Confessions first: I am not a “pure” critic. I routinely purchase works of art with the money I earn by writing about them. In my youth, I actually owned a gallery and sold art for a living. As a consequence, I never stroll through an institutional exhibition, in my role as art critic, unaccompanied by my two unfashionable alter-egos: the low-end collector and the ex–art dealer. These guys usually feel marginalized on such occasions, since present fashion dictates that we look at art the way we listen to songs on the radio—looking for the two-minute stand—the short-attention-span bang of the

When Jeremy Dickinson’s small, meticulous studies of English buses were exhibited a few years ago, they were shown along with route maps and tape recordings of the various sounds they produced. The mechanical aggression of the noisy, smelly, lumbering vehicles was all but erased by Dickinson’s documentary approach. In his most recent work, the British artist continues to scrutinize modes of transportation, but with a twist: many of the cars, trucks, and buses in these small canvases are toys, and their massive containers are without any means of movement (they could, we assume, be carried by