The facade at Storefront for Art and Architecture on Kenmare Street has been slathered with gold leaf as part of a new exhibit, “Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings."  Unfortunately none of the pizazz seeps inside.  It’s a rich topic for study, since so many religious spaces in the city are hidden within non-religious buildings.  The exhibit has books cataloging places of worship throughout the five boroughs.  And it has four "Spiritual Devices” designed by Matilde Cassani, beach towel sized platforms on which an individual can perform Buddhist, Islamic, Sikh and Catholic rites.  (Were the Protestant and Jewish “Devices” excluded because the religions, and their rituals, are considered less exotic?)  But there’s nothing magical, nothing otherworldly about the “Devices."  Maybe the curators wanted to strip religion of its authority.  They’ve also succeeded in stripping it of its glamor.

I used to work in an office on Ninth Avenue, close to a Pakistani take-out place that prepared great, greasy curries and also served as a meeting place for South Asian cab drivers.  One afternoon I walked in and there was no one standing behind the counter.  The chairs and tables had been pulled back and eight men were kneeling forehead-to-ground on prayer mats that had been turned, in two neat rows, to face south.  This – the rigor, the silence, and the strange, slender angle the men shaped between true south and Manhattan south – expressed perfectly the distance between the everyday and the godly.  Nothing at Storefront comes close.

Is there anything left to say about Apple chairman Steve Jobs, who passed away on Wednesday?  He was just 56 years old and he died from pancreatic cancer, a fast, cruel way to die.  The commentary, both in newspapers and on twitter, praises him for “changing” the way we communicate, watch movies, listen to music, make presentations, and, basically, live.  And it credits him as a “genius,” breaking boundaries in computer technology.  The truth is that Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple computers, and that Jonathan Ive designed the roster of current, iconic Apple products: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.

If Jobs had a genius, it was for taste-making.  He wasn’t a scientist, he was an aesthete,  an aesthete with an astounding gift for marketing.  Just the day before he died Apple unveiled the latest iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, that resembled the earlier model but was enhanced with voice-detection.  Both geeks and and laymen were disappointed, because they didn’t just want a phone that was innovative, they wanted a phone that also looked innovative.  (Rumors predicted that the 4S would be all-glass, or tear-shaped.)  Jobs had set them up.  During his tenure at Apple he made product design important in a way that it has not been important since the Bauhaus, when looking modern was very nearly the same as being modern.  Jobs brought high design into our everyday lives.

There's  been a brouhaha about Bob Dylan’s paintings at the Gagosian uptown, which the gallery claimed were inspired by his travels through East Asia, but turn out to have been copied from famous existing photos of East Asia.  It’s obvious that the paintings are from a novice.  They’re not pretty.  (Richard Prince calls them, kindly, “workmanlike.”) The colors are muddled, the handling is awkward, and there are spots of blank canvas popping through in all the wrong places.  And it’s obvious that the scenes weren’t painted from life; they’re stiff compositionally and weirdly flat.  But there’s something else going on too – the stirrings of someone grappling with the language of painting.

Is it even possible for Dylan to be a great painter?  He’s a brilliant lyricist, and it would seem that language and painting reside at opposite sides of the imagination.  Each painting feels like it’s made up of smaller pieces strung together; it doesn’t spring from one place.  Dylan fans (remember, this word came from “fanatics”) have traced almost every painting to an original source.  But there are a few that feel more than imitative and somewhat synthetic, like La Belle Cascade, which evokes Picasso and Cezanne.  In the end it’s touching that someone who’s mastery of English is so absolute would want to learn a new language at all.

I watched last night’s television documentary about the transsexual tennis pro Renee Richards, “Renee,” with real interest.  I grew up in the 70’s with a tennis-mad father who tried, with absolutely no success, to teach me the game.  And I remember the heroes of that era, who played with small rackets and small bodies, vividly.  The movie was a powerful, personal portrait of Richards, giving a sense of her desires and her regrets.  But what brought the whole milieu alive for me was the archival footage of her and her competitors running around in their Teddy Tinling dresses.

Tinling was a big, bald, smiling Englishman who made dresses for all the great ladies on the tour, including Martina, Chrissie and Billie Jean.  Tinling dresses were, for the most part, simple, sleeveless sheaths fancified with cut-outs, ruffles, appliques and trim.  They were seriously dressy, like gowns for the tennis court.  I got to see the Tinling-designed dress Tracy Austin wore to win the US Open in 1979, a red gingham number with white lace trim, on display at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport.  It was tiny, like a doll’s dress, and stitched from woven cotton gingham, not the super-stretchy, sweat-wicking synthetics tennis dresses are made of now.  At a time when womens roles were changing, and when it was hard to know what a woman was, Tinling insisted that they dress like ladies.