Moma

At the corner of Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue and 22nd Street, there is a mural by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra. Situated over the landmark Empire Diner, Kobra's painting reimagines Mount Rushmore as a paean to art stardom or, depending on how one looks at these things, the tragically hip and perpetually overrated.  Kobra supplants George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt with the graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Mexican fabulist Frida Kahlo and the melanin-deprived panjandrum of Pop, Andy Warhol. These cultural icons loom over the crowds supping on blistered shishitos and tuna tartare inside the diner.

Georgia O’Keeffe is beloved for her oil paintings on canvas showing flowers and animal skulls: the first all soft, sensual openings; the second, spiky points and hardness.  Her works on paper are less well known. Yet, as MoMA’s exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, argues, paper played a key role in her early experimentation and art. As she told Alfred Stieglitz, the influential art gallerist and photographer who became her husband, “Why — it’s just like scrap paper. I throw it in the scrap heap and go on to something else.”  Paper is the beating heart of this retrospective, which shows 120 of O’Keeffe’s works from fifty-eight separate lenders, and which range from charcoal sketches to candy-colored pastels, rich watercolors to grainy graphite.

If you won the lottery tomorrow and suddenly had the money to invest in art, what would you prefer: a work from Picasso’s Cubist period (Guitar on a Table, 1919), or an NFT made from AI-based images and shapes? On the one hand, Picasso’s Guitar on a Table isn’t his most famous or even most interesting work — by 1919, the radicalism of Cubism had begun to wane. But on the other, NFTs are a relatively unproven market with dubious artistic merit, and have been linked to art crime, money laundering, and even allegations of human trafficking. If Picasso couldn’t persuade you to ditch the digital art, what about a painting by Renoir, a sculpture by Rodin, or a triptych of paintings by Francis Bacon?