The problem with mounting a retrospective of Barbara Kruger’s art is that “art” gets misleadingly emphasized. That artist is now just one of several occupations notched on Kruger’s résumé—graphic designer and media critic are among the others—is a fact MOCA has bravely tried to own up to, even though doing so has led to some pretty absurd curatorial moves. For example, standing in one pristine gallery is a Plexiglas vitrine safeguarding a tastefully arrayed sampling of Kruger-designed coffee mugs, notepads, and umbrellas, the very same merchandise stocked in bulk and available for purchase in

Looking at Kori Newkirk’s show, “Midnight Son,” two things kept bouncing around in my head: John Ashbery saying (I’m paraphrasing) that art shouldn’t be confused with the Salvation Army and Richard Prince’s essay “Bringing It All Back Home” (“I read what Sontag had to say about how art and politics can and should mix. Maybe they already do mix, but she says this as if any question about their separation could only occur to the Man from Mars.”). These ideas do not necessarily contradict one another; in fact, they converge around what might be called the politics of beauty, always existing in that

With four of her largest paintings to date (each measuring roughly two by two feet and all from 1999), Linda Stark continues building up surfaces with puddles, drips, and layered coats of fluid oil painta process she augments with more traditional rendering.

Black Widow Portrait III falls somewhere between Color Field painting, naturalist illustration, fashion design, and international signage, its hourglass-shaped red figure on a black ground simultaneously conjuring the poisonous female spider, the outline of a head-turning red dress, and the femme fatale. In Curtains, she turns layer after