Yesterday I passed the new statue of Andy Warhol in Union Square, a temporary installation by the Public Art Fund, and it struck me as both absurd and perfectly natural.  It’s a life-size chrome figure by Rob Pruitt that depicts the artist as a slender, wigged thing with a Polaroid camera, a Bloomingdales bag, and a long, vacant stare.  It’s on Broadway at 17th Street, in a strip of space co-opted from the street, painted green and furnished with lawnchairs and potted plants as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s apparent master plan to convert the city’s busiest intersections into outdoor living rooms.

To give Andy a bright and shiny statue here, in the middle of the street, so close to the original Factory, and facing the statue of Gandhi two blocks south, is perfectly correct.  At midday people were buzzing past to their offices, the farmers’ market, and McDonalds.  True to the Warhol ethos, this isn’t an artwork that demands much attention.  But it doesn’t possess the all-at-once iconic power that Warhol’s best paintings have, paintings that get taken in instantly and then, over time, settle more deeply and uncomfortably.  The statue is a small one, set on a plain, mean base.  What if Pruitt had stood it right on the street, or inflated it in scale?  I want badly for this Andy to be one of us – an anonymous, fame-obsessed city-dweller – or a dazzling pop monument, not the conventional piece that it is.

Both book lovers and building lovers feel the loss of the Architectural League bookstore, which closed last year after losing its lease.  Just stepping off Madison Avenue into the lush, hushed stone courtyard of the Villard Houses,  where it was located, could lift one’s spirits.  So I was excited to hear that the Van Alen Institute was opening a new architecture bookstore/event space on West 22nd Street designed by LOT-EK.  A rendering released to the press a few months ago promised a bright, open space.

The bookstore itself, which opened this week, is something altogether different.  It’s the same size as the Architectural League bookstore but, unlike that store, which had floor-to-ceiling cases and a low, central table packed with lovingly-curated books, most of the Van Alen space is given over to a series of suspended, stepped wood benches.  They’re painted acid yellow, which makes for a happy spectacle that draws people inside.  But the books are tucked along one wall, on low, dark shelves that are impossible to reach without navigating the edges and undersides of the benches.  The space is small, certainly, and only temporary (there’s a six-month lease), but why wasn’t it planned more pragmatically?  LOT-EK’s groovy construction stylings (hardware-store materials, rough finishes, exposed connectors), which bring a fresh informality high-end retail and residential projects, seem provincial here.  An architectural bookstore could show a little more love for the books, and for the architecture.

The current show at the Guggenheim, a selection from their holdings called “The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910 - 1918,” could just as well be called “Secondary Works by Major Painters,” “Major Works by Secondary Painters,” or “Fantastic Paintings You’ve Never Seen Before."  The show, which focuses on the groundbreaking art produced against the tumult of the first World War, features all the usual suspects, including Picasso, Cezanne and Kandinsky.  But the highlights are masterful paintings by artists less well-known, including Natalia Goncharova (these cats) and Robert Delaunay (a fractured view of the Eiffel Tower), and pieces by artists better-known that reveal unknown sides.  There’s an unflinching, earthy portrait of a young woman by Chagall, and a luminous landscape by Mondriaan, which is, in its lyricism, suprisingly tender.

Most powerfully, the show reminded me how fundamentally physical, visceral and pleasure-giving painting is.  This is, I think, something more than the strength of the artworks on display and the sophistication of the collection.  It might have something to do with the experience of seeing practically all of these canvases for the first time.  Each one, from a century ago, crackles with kinetic energy.

What is the architecture of insanity?  Bentham’s panopticon, Maclean Hospital, Escher?  The architecture in the film “Shutter Island,” which combines elements of all three, offers up a convincing one.  The movie, which takes place at a prison for the mentally ill, was filmed at various locations in Massachusetts including Medfield State Hospital, and with sets and models designed by Dante Ferretti.

“Shutter Island” has the same emotional queasiness of other who-am-I movies, like “Vertigo,” “Inception” and “Angelheart."  But the indelible physicality of "Shutter Island” (the hyper-real color, the overbaked special effects, the gothic lighting) make the movie’s sense of place far more compelling than any of its characters and any of their dilemmas.  The scenes set in the hospital’s ward for dangerous patients, with crisscrossing steel staircases and endless masonry tunnels, were particularly unsettling.  These are strong, lucid spaces from which there is no relief, that is, no opening to the outside.