Sharing the prejudices of most New York art people, I had always located Braque on some remote and far too comfortable French planet, where, together with the likes of Bonnard, he went on cultivating his own beautiful gardens but could never do anything risky enough to make my pulse beat faster. For me, even his most audacious Cubist work, when seen beside Picasso’s, often looked like a genteel and redundant counterpart to his significant Spanish other’s macho drama and daring. As for what he did after the First World War, this could be quickly banished in the category of the unadventurous,

In much recent artwork involving casts of found objects—certain sculptures by Kiki Smith or Rachel Whiteread, for example—one can’t help wondering whether a “host” form has been suffocated inside a tomblike cast, as much as it has been preserved. While he may not use a casting process, Jan Fabre deploys clothing, another kind of shell, to equally ambiguous and ominous effect. The Flemish artist has recently been constructing costumes out of an unusual material: beetles. Tightly packed together on iron-wire armatures, the insects form garments that resemble monks’ frocks and beekeepers’ uniforms,