Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era ' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane provides moments of buzzy fun but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters it may be the whitest straightest most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open tall-ceilinged super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures should the need arise. It has arisen.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection the bar has been set pretty low.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes in galleries on the walls of auction houses and off the walls in museum storage.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Outside museums in noisy public squares people look at people. Inside museums we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind getting quiet to look at art.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York ' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity gizmos eating hanging out things that make noise - all are now the norm often edging out much else.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.