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D C Moore 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. -- The road to a job as a museum art curator used to be winding and haphazard. Now there are degree-granting programs like Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, which has been processing aspiring organizers of world-changing exhibitions for 20 years as of this summer. Along with other anniversary events the center is presenting a pair of exhibitions in the spacious galleries of Bard's Hessel Museum. Viewed as independent shows, ''Anti-Establishment'' and ''From 199A to 199B: Liam Gillick'' are remarkably enervating. Considering them in light of the occasion, however -- and that one was organized by the center's executive director, Tom Eccles, the other by its graduate program director, Johanna Burton -- the shows are fascinating to think about together. What do these exhibitions tell us about the education of curators today? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

459 West 19th Street, Chelsea Through May 5 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the department of unsolicited advice for aspiring artists: avoid dust, dirt, ashes, soot, smoke, sand, mud and lint, especially if you want to make a statement about life, death, history and the ephemerality of it all. The dangers are well illustrated by ''Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design,'' at the Museum of Arts and Design. The problem is that these kinds of materials are loaded with symbolic baggage before you do anything with them. Blood, straw and broken glass are similarly problematic. They are like hammy method actors drawing too much attention to themselves. Imagine Sean Penn in a mumblecore movie. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Last weekend, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrated the opening of its new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, which would seem to represent a major commitment to collecting and exhibiting the art of our time. It should be noted, however, that the new wing is not actually new. It is the old, I. M. Pei-designed wing from 1981, formerly used for rotating exhibitions, now refurbished, repurposed and renamed. And while a lot more contemporary art is now on view, you don't get the feeling that the old, small-city provincialism has been replaced by a new, fiercely ambitious cosmopolitanism. The main attraction is a 12,000-square-foot, oblong gallery, a big-box space occupied by a sprawling, uneven, crowded hodge-podge of about 240 works from the museum's permanent collection, augmented by some blue-chip loans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global influence of blockbuster movies on the collective psyche of humanity is awesome, if not terrifying, to contemplate. Much ink has been devoted to analyzing the social effects -- usually viewed as pernicious -- of popular cinema, and that thinking has spilled over into contemporary art. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Douglas Gordon and many other artists have made the Hollywood feature an object of skeptical scrutiny. The advent of easy digital editing has enabled the rise of one entertaining strain of art about movies: the thematically pointed montage of samples from popular films. Christian Marclay's ''Quartet,'' a rousing four-screen compilation of clips from cinematic musicals, remains the high-water mark for this genre. Candice Breitz's two-room pairing of multiscreen installations anatomizing the careers of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep (presented at Yvon Lambert in Chelsea in 2009) suggests that the formal and technological possibilities are still wide open. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For museums, collecting contemporary art is a crapshoot. Odds are that in the long run, they will acquire more storage problems than great, lasting works. For the Newark Museum, a distinguished institution that has been collecting pieces by living artists since its founding in 1909, the problem is compounded by geography. Just across the river, several big museums collect and exhibit contemporary art for a huge, international audience that is interested in all things new, experimental and provocative. Not to knock the once proud, now down-at-the-heels city of Newark, but why would anyone come here to see cutting-edge art when it's so easy to do in Manhattan? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the dog days arrive, many New York art galleries put their solo acts on ice and turn their exhibition spaces into pluralistic laboratories to test new talent and experiment with cool ideas. If you can stand the heat, it is a great time to be out looking at contemporary art. An unscientific and incomplete survey of group shows already open -- more openings will follow after the holiday weekend -- finds a retiring, introspective mood. It looks as if the art world had gone into retreat from the endless barrage of bad news coming from the world at large. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the art exhibition "Works on Paper" being held at the Seventh Regiment Armory until March 5, 2006 in New York.

The article reviews the art exhibition "The Art Show," organized by the Art Dealers Association of America at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City on February 24-25, 2006.

This article reviews the art exhibition "Rodney Graham: A Little Thought," at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia through December 23, 2005.