I'D LIKE TO CALL Vanessa Beecroft the Leni Riefenstahl of performance art, but that wouldn't be fair. Her fascism's fake: No menace or power or insanity, beyond capital, underwrites her project. (She described VB45, her February performance at the Kunsthalle Wien, in which forty-five women stood around wearing nothing but thigh-high black boots by Helmut Lang, as “Nazi-looking.”)

So, VB46, Beecroft's Los Angeles debut a week before the Oscars: In an evenly dispersed cluster, twenty silent women idled, all with depilated crotches, calcimined skin (blanching any tattoos), blonde wigs, dyed blonde

THE ART-REVIEW FORMAT tends to encourage nutshell accounts of an artist's output, which shouldn't be so hard in the case of Thomas Nozkowski. If you're at all familiar with his work, you'll recognize his paintings when you see them. They're generally rectangular, consistently rendered in oil on canvas board or linen on panel. They tend to be precise and defined, without fetishizing the straight edge or roll of masking tape; the hand of the artist is apparent, but they don't seem to aspire to the expressionistic; and while associations abound, Nozkowski's paintings fall more into the category of