I used to love rifling through the marked-down art books piled on tables in the back of the @MetMuseum shop. Surprised to learn that the sale-book tables have been discontinued and the space is now reserved for racks of numbingly artless sweat shirts.🥲

Just noticed, in the permanent collection of the @WhitneyMuseum, Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s intriguing “Twisted Loaf” (1930), whose tilting table, sooty tones and unlikely subject —a challah —make it look like a Lower East Side version of a Cezanne still life.

This is a great story about Serra’s art and relationship (such as it was) with Jasper Johns. It reflects a significant moment that Solomon conjures up very evocatively. It resonates because, for those alive in 1969, it’s just all gone.

I wrote a story about a time in 1969 when Jasper Johns, who was well-established, invited the little-known Richard Serra to come to his home and splash molten lead against a wall, recreating a piece that Johns had admired at the Whitney. nytimes.com/2024/03/29/art…

Of the 30,000 works in the collection of ⁦SFMOMA⁩, Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953) is the one requested the most frequently for loans and reproduction.

The last time I interviewed Richard Serra, in 2019, he asked that I not mention in my article that he had cancer. He inscribed a book to me like this. R.I.P Richard, who will always be one of art’s great mentionables.

Enjoyed the new Kathe Kollwitz show at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art. Although she is revered as an artist of social protest, the show can also be read as a study in hands. The artist’s hands appear and disappear, variously strong or frail, as if reflecting her shifting moods.

Funny, slightly absurdist story about a young man who aspires to have the seeming depth of his Viennese emigre neighbor.

In Eric Fischl’s timely “October 7: Heading Out,” a woman stands stiffly in a hotel room, taking in the day’s tragic news. I admire Fischl’s narrative sweep, Hopperesque shadows and lushly geometric carpet. At @Skarstedt.

Why does Jackson Pollock have only one shoelace? Why does his ear look stitched together? And where is his thumb? I'm worried that we have entered an age of aesthetic paranoia in which every photograph is disbelieved and scrutinized for evidence of deceit.

Cy Twombly was an 18-year-old high-school senior when he registered for the draft and there is something about his signature (rounded, weighty, conveying a sense of coiled amplitude) that hints at his coming art.

Peter Schjeldahl would have been 82 years old today and I so miss hearing him discourse on Velasquez and his other art passions.

Roberta Smith, the peerless critic who changed her field by bringing a sense of deep scholarship and reflection to the newest and most untested art, is retiring from the Times after 32 years. Thank you, dear Roberta, for your always-precise and inspiring words.

So glad I left my desk today and caught John Duff’s handsome show of abstract sculptures, both on and off the wall. At #ReenaSpaulings .

Good to hear that MoMA has acquired Donald Moffett's light-box photograph, 'Call the White House.' It was done in 1990, at the height of the AIDS crisis, but the phone number listed for the White House still works.

I highly recommend the new off-Broadway musical, “Dead Outlaw,” a comedy about the unlikely subject of Elmer McCurdy, an early 20th-century outlaw who became a circus attraction in his mummified afterlife. Truly unbelievable true story.

Is there a word that describes the experience of reading three new art books at the same time?

What is this orange-pink streak hovering in the sky, right now, above the village of Scarsdale? A sunset? A sunburn? A message from newly disrupted Mars?

Nairy Baghramian’s spare sculpture, “Waste Basket (bin for rejected ideas),” 2017, reminds you that one good thing about wasted ideas is they don’t take up any room.

Hard to believe that catalogues for @WhitneyMuseum exhibitions once listed the home addresses of all the artists in the show. In case you wanted to drop in on de Kooning or Max Ernst.