Any even slightly exhibitionistic art student knows the ground rules to starting a band: do some serious hanging out, pick a name, make a noise, and bring that noise with supreme gusto to a group of people in a basement or a cafeteria. It's simple and satisfying. Perhaps one in five art school bands will play a second gig, and perhaps one in ten will get around to recording anything. There's a distinguished lineage to this class of contemporary music--the Who and Talking Heads, for example, took shape this way--but the art-school band project does not, typically, evolve into a life's work. What it has ever done, and will ever do, is provide a locus for the young artist's evolving personal definitions of friendship, politics and art. It is part of the artist's apprenticeship. With its humble summer exhibition devoted to the band Destroy All Monsters, the Printed Matter bookstore on Tenth Avenue has done sterling work to explore and explain this impulse.

courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

The discreet jiggle that comes with the New York art world's switch to summer hours--Monday to Friday instead of Tuesday to Saturday--acts as a blunt industry-wide signal: the people who buy and sell art at a high level have checked out until September. Some are chasing fashionable azure horizons from weekend to weekend, basically moving their operation to where the money's camped for the season, while the rest are wealthy enough to take real vacations. Pressure eases beautifully in the top dogs' absence. Unmonitored, the junior skeleton crews at the galleries unclench themselves, enjoying their jobs and smiling with more than just pursed lips, and the barn-like desolation and exquisitely tuned air conditioning make for a preferable July grime timeout than a bob into your hysterical avenue standby. So adios, Old Navy, it's quirky summer group show time in Chelsea.

5th Avenue between 27th and 28th Street is of those drab midtown blocks that should not be used to advertise New York. Bank buildings with chunky plastic signage are little more than oversized shells for cash machines, and there's no way to tell whether the various realtors and soft-furnishing showrooms are open to the public. The corner diner is as arbitrary a vessel as the office tower; folk flood in and out, unchanged. This block is also the home of the Museum of Sex. I entered knowing exactly nothing about the seven-year-old educational institution.

The Sex Lives of Animals occupies the ground floor. A college-level text about the division of scientific disciplines, Darwin's legacy, and various misconceptions about animal sexuality acted as unanticipated dry foreplay along the narrow entrance hall. The four young Italian women who clicked through the turnstile before me were unable to feign interest in fully clothed education of this sort, zipping around the corner towards a life-size papier-mâché model of three deer shagging each other. This too failed to satisfy the gang, alas, and I would not see them again. One wonders if an institution catering demonstrably to foreigners should rely this heavily on reading in English.

All images courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery

ANOTHER PAINTING, 2009

We're at Chelsea Whores, Houston-based Mark Flood's second one-person show in New York and his first at Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea. The artwork immediately to one's left is a spraypainted stencil on a tin sign called, descriptively, EXXON / TAKE DRUGS. A work a few feet away, METH / COMMUNITY BREAKFAST, consists of a Golden Oaks Montessori lawn sign--the plastic kind on a pair of prongs that pokes into suburban verges to advertise local events--with a message stenciled on the front in silver spraypaint. The message reads "METH." The artist's name is misspelled, 'Mark Lood', on the adhesive vinyl signage by the front desk. Mark Flood is 52 years old.

All images courtesy Michael Werner Gallery

"The Illusionist (Lens Painting)", 2007

There is a particular young species of painting that for a long time snarled or spoiled my appreciation of contemporary art. This painting, appearing noisily around a museum corner or turned page, would be busy, usually very large, messy, and wholly lacking a clear narrative. It frequently looked, literally or figuratively, like someone had taken a shit on the canvas. Martin Kippenberger made these paintings, with streams of consciousness dribbled around the canvas and no distinction made between what was personal, what was pointed, and what was just a joke. Albert Oehlen still makes these paintings; some new ones, currently on show at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea, have commercial posters pasted to the canvas then smeared and partially obscured by angry squalls of paint as well as--here and there and for good measure--giant words. The ostentatious and systematic disregard for rules of any kind made these artworks emotionally opaque and impossible for the novice to read, and it caused a problem. Foreignness is fine, a challenge, something that an art lover will learn to be cool about; but how can you learn the language of a painting if you can't figure out what language it's speaking? The work of 68-year-old Sigmar Polke, an elder and inventor of this mystifying dialect with a show of recent works up now at Michael Werner, first gave me the means to see this problem through.

All images courtesy 303 Gallery

Ceal Floyer's Ink on paper

I became a fan of 40-year-old, Berlin-based Ceal Floyer's work the way I imagine many people became a fan--by straightaway falling for a discreet piece in a museum's permanent collection. The Tate Modern often exhibits its version of the artist's 1992 Light Switch, wherein a 35mm slide of a light switch is projected onto the wall at the actual size and height of a light switch. For years I have asked returning friends if they remember it from that crowded, crazy blockbuster-culture scene, and they invariably do, and warmly. Light Switch is an excellent, distinctly memorable artwork for a destination museum, as it's both easy and very enjoyable to describe to others. It's a puzzle and it's a pun and it's a gag, and you get it and you still like it. It's a joke you can retell without fearing it'll lose its punch. These are qualities that have ever made for great art.

Charles Ray, a Californian artist who has been active for about 35 years, mostly makes sculptures. Their formidable weight, fragility and cumbersomeness means they don't travel as much as they might, and there have never been many of them--a few a year, perhaps, with long gestation periods before they're completed. Nevertheless, they are often and enthusiastically recalled to explain and illustrate recent art history. Ray makes for a good Google image search: the shots arrest, and may prick a lost memory of a room in a random museum or a perfect spread in an art book. Without fail they'll put a hunger in the belly for more Ray. He'll seduce from the first. His sculptures are engineered and finished with superhuman care, and they tease and prod, ruthlessly, at the fences of human perception. There are three Ray works from 1987-88, marquee years for the artist, now up at Matthew Marks Gallery, and their economy invites a tidy argument for the artist's singular place in the contemporary canon. What a treat.

Over the past decade, Andrew Kuo has become the sort of energetic, omnipresent New Yorker who appears, like magic, wherever you may be. I last encountered him in the backstage guts of Terminal 5, a ghastly cement nightclub in the hinterland of the West 50s. It took a few days before I even thought to wonder why he was down there. Years ago he used to give fat, lavish, multicolor-silkscreened zines of new work to the greenest and most approximate of acquaintances. I have two, and I forget when and where it happened. Kuo and I do not know each other, at all, yet I have seen the man on more occasions, and shared more smile-and-upped-eyebrow combos and peace signs with him, than I have with folk I know well. It's best to be suspicious of young artists who are quite this comfortable on the scene, yet--and perhaps it's a particular physical radiance, or the fact I've never witnessed him project the unmistakable shrill frequency of opportunism that young artists usually emit--Kuo seems OK.

All images courtesy Brooklyn Museum

Gustave Caillebotte, Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres, 1877

French Impressionism has a remarkable and, it seems, endlessly renewable currency in contemporary museum culture. The recent show of Van Gogh nocturnes at MoMA spawned an agitated, gelatinous daily mob of fans, waiting their turn with timed-entry tickets poking from purpling fists like betting slips. Cezanne is presently packing the aisles with a show that sounds like a late sequel to a hit movie, Cezanne and Beyond, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the good people of Atlanta only have a month longer to wait before their High Museum unveils a temporary Monet Mecca, perfect for the summer. Truly, museum-goers could spend their days living entirely in the Gallic years 1860 to 1920, hopping around the world, straw-hatted, from one big revival to the next.

The now-crashing, frothy tide of praise for 27-year-old video artist Ryan Trecartin began in earnest at the start of the 2007 art season, when New York Times critic (and as-of-Monday Pulitzer prizewinner) Holland Cotter apparently returned from the artist's New York solo debut at Elizabeth Dee Gallery an entirely changed man. Cotter delivered the sort of paroxysmal prose that will snap a reader's spine straight in its Friday chair, a knockout dose of unequivocal, steamrollering enthusiasm that could not stop itself from finding more and more aesthetic territory for the anointed artist to conquer. To wit: the critic claimed Trecartin's skill with face makeup to be superior contemporary painting than actual painting. This was an unforgettably outrageous, colorful, monumental assertion. The show was, all told, 'The best thing that could have happened to the New York fall art season.' And no one voiced any objection. Unchecked Trecartin mania abided. Last week The New Yorker proclaimed the artist the 'star' of Younger Than Jesus via poet/codger Peter Schjeldahl, a man I respect enormously and the last person I'd expect to come out with such faith in such a young artist. The editors even rewarded the lad with an absolutely cherry illustration. I am bowled over by these responses.