There’s been much ballyhoo about The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia at the Met.  None of the artwork is new; these objects have been part of the Met’s permanent collection for decades.  But current geopolitics make it important to look at this part of the world (basically, the Muslim world) more attentively.  And as we do we can congratulate ourselves for learning about another culture.  The Times (unintentionally, I’m sure) captured the ambivalence perfectly in the title of their review, A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty.  There’s the same faint condescension in it that there was when taste-makers first looked at African art.

In rebuilding these fifteen galleries, the Met had an extraordinary opportunity to restage works with contemporary museum protocol, and they had an extraordinary inspiration for design – Muslim architecture.  But the new galleries aren’t so different from the Met’s other, older galleries: smallish, squarish, oatmeal-colored rooms, with ceilings cluttered with tracklights.  There are small gestures here and there to the traditions of Muslim architecture: a white marble floor with colored inlay, two rows of hanging glass lamps, a magnificent gilded coffered ceiling, and an eighteenth century house from Damascus.  As some kind of proof of historical continuity, the final gallery has been finished entirely (and handsomely) by eight craftsmen from Morocco.  But none of the displays have the flair of those at the Neues Museum in Berlin, which shroud each object in magic.  A generic all-white environment would have served the work better, and also offered a more sophisticated curatorial view.  Over one of the explanatory wall texts, there’s a grainy black and white photo of the Great Mosque at Samarra, a huge rectangular hall with a cone-shaped ziggurat in front.  There’s more architectural power here, in this small image, than in all of the new galleries combined.

I had a fight with a friend this summer over lunch at a sidewalk cafe.  A young woman walked by and my friend stared and remarked, “She’s beautiful."  I protested, too much.  Not because the woman wasn’t great-looking or because I was jealous, but because the word – beautiful – is one that shouldn’t be thrown around like that, and not at a passerby on Ninth Avenue.  I’d like to believe that beauty is complicated and takes time to reveal itself.  It’s simply too important; it’s something much more.

Then I saw these glossy, full-size prints of Richard Avedon’s 1967 portraits of the Beatles in the cramped back room of an Upper East Side Gallery.  I’d seen the images before, in books, but the prints are astounding.  They’re composed very simply and capture great detail.  The four men are young, guileless, and, yes, beautiful, in a way that has everything to do with what they look like but also goes deeper than that.  There’s something of their spirit in the pictures.  Not everyone who’s photographed by Avedon looks good.  So many of his portraits, particularly those of political figures, are pointed and satirical.  And so many of his portraits, particularly those of celebrities, are undermined by their formal perfection.  (That might be exactly what makes him a magnificent fashion photographer.)  These portraits of John, Paul, George and Ringo owe something to the skill of the photographer, and also the character of the men.

One of my high school English teachers, an amateur film historian, had the opportunity to interview Ginger Rogers before she died.  Out of respect for her accomplishments, he didn’t ask her any questions about Fred Astaire.  That’s a little what the museum-worthy Georges Braque show at the Acquavella Gallery is like.  It’s trying so hard to establish Braque’s reputation as a solo artist (it’s called Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism), that it leaves out Picasso, who’s mentioned only briefly in the wall texts.  That omission makes the other painter’s presence even more palpable.

The work is hung chronologically in three separate galleries, with the largest, middle gallery given over to the iconic cubist works Braque completed in tandem with Picasso.  Seeing Braque’s work alone, from one phase to the next, gives a clear sense of his personal journey.  In this context the cubist works that incorporate newsprint and wallpaper, corrupting the sacrosant field of picture, seem freshly revolutionary.  And the exhibit allows one to see more clearly the character of Braque’s work, particularly it’s turbulent spatiality.  Picasso’s imagination was a plastic one, so that even his drawings and paintings possess an indelible, immediate sculptural force.  There’s a sense of spatial ease in Braque’s early, lyrical Fauvist canvases (which are reproduced poorly on the gallery’s website), but his late, post-cubist canvases are murky and occluded.  This is something different from subjects crowding the canvas in horror vacui, and from subjects stepping out from illusory space into real space.  This is the pressured, jumbled world of the painting – packed with objects, patterns, and visual scraps – pushed out into the real world.  The rupture in these canvases is unseemly, unlike the playful, gracious spatial ambiguities in the painter’s cubist works.  Perhaps Braque was searching for some kind of logic altogether outside of painting.

PBS just aired a two-part, five-hour, pleasingly conventional documentary about Woody Allen.  It was informative but didn’t go nearly deep enough to get at the sources of his humor, his ambition, and his romantic beliefs.  But the first hours, which documented his rise as a standup comedian, were inspiring.  Unlike a lot of other comedians, Allen didn’t deliver one-liners, he told stories.  And, unlike a lot of other comedians, he wasn’t desperate to be in the spotlight.  He started out as a writer and was perfectly happy writing.  So much of his comedy is about language – about a perfectly turned phrase that floats in the air for half a beat until its meaning (and its sarcasm, and its affront) sinks in.  It was Allen’s business managers, two old-school cigar-chomping vaudeville veterans, who pushed him on stage to act out his jokes and build a name for himself.

That reluctance to perform is evident in the tortured relationship the young comedian has with his microphone.  Watch him on this television show to see how he rests his elbow on the stand, dances around it, plays with the cord, and grips the mic like a weapon that he’d rather not be in possession of.  It’s a fine and elaborate choreography of dread.  To use Allen’s own language, he’s “perspiring audibly."  There’s in this physical anxiety tremendous charm and humility, something that’s lacking in a lot of his movies.  In fact, his own presence is lacking in a lot of his movies.  The standup Woody Allen is a remarkably appealing performer, if only he would want to perform.