I expected a punch line by the art world’s favorite jokester, but left the Guggenheim in awe.

On the Metropolitan Museum’s swoon-inducing new galleries devoted to art of the Near East.

Matthew Barney’s epically mystic Egypto-industrial detritus sculpture inspires and transports.

At MoMA, the full, amazing, ever-evolving, never-retreating story of Willem de Kooning.

Robert Rauschenberg’s portraits of his extraordinary friends.

Street art with awful power.

On the eve of the AbEx master’s retrospective, his biographer (and our former critic) Mark Stevens chats with Jerry Saltz.

The beautiful, cerebral, ultimately content-free creations of art’s well-schooled young lions.

Mark Grotjahn’s sinews of paint take on lives of their own.

Kara Walker returns to basics and makes her most powerful images yet.