Anyone conversant with Ms. Smith’s sculptures, drawings and installations will recognize that the word “pleasure” is used advisedly here: The main theme of her oeuvre is the body and its many and various failings. Frailty, illness and decay are subjects meant to prompt sobriety and reflection, not delight. “Nature doesn’t care if you become fly food,” an aphorism scrawled across one of the drawings, puts a blunt spin on her preoccupations.

Ms. Smith’s most infamous work—Tale (1992), a life-size effigy of a nude woman on all fours trailing an absurdly long line of shit out of her rear—is not at the Whitney. That doesn’t mean you won’t recognize how thoroughly Ms. Smith conflates putrefaction and sex. Intimacy is the sum—less, actually—of its dissected parts: A “mammary” is distended and spider-like; the “uro-genital systems” are alien specimens; a tongue slithers into an ear like a sea slug entering a shell.

The body, particularly the female body, is a burden, its processes gross and lamentable. An early untitled work consists of 12 silvered glass bottles whose supposed contents are etched on the face of each: Semen, mucus, vomit, diarrhea, pus and so on. Constipation and bloody urine are mentioned elsewhere. Ms. Smith’s figures dangle from metal stands, give birth from fragmented bodies and suffer mutilation. A hunched-over woman, constructed from brown paper, paste and horsehair, is crucified upon the wall.

Allusions to religion, myth and fairytales become more frequent with the later work. Her furry Mary Magdalene (1994)—or maybe she’s scarred; Ms. Smith’s skills as a sculptor don’t quite allow her to make the distinction—suggests a caustic take on Christianity, as does a crèche comprised of scattershot bronze animal silhouettes. Daughter (1999), a smallish mannequin that’s a cross between Little Red Riding Hood and the Bearded Woman, is accompanied by spooky music. Feebly crafted and oh-so-symbolic, it garnered snickers from fellow museumgoers.

Ms. Smith is a proud disciple and practitioner of feminist art. The chief characteristic of feminist foremothers like Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann and, less so, Eva Hesse isn’t outreach or introspection, but narcissism. Self-absorption renders political statement worthless. Sloganeering and moralizing trample over aesthetics.

So it goes with Ms. Smith. Her art doesn’t admit to ambiguities or subtlety. Even at her most abstruse, the message is clear as a bell: Being alive sucks. Her strident ickiness quashes any interesting, furtive tangents. Ms. Smith winnows her art down to the barest whiff of a morbid idea.

If she were capable of or interested in transforming her love of materials, paper especially, into something greater than one-to-one markers of dread, then the work might earn or even transcend its reputation. As things go, she’s content to reiterate the fact that our bodies are fallible and, at times, repellent. Tell us something we don’t know, or at least don’t be so pretentious about it.

Ron Mueck, whose sculptures are the subject of a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, is also taken with the body, but he abjures the abject for verisimilitude. Before gaining renown as a Y.B.A. (Young British Artist), he made puppets for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Who could have imagined that Cookie Monster would lead to internationally renowned transgressions?

“How Does He Do It?” reads a wall label. The question will occur to anyone who sees the work. Using fiberglass and other materials, Mr. Mueck crafts figures, often nude, whose skin, hair, toenails and, in one case, umbilical cord are astonishingly true to life. Wrinkles, stubble, musculature, veins and moistened eyes are rendered with exacting fidelity to observed fact. A cool brand of trompe l’oeil is his specialty. “Don’t touch!” was the repeated mantra of the security guards. People want to know what the sculptures feel like, so credible is the illusion.

What separates Mr. Mueck from Duane Hanson, whose sculptures of frumpy housewives and tourists have elicited double takes since the 1960’s, is scale. A newborn girl takes up as much space as a stretch limo; another baby is hardly larger than a baseball card. A hairy naked man is huge, a crouching man, small. A woman in bed, pensively staring into space, is the size of a railroad flat. Mr. Mueck’s stock-in-trade is absurdist theater; sculpture is the means.

“Most art we look at,” the museum tells us, “Ron Mueck’s sculptures, we watch.” The implication is that his pieces convey movement. This is curatorial false advertising. What’s striking about the sculptures, after all, is their inertia. That’s the point. Consummate artificiality, not life, is Mr. Mueck’s raison d’être. There’s more energy in a wax replica at Madame Tussaud’s.

Historical references (to the crucifixion and Manet’s dead toreador) and various props (a mirror, a boat and a bed) add some diversity, as does physical dissociation: Mask II (2001-2002) and Mask III (2005) are gigantic faces without bodies. A sculpture of the artist’s dead, naked father, sequestered in a corner, is the lone reflection of autobiographical intent.

In the end, these variations tweak, rather than develop, Mr. Mueck’s clinical vision. He is, like so many contemporary artists, a one-trick pony. (An art market that prizes product consistency wouldn’t have it any other way.) Once you accept his trick, you’re free to be diverted by his immaculately plotted kitsch. His technique is breathtaking, but it can’t redeem a blandness of imagination.

At the museum’s exit, there are some Rodin sculptures. Passing by them, you almost forgive the 19th-century master his bluster. Rodin’s saving grace is that vulgarity was inseparable from his genius. Ms. Smith and Mr. Mueck are too prim to risk anything that energetic. Better to stifle vitality than embrace it. As artists, they ask as much of themselves as they want—and it isn’t enough.

Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, until Feb. 11; Ron Mueck is at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, until Feb. 4.

Madame Tussauds unveils a wax figure of U2 lead singer Bono--will they put him next to Hillary?

Then the City Council Committee on Lower Manhattan Redevelopment will unveil its proposal regarding construction authority at the World Trade Center site.

In the evening, the Metropolitan Republican Club hosts its St. Patrick's Day Party, while the New York Young Republican Club meets with special guest John Faso (which requires business attire), and finally, the Chinatown Republican Club hosts a fundraiser for Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco.

—Nicole Brydson

The venue was uncommon, the figures, unreal, she writes. Here's her campaign photo diary, 2008.

Hillary greets the crowd, on hand to hear her ambitions for 2008.

The proud husband looks on, hoping to get a chance to once again fly regularly aboard Air Force One.

Rudy and George pose with Hillary campaign aide, Lou.

Support from the outgoing prez is always crucial.

See you at the inauguration!

—Nicole Brydson

They probably don't notice the tall, rail-thin woman with kinky brown hair exiting the crumbling stairwell or the dismissive way she says goodbye to a bespectacled middle-aged man as they head in opposite directions. They don't see the flash of disgust that crosses her face as she zips up her sweatshirt over a midriff-less spandex top.

They certainly don't know that she has played out this same scene three times in the last hour and a half. They couldn't know this unless they've been staking out the entrance of the Elk Hotel for the last six hours like I have. But had they stopped to notice, they might have recognized the significance of the building and its transient inhabitants. They'd know that the Elk, the last "no-tell hotel" in the area, represents one of the few surviving remnants of 42nd Street's seamy and seedy side, a barely living connection to the gray days when Times Square was the reigning kingdom of sex and sin.

Bugs Bunny and the Lion King now line what was once home to porn theaters and sex emporiums. The Port Authority, yesteryear's mecca of grime and crime, now attracts kiddie birthday parties to its renovated, high-tech bowling alley. Last summer, even the classic Show World , land of peep shows and strippers, fired all its exotic dancers and started pimping plastic replicas of the Statue of Liberty and crappy "I ª NY" T-shirts. Then on May 27, it was shuttered for allegedly being the site of a friendly little fencing operation.

But even before Show World, I started to wonder if there was anything left of the Times Square I grew up with. So on a sunny afternoon I said goodbye to my wife and set out on a mini-adventure-to see if I could find any establishments serving the time-compressed lascivious needs of harried and horny New Yorkers in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's newly minted and freshly scrubbed Times Square-cum-Disneyland.

After wandering for a while, I turned to the professionals for advice: a couple of morose-looking doormen and bouncers at Show World. I inquired about the possibility of locating a room for just a couple of hours. Five minutes later-and $10 poorer-I was standing in front of the filthy plastic doors of 360 West 42nd Street.

There are no signs on the outside mentioning day rates, let alone any fraction thereof. I climbed the 12 stairs and waited to be buzzed in by a man hidden behind a Plexiglas-and undoubtedly bulletproof-separation. Finally inside, I asked the Pakistani clerk about room rates. He leaned forward, looking to see who had escorted me inside the building. As I signed the guest register (John Smith, of course), he asked me-twice-if I would be staying alone. I assured him I would. He just stared, then he shrugged and pointed me to the far end of the first floor.

A twin-size bed dominates Room 109-precisely what one would expect from a place charging $25 for a two-hour stay. The ratty, bumpy, mattress features a concave crater directly beneath the semen stains on the once white sheets. With only a little imagination, one can discern the subtle outline of the human form on its surface, where countless numbers of women must have lain, usually paid for the inconvenience of staring at the mold-covered ceiling. Pressed in one corner stands a chipped faux-wood table and underneath it a plastic container with one crumpled napkin, one crusty tissue and one used condom inside.

Out the window, I could see people walking. They would be repulsed by Room 109. But I saw something different. To me, the room and all its inert inhabitants were like a moment frozen in time. A moment, that if I had my druthers, would remain frozen precisely this way.

But rumor has it that the Elk's current owner has been slowly "assembling" the buildings along the southwest and southeast corners of Ninth Avenue in the hopes of constructing a residential high-rise similar to the wildly successful Manhattan Plaza that stands kitty-corner from the hotel.

Should we let this antique go gentle into that goody-two-shoes night? Nay, I say. The wax enthusiasts behind Madame Tussaud's will soon open a 60,000-foot facility just an avenue or so over. For a few bucks more, they could buy the Elk Hotel and memorialize the hot-wax enthusiasts who've occupied its rooms-a life-size, interactive exhibit that's one part Lower East Side Tenement Museum and five parts Sodom and Gomorrah.

Picture the themed possibilities: In one room, a 16-year-old runaway and her john are entwined on the bed, while her pimp, attired in pink mink, gold chains and feathered fedora, listens at the door, a smile covering his face as he greedily counts his cash.

On the second floor, the museum re-creates an earlier era- those special, summer nights at nightclubs like Plato's Retreat when beer guts, feathered hair and cocaine razors were the coin of the realm.

And what trip would be complete without a visit to the adultery room, replete with rendezvousing lovers caught in flagrante delicto by a jealous wife waving a kitchen knife.

Imagine the gift shop: T-shirts emblazoned with catchy slogans ("Welcome to New York. Now get the fuck out."), dildos shaped like Lady Liberty's torch and candies-in-a-crack-vial. At the register, a snippy workforce on workfare fleeces customers at three-card monte.

Then there are the expansion opportunities. A bed-and-breakfast where you can live like the addicts did-raids, deprivation and all! And a theme restaurant with out-of-work actors dressed as the homeless, directing customers to a buffet-style dumpster dinner.

On second thought, perhaps we should just leave it all alone. Sooner or later the ever-cycling city will hit another downturn and we'll need a blueprint for transforming Disney back to Deep Throat and Restaurant Row back to Crack Alley. Let the Elk Hotel remain in its present, pristine state, a repository for historical DNA from which we could clone 42nd Street the way it was meant to be.

For now, I'll just go home to my wife and wait till it happens.

The Ratners (the house is registered to Julie) bought the 17-foot-wide brownstone in 1985 for $1.3 million. What? Did you expect a big-time developer like Mr. Ratner not to make a sack of money selling his own house?

"It's not a big house," said one broker who has admired the tasteful home. It's a 17-foot-wide, four-story brick structure, built in 1895. There are 12-foot ceilings on the parlor floor, pocket doors, inlaid floors, a greenhouse by the kitchen, a fireplace in the master bedroom and built-in stereo wiring. Vacuum piping sucks quietly behind the walls; there's one of those "media centers" in the basement.

Mr. Ratner's company, Forest City-Ratner Companies, is known as the developer that brought office buildings and suburban-style shopping centers to the derelict regions of downtown Brooklyn. Mr. Ratner is also the chairman of the board at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But with the Times Square tourist-entertainment complex, Forest City's bid to redevelop Columbus Circle by installing a Sears there, and his night in the Lincoln Bedroom after he and his wife collectively donated $21,500 to the Democrats, it might appear that his agenda is expanding beyond the scope of this house. Unfortunately, however, the real cause is probably the couple's divorce.

Because the house is only under contract, a spokesman for Mr. Ratner had no comment.