Our Dadaist : Robert Gober -- Summer madness : Balthus and "Encounters" at the National Gallery in London -- The variety show : Tony Oursler, Bill Viola, and contemporary art -- Saint Gerhard of the sorrows of painting : Gerhard Richter -- Firings : Noguchi, Ken Price, and ceramics -- The beauty trap : notes on the return to beauty -- MoMA, Inc. : the Museum of Modern Art since reopening in 2004 -- Peep shows for poets : Jeremy Blake and experimental cinema -- Postcards from nowhere : new museums in Los Angeles and New York -- Private lives : the recession and the art world -- The opportunist : a life of Leo Castelli -- Extreme sensibility : Christian Marclay's The clock -- Ecstasy : reflections on Bernini -- Ordinary magic : Chardin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- Lyricist and empiricist : Gustave Le Gray at the J. Paul Getty Museum -- Philosophical furnishings : Thomas Hope and Jean-Michel Frank -- Everyday symbolist : Vuillard at the National Gallery of Art -- Apollo and Dionysus : CeĢzanne and Picasso -- Spiritual matters : Rouault and Chagall -- A defense of Dada : anti-art revisited -- The writer's eye : Edmund Wilson and the visual arts -- Maker and shaper : the life and literature of Lincoln Kirstein -- From Alabama to Manhattan : remembering David Daniel -- Half time : Roger Shattuck from The banquet years to Forbidden knowledge -- Varieties of artistic experience : Meyer Schapiro on medieval and modern art