Review Roundup

• "Color Chart" at MoMA: "The show is a rejoinder to the notion of color as the province of formalists, and to the idea that Minimal and Conceptual art comes only in shades of black, white and gray. That 'Color Chart' coincides with 'Jasper Johns: Gray' at the Metropolitan Museum is a happy accident..." [Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes] "...the show feels like a book on improving your sex life that's illustrated with charts from Masters and Johnson—technically carnal, but kind of cold." [Peter Plagens/Newsweek] "...a smartly analytical show worth thinking about." [Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker] "... a connect-the-dots kind of show... hardly more than an historical footnote." [Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg] "...radiant, if reductive and ultimately tedious..." [Ariella Budick/Newsday] "...an exhibition so simple and right in its conception that one marvels at the fact that it hasn't been done before." [Dan Kunitz/NY Sun] [March 2 – May 12, 2008]

• Whitney Biennial: "...the year of the Art School Biennial. ... a very narrow slice of highly educated artistic activity and features a lot of very thought-out, extremely self-conscious, carefully pieced-together installations, sculpture, and earnestly political art." [Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.] "Its heart may be in the right place, but it emits an awfully faint pulse." [Richard Lacayo/Time] "If there's anyone left who still doubts that we're living at the end of the American empire, they can find confirmation for this state of affairs at the current Whitney Biennial..." [Leslie Camhi/Village Voice] Also: James Kalm has a number of videos. [March 6 - June 1, 2008]

• "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe" at the Gugg: "For all of his pyrotechnics, Cai traffics in loaded imagery without quite pulling the trigger—not for nuance’s sake, one suspects, but because it would be bad for business." [Howard Halle/TONY] "...an artist playing air guitar with history--making a strenuous gesture to create the impression that he's summoning a powerful reality, when in fact he's merely toyed with it." [Richard Lacayo/Time] "...direct, visceral and dramatic, more concerned with spectacle than with symbol or allusion."[Ariella Budick/Newsday] "...dramatic, engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking." [Ed Pilkington/Guardian] [Feb. 22 - May 28, 2008]

• "Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008" at the Cooper Hewitt: "...why is the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition so enthralling? Mainly because of the sheer sumptuousness of its contents." [Ken Johnson/NYTimes] "...ridiculously overreaching timeline, presumably intended to make an antiquarian taste "relevant," negates any notion of serious scholarship." [Martin Filler/CultureGrrl] [March 7 – July 6, 2008]

• "John Milton at 400" at the New York Public Library: "If only this fine display, selected from its extraordinary collection of Miltoniana, had a significant fraction of the space now devoted by the library to a show about Jack Kerouac!" [Edward Rothstein/NYTimes] [Feb. 29 - June 14, 2008]

• "Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger," at the MFA (Boston) "highlights the many facets of this complex man’s career as scholar, collector, and, most intriguingly, master forger." [Miles Unger/NYTimes] [Dec. 15, 2007 - Sept. 14, 2008]

• "Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings" at the Met: "...a spare, studious show that offers, along with many stimulations, a retreat from worldly tumult — the religious fervor, the courtly pomp, the expressive self-promotion — that fills much of the museum." [Holland Cotter/NYTimes] [ March 1 - Aug. 10, 2008]

• Four "first-rate" shows at Yale: "A New World: England’s First View of America," ("the only surviving visual record of England’s first settlement in North America") "The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 1830-1925," "Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in 18th-Century France," and "Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" ("forgotten but captivating American expatriates who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 'Tender is the Night' and set the standard for flashy bohemian living.") [Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes] [-June 1, - April 27, - May 4]

• The Silicon Valley Computer History Museum: "...although the museum has the largest collection of computer artifacts in the world and has raised tens of millions of dollars, it remains relatively little known." Don't miss the slideshow of old mainframes and supercomputers. [Katie Hafner/NYTimes]

• The National Cryptologic Museum, an odd museum created by the NSA that's located in one-story motel off I-95 in Maryland near the agency's headquarters: "The World War II era is the focus of some of the largest displays. The 11 examples of the German Enigma machine, the legendary encryption device, include two for visitors to punch the buttons and feel the rotors turn." [Peter Wayner/NYTimes]