There are flower-fabric umbrellas at the cafe tables in Madison Square Park, and Op Art beanbags on the sidewalk.  They’re part of the opening celebrations for the new Marimekko flagship store on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.  As stores go it’s a good one: brightly lit, nicely merchandised, and smartly organized.  The products are just what you’d expect: waistless shifts, bath towels, coffee mugs, and placemats, all in signature patterns from the iconic Finnish brand.  I hope the store survives but that’s hard to imagine.  The only ladies I saw buying were from that slender sliver of the population that’s both old enough to remember the brand’s early 70’s heyday, and bold enough to want to shake up their personal style.

What I like best about the store, and the brand, is it’s support of home sewing.  Smack in the middle of the first floor there’s a full-height, open display shelf selling by-the-yard Marimekko fabrics.  The 45"-wide bolts, neatly rolled and pinned, have a candy-like allure.  The prints, of course, are glorious.  The fabric is a stiff cotton that’s not quite strong enough for upholstery and not quite soft enough for garments. But it’s unusual to find fabric for sale in a retail store.  And it’s especially heartening in New York City, after almost all of the small, family-owned fabric stores along West 39th and West 40th Street have closed their doors.  There’s even a workstation with a professional sewing machine to the side of the sales floor, ready for demonstrations and classes.  Just the sight of the machine and the piece goods cheered me.

Was there a celebrity subject better-suited to Andy Warhol than Elizabeth Taylor?  And was there an artist better-suited to the Gagosian Gallery than Andy Warhol?  The gallery’s show of Warhol’s paintings of the actress, called Liz,  is a perfect concoction.  The paintings capture her different incarnations: child star, adult temptress, and over-exposed yet still-unknowable celebrity.  There are, across the gallery’s back wall, seven canvases from the iconic headshot series.  The color fields in each one, applied across a black silkscreen, are in comic book shapes and hues that flatten the actress’ legendarily fine features.  There’s no depth to them, pictorially or emotionally.  They’re not portraits, they’re just pictures.

On the right-hand wall of that gallery are some remarkable canvases I’ve never seen before, a series of black-on-silver prints of that same headshot.  (Two of them are visible in this view.)  They’re something entirely different from the colored paintings.  They aren’t silkscreened with the same cool professionalism.  Some are blurry, some are too dark, and some aren’t centered on the canvas.  One, which captures the fiery life in Taylor’s eyes, has been cropped from the bottom so violently that it seems to fall off the canvas.  The imperfections give these images an incredible gravity, an effect that’s amplified when one remembers the actress’ passing last year.  These are elusive, unstable images that don’t ever really come into focus.  Like Warhol’s paintings of the electric chair and a mourning Jackie Kennedy, they are images of death.

What puzzled me most about Steve Jobs was the personal uniform he adopted in mid-life: black mock turtleneck, faded Levi’s, and white running shoes.  How could someone so savvy about product design feel comfortable in such sad, suburban duds?  In an interview with a biographer that was released after his death, Jobs revealed that those sweaters, which I had assumed were from Land’s End, LLBean or some such fuddy-duddy purveyor, were custom-made for him by Japanese designer Issey Miyake.

After visiting a Sony factory in the 80’s and seeing the black uniforms Miyake had designed for the workers there, Jobs commissioned Miyake to design a nylon jacket with zip-out sleeves for Apple employees.  Miyake sent Jobs several prototypes, but by then the whole notion of a uniform had been rejected by Apple leadership.  But Jobs went ahead and implemented his own personal uniform, and asked Miyake to whip up scores of these simple, anonymous-looking sweaters.  Apparently he had over 60 of them when he died.  Why didn’t he commission a sweater that was amazing-looking and better-fitted, or ask Miyake to design his jeans and sneakers too?  It’s puzzling and also humanizing.  Hitherto the only really personal things I knew about Jobs (gleaned from this breezy, trashy, out-of-date biography) was that he had once dated Joan Baez, and that his favorite meal was a bowl of shredded carrots.  The story about the uniforms reminds us that all of Jobs’ ideas were not great ideas, and that he wasn’t consumed by good taste.

I’d like to think that I’m more sophisticated than most, especially when it comes to art.  I can “get it,” or at least a large part of it, whether it’s a burlesque show, graffiti, or a blockbuster at the Met.  But I was stumped when I saw the sculptures by Matthew Barney on display now at Barbara Gladstone.  They’re metal and plastic forms cast from craters and cars during a staging of Barney’s opera DJED in Detroit earlier this year.  That performance was inspired by Normal Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings, which is set in Egypt.  It all makes for rich, referential baggage, bit doesn’t seem relevant to the objects at hand.  My first thought when I entered the gallery, and I’m not proud of it, was, “This is ugly.”

The forms have an indelible physical presence.  The low, dark mounds of copper and lead in the main gallery are unrecognizable as metals, powerfully earth-like.  You almost expect them to give off a smell.  The pieces with cast car parts in them look as if they’re the remains of an explosion, and bring to mind the material devastation of the wars we’re involved in now overseas.  (Maybe Barney can read “The Naked and the Dead” next.)  But the artworks still slipped out of reach.  One of the smaller pieces (Secret Name, above) inspired special panic.  What was it?  The friend I was with, a painter-turned-architect, explained it as a composition of opposing spirits, with the low, wax-like form setting off the higher dark volume behind.  But I wanted the piece to be more representational.  I sensed that the work was substantial, and knew that I was missing it.