There are deep themes underlying the work. These roughhewn ivory towers, which are out of reach and have no obvious egresses, explore classism and elitism. The fun and adventure of play spaces are also complicated by Kawamata’s tree hut design, which echoes the look of the flimsy shelters often erected by the homeless.

At first I was really put out that you couldn’t actually go inside the houses. But then I remembered all the times I went into tree houses as a kid. They were always a letdown—awkward seating and sparse accommodations. But it was having a space away from everyone else that was more appealing than the space itself. So don’t bypass the chance to go and see Kawamata’s installation for that reason. There is much to appreciate with your feet on the ground.

Jordan started going to landfills and junkyards, taking aerial views of these places to try and capture the scale of our rampant consumption. His series, Intolerable Beauty, tries to visually comprehend overwhelming statistics about consumption that can be really hard to envision—426,000 (the number of cell phones thrown away in America every day); 1.14 million (the amount of paper bags used in supermarkets every hour); and 60,000 (how many plastic bags are in the U.S. every five seconds). He does this by taking a relatively low number of these items, usually 200 or so, and making a digital photo of them. Then he splices the image together over and over until, mathematically, the photo shows the huge number he was shooting for.

Most concepts are more difficult to comprehend in the abstract. It is hard to make mass consumption meaningful because we can’t experience numbers and statistics in and of themselves. We can’t feel or see these amounts. But Jordan is trying to bridge that gap and get us to fess up to an addiction to stuff that, thanks to him, has been dragged into plain sight.

When I read that people were protesting the display of Jeff Koons’ work at the chateau de Versailles, I sat there waiting for the punch line to sink in because, really, how could that not be a joke. The artist and site couldn’t be better suited.

Versailles’ ostentation is the perfect backdrop for Koons’ kitsch sculptures. Both take ornamentation over the top, whether gilding everything in sight with silver and gold, or making life-size sculptures of balloon dogs in metallic hot pink. Though centuries divide the two, they both resonate with Rococo excess.

They both are exuberant, lighthearted and fun. Versailles was originally intended as a garden pleasure palace away from it all, and its visitors put play and fantasy first. Koons’ work is the same. Tacky in the best possible way, his work transports low art and makes it glittery and lively. Part of me thinks that if the Sun King was alive today, he’d not only be pleased Koons’ work is on display in his house, he’d hire the artist on the spot.

Image above courtesy of clemmm8/Flickr

Centuries ago, skill and mastery of technique got an artist a lucrative commission or helped secure a patron’s favor. Innovation had its place, but skillful execution was key—an artist was only as good as his last work. The ability to perform was crucial, but that wasn’t always easy to pull off given the complexity of certain techniques.

One of the most difficult artistic skills to master is fresco painting. It is a labor-intensive process where plaster is applied to a wall, images are traced onto the plaster (usually using charcoal and a perforated preparatory sketch) and paint is applied. All of this must be done quickly and without error because the plaster hardens within a matter of hours, sealing the image inside.

I’ve never frescoed myself, so maybe the hype is just that, but most accounts claim that this is a tough way of painting. Michelangelo struggled with it in the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo had trouble working quickly and getting it right the first time, so he invented his own way of doing things, much to the detriment of conservators later working on his Last Supper.

But now there’s an artist in Pisa, Luca Battini, who plans to bring fresco back. He’s planning a 1,700-sq-ft mural of the life of Pisa’s patron saint. What is fun about the project is that Battini is holding casting calls to find figures he’ll feature in the work. Some are prominent citizens; others just have the look the artist wants. People are taking this pretty seriously because the shelf life of a fresco is often hundreds of years, so those who are picked will be a part of history. I can’t wait to see if he can pull this off, but it turns out I’ll be waiting quite a long time—three years or so, which is about how long it takes to finish a project of this magnitude.

Image above: Detail from an earlier mural depicting the life of Pisa’s patron saint, St. Rainerius.

From the exhibition Zen Mind/Zen Brush: Japanese Ink Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

To get ready for the fall season, I found out what is coming down the pike at two museums that have been really great to visit in the past year or so. Let the slugfest begin.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has four shows headlining their fall roster. The first is an exhibition of Assyrian art traveling from the British Museum. Yes, a slow start, but they follow that up with a look at the career of celebrity photographer Yousuf Karsh, who shot everyone from Albert Einstein to Audrey Hepburn to the Kennedys. The third act is a small show of Japanese ink paintings, which looks a lot more interesting than it sounds. Rachel Whiteread runs the last leg of the race. The last show of the season is devoted to her most recent work, Place (Village), which is an installation of handmade dollhouses.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art starts with an exhibition of four short films from Jesper Just. Their second show pulls together 40 works from the museum’s growing contemporary collection, specifically pieces that were made after 2000 and resonate with the museum’s rich ethnic and artistic locale. After that, the last stop of an international tour of the work of Gilbert & George arrives. This could be the sleeper, as there are 80 or so stellar works in this retrospective. The final exhibition brings together feminist works that comment on the “house”—whether the historically male-dominated museum or the home as the principal domain of women.

Put side by side like this, I’m torn about which venue comes out on top. And choosing a winner before actually seeing any of the shows is probably foolhardily premature. But I’m ready and willing to take bets.

Vincent van Gogh struggled with so many things—mental illness, addiction, (ahem) lady problems—but at least he may have enjoyed his work. I saw The Starry Night in person at the Yale University Art Gallery last weekend. I stood there staring at the thick swirls of paint that make up the sky above Saint-Remy with the shadowy green cypress tree in the foreground, and all I could think was how much fun that it must have been to paint that scene. A little bit soothing, a little bit hypnotic, but mostly just fun to do, dragging a brush through the slick paint and seeing it ooze and furl.

Sometimes the struggle to create art overshadows the sensory pleasure that goes along with sculpting, painting, performing or installing a work. We never really talk or ask about the enjoyable side of it. Probably because it makes a serious work seem not-so-serious, but imagining van Gogh getting just a tiny bit of pure pleasure or fun out of painting certainly makes his sad run of luck in life seem a little less so.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, Saint-Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, Aquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1941

The installation of five totem poles by artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez. One of the totems was recently destroyed by a visitor at the Royal Academy.

The line between exhibition space and viewer space is sometimes clear and sometimes not. It is clear when there are security guards at the ready, telling you to move back if you step too near a sculpture. I’ve had many a motion sensor beep me away when I’ve leaned in too far while looking at a painting. Works can be behind plexi; on podiums; or cordoned off. These are all clear ways for them, the show makers, to let us, the visitors, know where we stand, literally. But some curators reject putting up barriers between artwork and visitor. And I can respect that, even applaud it, because I’m down with the whole “art should be experienced without filters or physical barriers” thing. But sometimes that can totally backfire, and I would not want to be the one holding the bag when things go terribly wrong.

Last week at the Royal Academy in London, a visitor at the Summer Exhibition stumbled into a group of sculptures by Costa Rican artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez and sent one of them—a piece that exhibition organizer and artist Tracey Emin called one of the stars of the show—tumbling to the floor, where it shattered into hundreds of pieces. So as much as I appreciate the opportunity to get close to works, I really think that next time, Tracey, you should save us clumsy viewers the nightmarishly awful guilt of being responsible for wrecking a really expensive sculpture by just putting it in a case.

When you think about Spanish modernism, a few superstars come to mind (Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, maybe Joan Miro) and tend to blot out all the rest. So during a recent trip to Spain I was completely floored and delighted to find so many other 20th-century Spanish artists that I knew nothing about.

Isidre Nonell was a Catalonian artist with a distinctive style. He used muted yet colorful tones, and applied paint almost as if he were working with chisel and stone, leaving regular, textured lines of pigment on the canvas. His portraits of destitute, weary women and children, often gypsies, alienated the conservative Barcelonan society that he worked and lived in, but provide a harrowing view of the so-called untouchables at the turn of the twentieth century.

Another artist I couldn’t get enough of was Joaquim Mir. His landscapes were really exceptional due to his use of searing colors and unusual vantage points. Pau Gargallo, a sculptor, was a standout too. His use of iron was innovative, uniting a strong sense of movement and energy with heightened detail within a piece.

Artist Thomas Schuette’s Fourth Plinth project “Model for Hotel 2007″

I’ve never seen any of the works in person while they were up, but I have a soft spot for the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square all the way over in London. Some critics grouse that the works that adorn the column always fall short in someway, but it gets contemporary art out in public in a very well known venue, so quit the whining.

There have been several sculptures put up since it started in 1999. Mark Wallinger produced a life-size sculpture of a man that ended up looking miniscule in comparison to the height of the plinth. Rachel Whitehead made a cast of the plinth and inverted it on top of the column. Marc Quinn carved a marble bust of the torso of Alison Lapper, an artist born without arms who was pregnant at the time.

The latest evolution comes from Antony Gormley, and is set to take the stage in November. The artist will put a giant soapbox on top of the plinth and allow people to climb up (actually, they’ll get carried up by crane) and chat, rant or rave about whatever they like to the visitors of the square for one uninterrupted hour. The performers chosen must first apply online; so far I haven’t found where, but my hope is that the applications and the project itself will stream live so that those of us on the other side of the pond can finally get a front row viewing.

Zhang is quoted about halfway through the piece as saying, “I like very much having so many people around. I am very open-minded to all the ideas from all different people—either a graduate student or a carpenter in the street or even my doorman; everybody can scribble down an idea, a drawing, or whatever, and I can see if I’ll take this or that or if I don’t like that idea at all.”

When did art become creation by committee? When did the artist turn into an arbiter, picking and choosing from other peoples’ ideas like a finicky eater at the buffet table?

Who talks like that? As if everyone else’s ideas are fodder for your appropriation. Someone get this man a publicist.

Who knew head-in-the-clouds artists with strong patriotic sensibilities were out there? They are — and they have been for some time. And I’m not just talking about Jasper John’s canvas homage to the red, white and blue.

Not quite a founding father, but a powdered wig type all the same, Charles Willson Peale blended soldiering and portraiture during the Revolutionary War. One of the Sons of Liberty, he not only fought in the war, he also documented many of its players, including Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, John Hancock and Alexander Hamilton. George Washington sat more than a half-dozen times for Peale, allowing the artist to create almost 60 portraits of the first president.

In World War II, the U.S. Army recruited artists and designers to fight the Nazis with smoke and mirrors. One of the young soldiers was the eventual abstract expressionist Ellsworth Kelly. During his tour, Kelly helped develop prototypes of fake tanks, jeeps and weaponry made out of rubber, burlap and wood. These were set up in strategic places to convince the Germans that the Allies had more soldiers on the ground than they really did.

Andy Warhol practically stumped for the Democrats. He made a multi-colored print of Richard Nixon in 1972 with the caption “Vote McGovern” underneath the portrait. If only the print had been stamped on campaigning buttons and posters. Things might have turned out differently for George on Election Day. Nixon was certainly not looking like someone I’d let kiss a baby or shake my hand, not with that desiccated greenish-blue tint to his face. And the beady yellow eyes didn’t help matters. And most subliminal of all, the portrait was set against a background of the political hot-button color of pink (gasp!).

Four mammoth waterfalls, from 90- to 120-ft.-tall and as much as 80-ft.-wide, have sprung up in the East River thanks to Eliasson. Using banal materials—steel scaffoldings and run-of-the-mill plumbing pipes—and a big ol’ budget ($15 million), the Danish artist has made one of the largest artworks ever. It is also the largest, by far, public work ever put on view. But size isn’t all that matters. The fact that it is on American soil, where we tend to be pretty uptight about art in public, is also nothing short of astonishing.

When I first heard about the project, I cringed. Waterfalls are so romantic, so sappy. They are nature at her most gaudy, and I wasn’t sure how Eliasson was going to temper the hard edges of the big bad city with his waterways, even though he’s made waterfalls before.

But there was no need to panic. The waterfalls look like they’ve been around forever—that’s how well they match their setting. The scaffolds that the artist took no pains to hide lend the works an urban feel that resonates both with the history of the setting (a bustling industrial port) and the modern prevalence of scaffolds as a sign of growth, change and progress.

The fact that the waterfall’s construction is in plain sight, as well as a crucial part of the work’s look, lends the whole project an unpretentious honesty. The waterfalls don’t stand on formality or any kind of artsy airs. They don’t appear to be anything more than what they are: spectacular plumbing. But spectacular they are, because they hide nothing yet offer up so much to the viewer who is just passing by.

But then this book has a lot of bells and whistles. First of all, it weighs just over 46 lbs as it is covered in a scale reproduction of one of Michelangelo’s earliest works — a marble relief known as the Madonna of the Stairs. It is printed on paper made specifically for the book and is handmade all the way, from typesetting and printing to binding and covering. It includes the already mentioned Amendola black and white photos as well as removable handmade folios of Michelangelo’s drawings (reproductions, of course). It also comes with a 500-year guarantee.

The book was published by Gruppo FMR, an arts publishing house specializing in art, culture and luxury goods. And apparently the Michelangelo book is only the first in what FMR is calling its “Book Wonderful” series. But with a limited print run of 99 and a 6-month wait to get the book (as it is handcrafted upon order), the Michelangelo copies are sure to absolutely fly off the shelves. So reserve your copy today. But don’t try Amazon. I already checked.

With precise stitches and neatly embroidered rows, Ghada Amer interweaves politics, feminism, sexuality and anti-war ideologies into her work. The first American career survey of her work, Love Has No End, is up at the Brooklyn Museum through October. The show comprehensively examines each stage in the artist’s development.

Amer, Egyptian by birth, is best known for inserting herself into the historically white male domain of abstract expressionism with needlepoint, a feminine craft. The artist makes abstract paintings by sewing thread onto canvas and letting the long filaments hang along the surface of the painting, where they tangle together in a multicolored snarl. Oftentimes the canvas is first painted with abstract swaths of color or embroidered with scenes of female autoeroticism.

Amer has also embarked on projects that span designing a peace garden filled with carnivorous plants and then staging a performance where guests at the opening were invited to feed the hungry shrubs a meal of flies and worms to installing letter-shaped sandboxes in a Barcelonan parking lot that spelled out a feminist call to arms: Today 70% of the Poor in the World are Women.

She explores women’s roles in fairy tales and pop culture through her drawings, paintings and sculpture, and also makes pieces that unflinchingly discuss terrorism, race and politics. One installation involved a room wallpapered in a bright pink, yellow and green pattern. Written in small type, over the entire surface of the paper, were the English definitions of terror and terrorism. A table setting was laid out adjacent to the walls with a message for the viewer left on the plate: there is no definition or word for terrorism in the Arabic language.

Commingling the genteel occupation of needlework with forceful and thought-provoking themes and concerns, Amer is not reticent about getting her point across, no matter how taboo. She proves that in overturning historical or gender biases, and pointing out conundrums in politics and sexuality, a woman’s work is never done.

(Ghada Amer (Egypt, b. 1963) Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, 1995-2004 Embroidery on cotton (Each): 70 7/8 x 27 9/16 x 4 in. (180 x 70 x 10.2 cm) Copyright Ghada Amer. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.)

What caught my attention about Yeondoo Jung’s work was the color. Saturated and rich, the images capture high-octane hues that, coupled with the stylized appearance of the photos, make for surreal viewing. But the effects are honestly achieved—digitized retouches and glossy alterations hold no allure for the artist. With an approach that shows how truth can be guised as a lie and vice versa, Jung has earned a reputation for visually exploring fabrication, amplification, could be and never was.

As a mid-career Korean photographer and filmmaker, Jung delves into altered realities or dreams made real. His 2004 series, Bewitched, gave individuals whom the artist came across in everyday situations—a waitress, a student, an art collector—the chance to realize their innermost dreams, at least for the time it took to click a camera shutter. Dreams ran the gamut from a trip to the South Pole, to becoming a hotshot chef, to teaching art education in war-torn Afghanistan, and Jung staged them all. The photos document impermanent incidents that are simultaneously false and true.

Jung’s latest photographic series, Locations, contains photos so over-the-top that at first the viewer looks for a hidden meaning, only to realize that nothing is disguised or simulated. All is as it, incredibly, appears. Contrived, brilliant and a dynamic mix of lie and truth, these works attest to the skill and unusual sensibility of an artist who is a storyteller most of all.

(Image: Yeondoo Jung (b. 1969). Location #8, 2006. C-print, 48 x 62 3/5 inches, 122 x 159 cm. Edition of 5. Courtesy Tina Kim Gallery, New York.)