholas Lemann about the trial of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Mr. Lemann had mistakenly claimed that “Joseph Wilson was dispatched by ‘the White House’ to Niger … (he was sent by the C.I.A.)” and that Mr. Wilson had “published his Times Op-Ed piece ‘five months’ after his return (it was a year and five months).”

The message appeared not in an editors’ correction but in a piece of reader mail, a letter from James Currin of Stamford, Conn. Mr. Currin, 75, is a retired physics professor from SUNY Purchase. He has been reading The New Yorker for more than 50 years. Mr. Lemann is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

“I was surprised that he was so careless,” Mr. Currin said by phone on Feb. 4. “He’s a good writer.”

By legend, the factual infallibility of The New Yorker is both assumed and presumed. Its fabled team of fact-checkers—16 of them at present—vets every detail of the magazine before it reaches the reader. And if the errors that get through are rare, acknowledgements of those errors get through even less often.

The result is the meta-erroneous belief that The New Yorker has a policy against printing corrections at all—a belief that has made it all the way to the Columbia journalism department. “As I understand it, for many, many years they didn’t even run letters to the editor,” Mr. Lemann said. “It’s fairly recent—I can’t remember when they started—that they run letters. They still, since 1925, have not run corrections.”

In fact, although the weekly “Mail” section is a relatively new addition, the magazine has printed letters since at least 1936. And under editor David Remnick, corrections have been appearing as stand-alone items, the industry standard. They are, however, easy to miss, as there have only been about two dozen corrections or editors’ notes since 1999. (A new one appeared in the Feb. 12 issue.)

Through the decades before the current era of regular corrections, the magazine ran occasional ones—a lengthy 1963 editors’ note, for instance, corrected three errors in part four of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” And it ran dozens and dozens of letters pointing out errors, under the heading “Department of Correction” and variants thereof (“Department of Correction and Amplification,” “Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse,” “Department of Correction, Amplification, and General Pettifoggery”).

The handling tended to be arch: In 1940, after being corrected by the editors of Fortune, The New Yorker wrote, “Wrong was the New Yorker, and to the editors of Fortune our check for five dollars for discovering the error.”

The present approach is more measured. Corrections are presented as frank admissions of failure. But in the case of Mr. Currin’s letter, the concession was not quite straightforward.

Mr. Currin, who is the father of celebrated figurative painter John Currin, wrote in to question four assertions that Mr. Lemann had made. Two of his points were matters still under dispute, while the other two—about the provenance of Mr. Wilson’s assignment and the date of his Times Op-Ed piece—were verifiable facts that Mr. Lemann had gotten wrong.

In an e-mail to The Observer, Peter Canby, the head of the fact-checking department, wrote that the errors Mr. Currin pointed out could have been addressed in a formal correction notice. But Mr. Canby wrote that since he and letters editor Brenda Phipps “had a letter in hand that both set the record straight on the erroneous facts and also went on to some other widely debated points of interpretation,” they decided to let Mr. Currin’s letter speak for itself.

Except that Mr. Currin’s note, as written, did not set the record straight. The original draft, according to a copy supplied by Mr. Currin, merely quoted the parts that Mr. Currin thought were wrong. The parenthetical clarifications, explaining what the correct facts had been, showed up after The New Yorker edited the letter.

In other words, the editors wrote a functional correction after all—they just credited it to Mr. Currin.

“Maybe that’s the New Yorker way of correcting an error,” Mr. Currin said. “A graceful way.”

—Leon Neyfakh

But Mr. Lang’s minimalist face showed up at Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Friday the 13th to toast his friend Juergen Teller, the fashion-slash-art photographer.

Mr. Lang was even clad in a pair of jeans of his own design—the very sort that young trendoids all over town, both male and female, have been hoarding since the designer shuttered his Soho-based business last year.

“It’s so sad,” moaned fellow gallery-goer Aretha Busby, fashion director of Good Housekeeping magazine, clearly still smarting from the closure.

Ah, but there is hope!

Mr. Lang, it seems, is gearing up for round two. “We are not ready to announce it yet,” he said, “but we do something, maybe this year—me and my office.”

And how are you enjoying Mr. Teller’s show? The Transom asked him, perhaps prematurely. “I don’t even know why, yet, it’s called Nürnberg, so to speak,” Mr. Lang answered.

But then, who did?

Some of Mr. Teller’s photographs were shots from Marc Jacobs ad campaigns, Mr. Teller’s main commercial gig for the past couple of years.

There it was, the notorious shot of model Kristen McMenamy raising her gown to expose her cooch. Price tag: “Three thousand pounds,” Mr. Teller said.

“I make my money from taking this photograph,” he added, his neck swathed in a polka-dotted scarf. “I am completely freer, in a way, than an artist.”

Yes.

Painter John Currin wiped his brow and glared contemptuously at the ceiling sconces that beamed down quantum rays. His sculptor wife, Rachel Feinstein—who’d also been photographed by Mr. Teller for Marc Jacobs—stood beside her husband. She wore a heavy coat, but no stockings, and seemed quite comfortable.

“I’ve been sweating all day,” Mr. Currin said. Temperatures were indeed high in New York City last week. But those weren’t the only elevated numbers making Mr. Currin sweat.

“We’re looking at a studio for Rachel,” he said. “Half of the day was the usual real estate …. ” His voice trailed off into a dry chuckle and he wiped again.

Expenses?

“Yah. Renting studios is insanely expensive.” Chuckle, chuckle.

And whereabouts are they looking?

“Right around where my studio is, in Tribeca. Hopefully, it will work out. It’s actually cheap to rent, but incredibly expensive to build out, so we’re trying to figure out how much it costs to move pipes and stuff like that.”

Mr. Currin and Ms. Feinstein are not alone in their travails. Just around the corner, the host of spanking new front doors to the much-discussed new locations of seven young art galleries—who have relocated to a stretch of 27th Street west of 11th Avenue—are experiencing the real-estate equivalent of opening-night jitters. Over the weekend, these front doors were sticking like crazy.

“You just have to push hard,” said one gallery assistant to a woman who was becoming unhinged at the front door’s refusal to let her out.

The scene was an apt metaphor for larger circumstances, primarily the question of how much creative give these galleries can afford faced with the pressure to sell to pay the bills.

“Prices attract a broader attention,” said Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, itself facing a big move in 2007. “[They] establish some kind of legitimacy for the dealer. I’ve watched that happen over years and years and years.”

“It’s not McDonald’s; they don’t do that kind of volume. It’s a luxury business,” said art critic Linda Yablonsky, jotting down notes before an altar erected in Clementine Gallery by Ota Benga Jones & Associates, a 2006 Whitney Biennial inclusion.

One visitor to the new spaces—who said she was prospecting for purchases but withheld her name—made the common oversaturation argument. “I don’t know how many more galleries Chelsea can take,” she said, flashing her super-white teeth. “Is there that much good art?”

Behind her, on the floor, lay Kirsten Stoltmann’s beguiling sculpture: a knocked-over wine bottle whose spilled contents were made to look like red wine spelling out the words “You Don’t Know Me” in wretched, alcoholic blobs.

—Nicholas Boston

Lurking Down Under

Is it odd that audiences are flocking to see Hostel? Nationwide, the brutally violent slice-’em-up pic is pulling in more cash these days than Narnia. A recent late-night engagement in Union Square revealed that a significantly large number of attendees appeared to be on dates. Who knew that seeing virile young frat boys get penetrated with a cordless drill was such a good night out away from the kids?

(That’s not to give Eli Roth’s second big film short shrift; the nasty tale of young Americans gone abroad in search of loose European women actually just barely conceals totally subversive conceits about national and sexual identity—and even a minor gay subplot. Hey, all films are required to include the gays now!)

But soon it’ll have competition for gore. Though it’s not really a horror film, The Proposition, an Australian film written by the songwriter Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, is certainly twice as dark as Hostel, if three times more poetic. (And, naturally, the music is flawless.) Set in 19th-century Australia, the film tracks a small-town lawman’s misguided and brutal attempt to civilize the outback and three lawless brothers.

Also, it contains the scare that has become Emily Watson’s face—though to her credit, she’s put that visage to work in service of a totally harrowing performance as a nice English girl in a dusty hell.

In fact, at a recent showing in the utterly claustrophobic and creepy basement screening room of the Bryant Park Hotel (the film won’t be released until May), one audience member couldn’t restrain himself during the film’s various depictions of spearings, shootings, a head being blown off, attempted rape and an endless blood-spurting flogging. “OH, GOD!!” he’d yell, prompting shushings from his embarrassed female companion. But there he’d go again, to the laughter of various film folks: “JESUS CHRIST!”

So let’s say reaction to the film will be vociferous.

Oddly enough, one of the film’s producers is Chris Brown, a long-time indie-film man who is also none other than legendary New York editor Tina Brown’s brother. Apparently, just as with the Hiltons, there’s always one more lurking on a nearby continent.

—Choire Sicha

The Dog Whisperer

Behind a short velvet rope and a fierce-looking bouncer, a line of people and their dogs waited anxiously to get into Petco on Friday evening. The Union Square pet store isn’t usually so exclusive, but it’s not every day that the animal kingdom’s reigning magician pays a visit, either.

“The dog whisperer is in there,” said Gary Bussells reverently. The large, red-faced man held a staff in one hand and the black rope leash to his dog, Prince, in the other. “He can take the meanest dog and make it act nice. He heals dogs and he trains people.”

The bouncer, dressed in a black suit, approached the line, and Prince, a powerful cur, jumped to his feet and growled. “He’s just excited to see the whisperer,” said Mr. Bussells, now whispering himself. “I hope he’ll tell us what to do.”

Like Mr. Bussells, nearly 500 people had lined up to see the dog whisperer, also known as Cesar Millan, on Friday morning and afternoon. Many of them were well versed in whisperer lore. They knew how he had been born during a hurricane that ripped the roof off his family’s house, how his grandfather helped him hone his telepathic talent with dogs, how he’d studied Rin Tin Tin and Lassie on television and always dreamed of spreading his gift to the United States, where he now runs the Los Angeles Dog Psychology Center and lives with his wife, Illusion.

But most of all, they knew him as the television star on his own prime-time show, Dog Whisperer, in which he reforms the unruliest and most vicious mutts with a staccato hiss, a jabbing pointer finger and an intense glare. After “rehabilitating” the dogs of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Scarlett Johansson, Oprah Winfrey, Ridley Scott and, yes, even Daisy Fuentes, Mr. Millan has become something of a celebrity himself.

“It’s a big event,” said Matt Everding, Petco’s appreciative manager, who said that a third of the people who came by to get a picture and an autograph didn’t even have dogs with them. “He’s a genuine nice guy—even when everyone is gone, you know?”

Just after 7 p.m., Mr. Millan—a short, fit man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a trim goatee, a maroon T-shirt and an unrelenting gaze—greeted his last visitor, a Jack Russell terrier dressed in a green sweater. The dog’s paws had been clicking nervously on the linoleum floor, and it seemed overwhelmed by the commotion, fluorescent white lights, squeaking rubber toys and musky scent of wet fur that hung heavy in the air. But as soon as Mr. Millan scooped the dog into its arms and stared into its eyes, the animal seemed at ease. Mr. Millan smiled for the camera.

“Intuition,” explained Mr. Millan, setting the now-serene animal down on the ground. He attributed his powers to being brought up “in another country, a country where people know dogs— Mehico.” The biography in his bulging press packet, which carries a photo of him carrying a staff, shepherd-like, as he leads 18 big dogs through the wilderness, notes his “uncanny gift for communicating with dogs and seeing the world through their eyes.”

According to Mr. Millan, that world is a godless one.

“Dogs don’t follow a spiritual leader; they don’t believe. But they follow the dominant one,” he said, adding, in one of his many trademark mantras: “Master the walk. Don’t just walk the dog—master the walk.”

He explained that, in the animal kingdom, one should never walk behind a dog, because it sends a message of weakness. “Bad energy,” he explained, noting that in New York, only homeless people understand that. “You never see a homeless man walking behind a dog.”

The problem in New York, he said, is that people baby their dogs too much. “Affection, affection, affection does not create connection. But what it does create is instability,” he said in his heavy Mexican accent. “In the wild, dogs have only two states of mind: the calm, submissive follower and the calm, assertive leader. Animals don’t have any issues until they come to live with humans. Your energy level is who you are in the animal kingdom.”

Well, what sort of level does it take to be a dog whisperer?

“I’ve got something special,” he said. “That’s why I have the show.”

—Jason Horowitz

Mr. LeBoeuf, whose recent canvases are on display at the Miller/Geisler Gallery, has clearly had a solid academic schooling. His knowledge of the human form, agility at manipulating oils and eye for the checks and balances of composition will draw "oohs" and "aahs" from New Yorkers resigned to the notion that they don't make painters like they used to. Mr. LeBoeuf's pictures of sons and fathers, brothers and sisters, women bathing and men sleeping are narrative fragments imbued with a strong sense of place. (They are, in fact, set in Louisiana, the artist's birthplace.)

Scratch immediately below the mundane surface of Mr. LeBouef's paintings and you'll find a spooky and, at times, unseemly realm of sexual intrigue, familial discontent, identities in crisis and-if I'm reading accurately-alien invasion (for the canvas imbued with the acidic green light). This isn't Currin territory; it's what you get after mixing Andrew Wyeth, Eric Fischl, Boys' Life magazine and The Twilight Zone . That is to say, straight-laced, poker-faced, all-American hokum.

Vessel (2004), a smallish horizontal canvas depicting a woman in her bath, is the exception. Mr. LeBoeuf's subtle modulation of white and gray in depicting the porcelain tub and surrounding tile merits accolades, as does the slow, almost aching ascension of the woman's right knee out of the bathwater. The picture's seductive power can be traced to an unease that's evoked rather than underlined-a sense of time forever stilled. Vessel brings to mind the uncanny quietude of Chardin and the skewed and pithy scenarios of Catherine Murphy, two sterling painters Mr. LeBoeuf might want to get to know and take inspiration from. Left to his own devices, he might not outgrow the caution bred by all his training.

Bryan LeBoeuf: Vessels is at the Miller/Geisler Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 26.

A Small World

There's no doubt about it: Hilary Harkness, whose recent paintings are on view at the Chelsea branch of the Mary Boone Gallery, has an imagination. Where to begin enumerating its wild and weird attributes? Each canvas presents a cross-section of a labyrinthine environment-a war ship, a futuristic industrial plant-overrun by tall, thin and scantily clad white women. Myriad scenarios take place simultaneously; most involve sex and violence, though dentistry and saving the whales also enter in to it. A painstaking artist (the show includes only three modestly scaled canvases), Ms. Harkness limns her doll-house fantasies with impressive diligence. Would that the touch weren't so drab. Maybe then I'd agree with the opinion that Ms. Harkness is a "post-feminist Hieronymus Bosch."

The thing is, Bosch wasn't post-anything; the nightmarish realms he painted were real to him. Ms. Harkness isn't capable of going out on that limb. Losing herself in a fiction is the one thing Ms. Harkness can't imagine. Painting is merely a pose-freaky, fun and finicky. If anyone, she reminds me of Jared French, the 20th-century American artist whose stiff brand of magic realism has been lost to history, consigned to the storage racks. Ms. Harkness' stiff brand of cartoon agitprop is likely to meet the same fate. Hilary Harkness is at the Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, until June 26.

Angular Gestures

"Talent at the End of the Line" was the headline for my review of Salvatore Federico's abstract paintings seen last year at the Amos Enos Gallery. After looking at Mr. Federico's recent pictures at the George Billis Gallery, I'm convinced he's moving closer to the front of the line. He continues to capture, contain and distill movement, creating hard-edged, pirouetting forms aligned to a hexagonal grid. You don't need to look at the finely rendered, diagrammatic drawings to intuit how exacting Mr. Federico is in mapping out the proportions of his origami-like shapes-it's all there in the work's taut and angular gestures. You do need to look at the paintings to appreciate how the palette-punchy, pure and jubilant-enriches the compositions, endowing them with emotional resonance.

Ischyrion and Spiridon (both 2004) are atypical paintings in that they feature more than one monumental form; each contains three. The former piece is whimsical, the latter joyous; both make overt their debt to the human form, and they're better off for it. Pictorial variety becomes Mr. Federico. Someone throw him another ball-the more he has to juggle, the more exciting a painter he becomes.

Salvatore Federico is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 12.

Eerie, Familial Paintings

The good thing about the notoriety and success of John Currin, predicts a painter friend, is that it'll spark a renewed interest among younger artists in the Old Masters and traditional art-making skills-like drawing from the figure. That's better than the umpteenth variation on Mona-with-a-mustache, I guess- how much better, only time will tell. There are indications that Mr. Currin's old-school affectations are taking hold. Would a painter like Bryan LeBoeuf find a welcoming home in Chelsea otherwise?

Mr. LeBoeuf, whose recent canvases are on display at the Miller/Geisler Gallery, has clearly had a solid academic schooling. His knowledge of the human form, agility at manipulating oils and eye for the checks and balances of composition will draw "oohs" and "aahs" from New Yorkers resigned to the notion that they don't make painters like they used to. Mr. LeBoeuf's pictures of sons and fathers, brothers and sisters, women bathing and men sleeping are narrative fragments imbued with a strong sense of place. (They are, in fact, set in Louisiana, the artist's birthplace.)

Scratch immediately below the mundane surface of Mr. LeBouef's paintings and you'll find a spooky and, at times, unseemly realm of sexual intrigue, familial discontent, identities in crisis and-if I'm reading accurately-alien invasion (for the canvas imbued with the acidic green light). This isn't Currin territory; it's what you get after mixing Andrew Wyeth, Eric Fischl, Boys' Life magazine and The Twilight Zone . That is to say, straight-laced, poker-faced, all-American hokum.

Vessel (2004), a smallish horizontal canvas depicting a woman in her bath, is the exception. Mr. LeBoeuf's subtle modulation of white and gray in depicting the porcelain tub and surrounding tile merits accolades, as does the slow, almost aching ascension of the woman's right knee out of the bathwater. The picture's seductive power can be traced to an unease that's evoked rather than underlined-a sense of time forever stilled. Vessel brings to mind the uncanny quietude of Chardin and the skewed and pithy scenarios of Catherine Murphy, two sterling painters Mr. LeBoeuf might want to get to know and take inspiration from. Left to his own devices, he might not outgrow the caution bred by all his training.

Bryan LeBoeuf: Vessels is at the Miller/Geisler Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 26.

A Small World

There's no doubt about it: Hilary Harkness, whose recent paintings are on view at the Chelsea branch of the Mary Boone Gallery, has an imagination. Where to begin enumerating its wild and weird attributes? Each canvas presents a cross-section of a labyrinthine environment-a war ship, a futuristic industrial plant-overrun by tall, thin and scantily clad white women. Myriad scenarios take place simultaneously; most involve sex and violence, though dentistry and saving the whales also enter in to it. A painstaking artist (the show includes only three modestly scaled canvases), Ms. Harkness limns her doll-house fantasies with impressive diligence. Would that the touch weren't so drab. Maybe then I'd agree with the opinion that Ms. Harkness is a "post-feminist Hieronymus Bosch."

The thing is, Bosch wasn't post-anything; the nightmarish realms he painted were real to him. Ms. Harkness isn't capable of going out on that limb. Losing herself in a fiction is the one thing Ms. Harkness can't imagine. Painting is merely a pose-freaky, fun and finicky. If anyone, she reminds me of Jared French, the 20th-century American artist whose stiff brand of magic realism has been lost to history, consigned to the storage racks. Ms. Harkness' stiff brand of cartoon agitprop is likely to meet the same fate. Hilary Harkness is at the Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, until June 26.

Angular Gestures

"Talent at the End of the Line" was the headline for my review of Salvatore Federico's abstract paintings seen last year at the Amos Enos Gallery. After looking at Mr. Federico's recent pictures at the George Billis Gallery, I'm convinced he's moving closer to the front of the line. He continues to capture, contain and distill movement, creating hard-edged, pirouetting forms aligned to a hexagonal grid. You don't need to look at the finely rendered, diagrammatic drawings to intuit how exacting Mr. Federico is in mapping out the proportions of his origami-like shapes-it's all there in the work's taut and angular gestures. You do need to look at the paintings to appreciate how the palette-punchy, pure and jubilant-enriches the compositions, endowing them with emotional resonance.

Ischyrion and Spiridon (both 2004) are atypical paintings in that they feature more than one monumental form; each contains three. The former piece is whimsical, the latter joyous; both make overt their debt to the human form, and they're better off for it. Pictorial variety becomes Mr. Federico. Someone throw him another ball-the more he has to juggle, the more exciting a painter he becomes.

Salvatore Federico is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 12.

Mr. Winkfield borrows Pop's stylistic tics-bright, uninflected colors; flat planes; simplified concrete forms-and puts them to use according to his own funny and flighty vision. He creates a realm that is equal parts geometric carnival, medieval comedy of manners, psychedelic Punch-and-Judy show and paint-by-numbers meditation on culture. The final straw that prevents Mr. Winkfield from entering the ranks of the art-star elite is his sense of purpose: Delight is his goal and, more often than not, the outcome. Delight is an alien concept to scenesters who prize Robert Gober, Matthew Barney, the Chapman brothers, Kiki Smith (the list goes on … ) as exemplars of culture; in fact, pleasure doesn't rate high on the list of priorities of many of our critics, collectors and institutions. I don't expect, say, the curators of the Guggenheim or the Brooklyn Museum to rush over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where Mr. Winkfield's latest efforts are on display.

Mr. Winkfield packs more imagery into a single canvas than most artists do over the course of an entire oeuvre . Having said that, the new pictures are less abundant in juxtaposition, more settled and heraldic, though still careening with oddball conglomerations of this, that and the other thing. With the exception of The Garden II (2002), explicit references to the human form are absent. The figurative is implied: Totemic personages, cobbled together from (just to name a few items) fish, ropes, roses and tongue depressors, gamely attempt to keep their constituent parts in order.

There's a strong sense of theater in the new work, and a metaphysical bent that is-if the otherworldly The Garden VII (2003) is any indication-Mr. Winkfield's most recent preoccupation. These expansive allegories on memory, art and the courting rituals of oranges revel in a cheeky and improbable invention.

People trudge through the Whitney these days, wearily trying to convince themselves that contemporary art isn't a dead end and that Mr. Currin lives up to the hype. Mr. Winkfield doesn't need hoopla: His pictures are proof of his headlong independence. For many in the art scene, that may be the hardest thing of all to imagine.

Trevor Winkfield: Gardens and Bouquets is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Feb. 7.

Unfortunate Arc

Squirreled away in the mezzanine galleries of the Whitney is In Conversation , a beautiful, if frustrating, exhibition of photographs by Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), mounted to coincide with the centennial of his birth. Viewers meet Siskind fully formed as an artist in 1943, after which follows a breathless, rat-a-tat-tat parade of the signature motif: peeling paint, deteriorating wallpaper and similar phenomena distilled and transmuted into stately, meticulous abstractions. Siskind redeemed urban detritus (particularly graffiti) as decisively as did Dubuffet, primarily by putting his nose-or rather, the camera lens-right up to it. Siskind gets so close at times that we lose a point of reference, as in Ajo, Arizona (1949), which could be an array of microscopic life forms but is basically unidentifiable. The rich textures and startling interruptions of pictorial space, most memorably seen in photos of tattered posters, absorb the eye. The work entrances.

For a bit, anyway-after that, the work is merely expert. By the early 1970's, when Siskind begins to locate paintings by Franz Kline on vandalized city walls, it's clear that formula has taken over. Whether the unfortunate artistic trajectory-from uncanny revelation to elegant routine-is the Whitney's doing or the true arc of Siskind's oeuvre , only a more comprehensive exhibition will make clear. As it is, viewers will leave In Conversation wanting more of Siskind-and having had enough.

In Conversation: A Centennial Exhibition of Photographs by Aaron Siskind is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until Feb. 1.

Underdone Stew

Benjamin Butler is having a second one-person show of smallish paintings at Team Gallery, but he's not really ready for his first. Trees are Mr. Butler's subject, or rather, his device: They bisect the canvas, creating compositional fields in which blocky strokes of oil paint accumulate. The pictures underscore the dynamic between figure and ground by obscuring the distinction between the two. Mr. Butler's trees aren't surrounded by space so much as engulfed by it.

The simplicity of composition recalls Milton Avery; the pictorial brevity, Lois Dodd and Alex Katz. A thin Symbolist bent can be traced to the mystical landscapes of Piet Mondrian, and a thinner Expressionism to van Gogh, Gustav Klimt and Jan Muller; the Orphism of Robert Delaunay may be in the mix as well. This is an odd and intriguing stew of raw precedent that has yet to come to a simmer.

Mr. Butler's paintings catch the eye when seen from a distance: The chunky mosaic-like brushwork stopped me in my tracks when I was still on the sidewalk, looking through Team's front door. Once inside, I saw that Mr. Butler can't be bothered with working a picture-the brushwork is rushed, the surfaces tatty. Sometimes, as with Trees and Leaves and Blue Trees (both 2003), the paintings are hardly there at all. This is student-grade stuff-high on energy and lacking in focus.

Not everyone agrees: The show is almost sold out. Somebody must admire Mr. Butler's forays into the " faux space of ironic possibility." Too bad: Though he has evidently absorbed the unhealthy influence of postmodernism, Mr. Butler has real know-how. Let's hope he follows through and builds on the potential of the paintings; and let's hope he ignores the callow enthusiasm of his collectors, whose encouragement will only lead him astray.

Benjamin Butler: Trees is at Team Gallery, 527 West 26th Street, until Feb. 14.

Four years ago, Rachel Feinstein was working as a receptionist at the Marianne Boesky gallery, but "certain times of the day would slow down and these hallucinations would come to me," said the former Bar Six barmaid. She began sketching some potential sculptures: whimsical plaster-and-cardboard concoctions of mushroom stalks and flower vases perched atop dancing ladies. Ms. Boesky took note.

"I want to show you," she said.

"I can't," Ms. Feinstein said. "I work for you."

"O.K., you're fired," Ms. Boesky said.

"The stars had aligned," the 32-year-old recalled the other day. At a dinner party hosted by Lisa Yuskavage, an A-list painter of big-breasted, titillated blondes, Ms. Feinstein was fortuitously seated next to prominent London gallery owner Tommaso Corvi-Mora. "An incredible man," she said. "He wanted to come by and see my stuff."

Mr. Corvi-Mora arranged two solo exhibits of Ms. Feinstein's work.

"When the lights are green," Ms. Yuskavage said, "she steps on the gas."

Ms. Feinstein might get some extra mileage from being married to artist John Currin, whose Whitney exhibit this month includes hyper-real renditions of round-hipped ladies blessed with his wife's wide face, ethereal blue eyes, blond ringlets and Botticelli bosom. "His love is on the wall for me," she said. "How great is that?"

These attributes are also on view in the December Vogue , where Ms. Feinstein-currently between shows-may be glimpsed sprawled across a bed, legs kicked up girlishly behind her. But, she said, "it's terrifying to think I might run out of ideas. I don't want to be one of those people who rise up and then disappear."

Ms. Feinstein was born in Miami-"very Wild West in the mid-80's, like Scarface "-and discovered art in elementary school, taking private lessons in Coconut Grove with pop-psychology books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain . Coming of age, she appeared twice as an extra on Miami Vice before attending Columbia, where she studied religion and philosophy. She applied to Yale's M.F.A. program wearing a see-through plastic mini-skirt and a T-shirt reading "I'm a Satisfier." Yale passed, but Ms. Feinstein's passion for personal expression wasn't doused: When she married Mr. Currin in 1998, she wore a Lucy Barnes gown inspired by Marie Antoinette as a shepherdess, and dressed her bridesmaids in Barnes dresses inspired by The Stepford Wives .

"She knows everybody," said Elisabeth Ivers, a director at Marianne Boesky. "Extremely friendly."

Ms. Feinstein is aware of the talk-even among her many friends-that she owes her artistic success to good looks, socializing and her husband. "Sometimes they say really horrible things," she said. "People say, 'You're getting what you have because of him.' I'm such a loudmouth, and people haven't liked me." But she shrugs off these jealous biddies. "I'm pretty tough," she said. "All successful people are ambitious, and if you're ambitious, people aren't going to like you." Ms. Yuskavage said her friend is very talented. "You can't lie when it comes to art," she said. "Look at Rachel's work for what it is. If you don't like it, fine."

-Ronda Kaysen

All of which was brought to mind when the invitation for HOT!!, an exhibition of paintings by Robert Kushner at the DC Moore Gallery, arrived in my mailbox. Mr. Kushner is a fairly ubiquitous painter, one who has exhibited regularly in New York for close to 30 years. I don't want to give the impression that he's an artist whose work we're better off skimming over lightly. His lavish depictions of flora, inspired as much by Henri Matisse as by Japanese Rimpa painters like Ogata Korin, are those of an artist for whom the decorative isn't simply a passion but, one feels, a way of life. I've been an admirer of Mr. Kushner's work since his 1995 show at the Midtown Payson Galleries threw me for the most ecstatic of loops. Each picture in that exhibition was a giddy yet deep-felt celebration of color, line and material. His subsequent work has maintained that jubilant high. Still, I more than briefly wondered, while fingering my invitation for HOT!!, if Mr. Kushner might not have begun digging himself the most engaging of ruts. Was he really capable of earning an exhibition title that required not one but two exclamation points?

These doubts were dispelled when I finally got around to visiting HOT!! If Mr. Kushner's continuing use of botanical motifs will surprise no one, his sense of color continues to gain in resonance a not-unimpressive fact given an oeuvre whose vibrancy would seem hard to expand upon. Although simmer might not be as scintillating a trope as hot, simmer is what the paintings do radiate a heat that is steady, nourishing and strong, but not so strong as to overtax our central nervous systems. Mr. Kushner's use of glitter and gold and palladium leaf key in to his chromatic knack. In lesser hands, these materials would result in the gaudiest kind of pictorial kitsch. In Mr. Kushner's hands, glitter and gold are a surprisingly organic component of his palette. There are a lot of painters who use a lot of color, but there are few we would feel justified in dubbing colorists. Mr. Kushner is very much the latter.

In the exhibition catalog, gallery owner Bridget Moore writes that Mr. Kushner "is particularly interested in the high key palette of the 1960s and considers Pop Art as one of the last great painterly traditions in American art." As someone who considers Pop Art a nihilistic steamroller whose bright accessibility is part and parcel of its sneaky bad faith, I can only scratch my head that an artist as life-affirming as Mr. Kushner should esteem it as much as he does. Of course, everyone is allowed one mistake: If Mr. Kushner divines inspiration in the Day-Glo palette of that overrated epoch, well, more power to him.

As it stands, I find that his paintings have less in common with Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and company than with Hans Hofmann. Like that volcanic pedagogue, Mr. Kushner isn't always capable of sustaining a composition all the way through; the pictures, with their encyclopedic compendium of painterly techniques, are a mite tricky. Nonetheless, Mr. Kushner, again like Hofmann, is propelled by an unadulterated exuberance and a gift for translating that exuberance into paint. His canvases are shamelessly, winningly seductive. New Yorkers in need of respite from a brisk beginning to spring are advised to head over to DC Moore in order to bask in Mr. Kushner's generous, over-the-top bravura. Robert Kushner: HOT!! is at the DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until March 31.

Even the Intricacies Are Self-Conscious

Like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, Julie Heffernan is a figurative artist who yokes newfangled ends to oldfangled means. Her paintings, currently on exhibit at PPOW and Littlejohn Contemporary, picture a fairy-tale-like realm abundant with symbol and captained by theory. Ms. Heffernan employs the conventions of Old Master painting and puts them in the service of an art that takes the credo "the personal is the political" at face value. One doesn't have to read the press release to intuit the work's preoccupation with issues of gender, identity, adolescence and eco-politics it's there to scan in the pictures. Yet as plain as Ms. Heffernan's art may be, it's also adamant in its evasions. Mistaking the impenetrable for the poetic, the artist conceals nothing and withholds everything. This is frustrating one canvas of a dozen or so bathing beauties frolicking in what appears to be a doomed Edenic setting hints at a futzy, Rousseau-like charm. Yet Ms. Heffernan's canvases aren't charming; mostly they're just dreary.

As accomplished as her pictures are, one isn't tempted to plumb their intricacies, not least because their intricacies are so pro forma. The thing about having a vision is that one has to give it credence in order to give it life. This is something an artist as self-consciously remote as Ms. Heffernan is incapable of doing. Spend some time with her brown and brittle cosmos and one almost begins to pine for the ersatz porno of Mr. Currin and Ms. Yuskavage. Julie Heffernan is at PPOW, 476 Broome Street, and Littlejohn Contemporary, 31 East 57th Street, until March 31.