There are painters whose work lies on the surface (like Vermeer), and painters whose work lies in the subject (like Rembrandt).  I can’t figure out if Franz Hals is the former or the latter.  Walking into the Franz Hals exhibit at the Met, aptly called “Style and Substance,” the brushwork is what struck me first.  There’s a freedom in it and an understanding, almost modern, that a painting is just paint applied to canvas.  Especially when depicting mounds of cloth, which is what eighteenth-century people tended to wear, the paintings have an audacious physicality, with free-floating smears of oil everywhere.

But there are very real people captured here.  There’s a cliched view that Northern European painting is “photographic” because it captures light with a special primacy.  Hals’ portraits are “photographic” because they capture one very specific moment.  They’re not, like Rembrandt’s portraits, images that transcend time.  While enormously (and joyously) character-revealing, each of Hals painted portraits captures just one particular moment.  And, even in his commissioned portraits, it’s not an official moment, the most flattering and noble moment.  Instead it’s an off-kilter moment, when the subject is wrinkling her nose or smiling too broadly or about to straighten his collar.  I don’t think Hals’ intention is to satirize.  I think he simply found in these moments something more appealing, more stubbornly real, than what he found in conventional paintings.

In 1992 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) unrolled a project called “Poetry in Motion,” and started slipping placards with poems in between the advertising panels that line subway cars.  It’s always a nice surprise to find oneself, standing in a rush hour car, facing a scrap of Robert Frost instead of an ad for storage space or teeth whitening, especially if the poem, as they often are, particularly relevant.  In the same way, it was a special pleasure to receive a MetroCard this month with the word “optimism” printed on the back.  It’s part of a large-scale artwork, “Project Optimism,” by artist Reed Seifer.  He designed the graphic years ago, as a student, and began by printing it out on buttons and handing them out to friends.  Then he collaborated with the MTA to print the word on over 30,000 cards, which have been distributed to riders randomly over the past two years.

It’s been suggested that the artwork is a rouse by the MTA to get riders to forget the inadequacies of the system.  But I find it, well, optimistic.  The past years have been rough going for some of us, and just seeing one word like this in an unexpected place can set a new idea in your head, or dispel the not-so-terribly optimistic ones that are already planted there.  The MTA could have sold the space on the back of the MetroCard to advertisers, printed one of their own lethargic slogans (“If You See Something, Say Something”) or just left it empty.  I hope that more words are forthcoming.

What’s going on?  Our train stations look like shopping malls, and our art museums look like office lobbies.  The new glassy wing for American art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, by the great English architect Norman Foster, which opened last year, is rendered in the kind of blandly handsome corporate architecture that’s become de rigeur for museums who want to tart themselves up a bit without committing to something as big, as bold, and as costly, as the Guggenheim Bilboa.  The addition, which consolidates the MFA’s considerable holdings of North American art, contains four stacked galleries connected with an open stair.  The stair hovers over an entrance hall that’s about the size and height of the main hall at Grand Central Station.  However banal the character of the architecture (and it’s banal), in the hall the MFA possess a space of considerable grandeur that’s flooded with natural light… and they’ve put a cafe in it.  Why don’t they use it as sculpture garden? Or a theater?  Or just leave it empty?

A friend who lives in the city says that she liked the old MFA better, where she had to wander through a mess of old, small galleries to find particular artworks.  After I’d gotten my fill of the American wing, with its astounding John Singleton Copley and John Singer Sargent collections, I wandered through the old wings stuffed with Greco-Roman, Asian, African and Oceanic art.  These parts of the museum, with their humming fluorescent lights, groaning mechanical fans, and stodgy, linen-lined showcases, had a warmth entirely lacking in the new wing, whose architecture is glossy, flawless, and inert.

Walking down the most rarified stretch of Madison Avenue last night, between 79th and 68th Streets, I caught sight of these shoes on a small, spinning platform in the window at Christian Louboutin and stopped in my tracks.  Amid storefronts peddling paintings, antique furniture, designer gowns, jewelry, and other massively expensive stuff, this pair had a hot, supernatural glow.

The Lady Peeps, as they’re called, might have been concocted, Frankenstein-like, from all the different things that makes a woman’s shoe sexy: swaggering height, a pointed heel,  figure-emulating curves, dazzling surfaces, and, most of all, a hooker-red sole, which Louboutin is trying, unsuccessfully, to patent.  I know at least one girl (well, actually, a boy) who spray paints the bottoms of bargain-store heels to get the effect.  Would anyone wear these shoes, except on a red carpet, or except Lady Gaga?  If, for a woman at least, each shoe is a balance of function and desire, than Lady Peeps approach pure desire.