
MEDIUM COOL
IN LATE OCTOBER, on the opening night of the Alex Katz retrospective at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, crowds of people in a party mood lined the spiral ramp from the ground-floor rotunda all the way to the uppermost skylight. This in itself is not so unusual—just about any opening at a major New York museum tends to bring out the scenesters. What happened next, however, is less common. Toward the end of the night, as the artist, who at ninety-five is seemingly immune to the depredations of advanced age, and who that evening was resplendent in a cream-colored suit and gold tie, made