Review Roundup

• Off to a bang is the Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective at the Guggenheim (Feb. 22 - May 28). The artist, whose name is pronounced "sigh gwo chee-yang," is profiled at length in the New York Times Magazine. The story looks at "the duality of Cai’s nature," including his complex attitudes towards his native China; while his work has been critical of the government there, he is overseeing the opening ceremonies for this summer's Beijing Olympics. Cathleen McGuigan at Newsweek points out that "it might seem easy to pigeonhole Cai as a Chinese artist. But he's really an avatar of cultural globalization." Peter Schjeldahl writes that "a whiff of eccentric passion complicates the character of his art, which is strenuously theatrical and weirdly political (with ambiguous stands on Mao Zedong and terrorism)." Roberta Smith echoes the global theme, writing that the show presents, "a United Nations’ worth of cultural sources and artistic strategies into crowd-pleasing, easily deciphered if not terribly original art."

• Over at the Met, Smith deems the Jasper Johns monochromatic "Gray" show (Feb. 5 - May 4) "moody, opulent and eloquent"; husband Jerry Saltz finds it "ravishing... [but] too big."

• Also at the Met was Holland Cotter, who contemplates the dialectics of Classicism and Romanticism while enjoying Nicolas Poussin's painted "Aracdian Visions" (Feb. 12 - May 11), calling it "the quietest, most intimate-feeling major exhibition in town. ...also one of the moodiest."

• This week Mr. Cotter ogles another Old Master -- Parmigianino’s "Antea," a single-painting show at the Frick (Jan. 29 - April 27), finding the work to be "the embodiment of an ideal, in this case an ideal of desirability, in which the sensual and the spiritual merge."

• Ken Johnson reviews "WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution" at P.S. 1 (Feb. 17 - May 12), calling it a "big, messy, fascinating scrapbook of a show." Mira Schor in the Brooklyn Rail is troubled that "feminism continues to be perceived as a controversial and dangerous identification."

• Nicolai Ouroussoff likes "Design and the Elastic Mind" at the MoMA (Feb. 24 - May 12), writing that "the exhibition is packed with individual works of sublime beauty."

• Also at the MoMA was Daniel Kunitz, who thinks the Jan De Cock Crows installation (Jan. 23 - April 14) is "over-thought and under-felt."

• Edward Rothstein reviews two museums -- Abraham Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldier's Home in Washington, D.C. ("idiosyncratic and intriguing") and Chicago's Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum (he loves the original 1913 Atwood Sphere and finds the newer high-tech displays "uninspired and unfocused.")

• Finally, Christopher Knight discovers something to love at the LACMA -- monumental sculptures by Tony Smith and Richard Serra -- a pairing he describes as "perfection."