If I had my own girl band I would call it The Glass Flowers, after the famous ones at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.  Two Dresden glass blowers, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, crafted about 4,400 of these teaching models, for nearly 800 different species, between 1886 and 1936.  The figures are uncanny in their fineness and faithfulness.  All of the tiniest parts – filaments, pollen, petioles, stipules – are there, translated into glass.  The effort that went into fabricating these models is mind-boggling.  The Blaschkas must have gone mad, or at least blind.

The models are accurate in fact but not in spirit.  There’s no doubt that all the parts of each plant are present and rendered with perfect accuracy.  In fact, the glass flowers seem more complicated and biological than real flowers.  But there’s something funereal about them.  They’re lying on their sides in low, dimly-lit glass vitrines, coated with a fine layer of dust.  And they’ve been painted with soft, matte colors, so that they don’t have the lush sheen of real plant parts, or even of glass.  Their lifelessness is especially noticeable with familiar varieties.  The daisy and the banana are at once real-looking and patently false.  If Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs but the sex back in flowers, the Glass Flowers sucks the sex right out of them.  They’re fascinating and inert.

Like movies stars, buildings from our past are often smaller than we imagine.  That’s true of the ones in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I attended architecture school.  I was visiting last weekend, seventeen years after I graduated, and the whole place felt much more welcoming than I remember.  It was a clear afternoon and the leaves, which had turned gold, set off the brick buildings and cloudless sky brilliantly.  I circled the Yard on streets barely wide enough for two cows to pass, with university buildings lined up along them just like in a storybook village.

But one building remained as large and looming, as truly monstrous, as I remember it – Sever Hall.  This undergraduate classroom building is a classic by the great nineteenth-century American architect Henry Hobson Richardson.  It sits back several hundred feet from the street, like a grounded ocean liner.  It’s grave and god-fearing, with an aspect of discipline and renunciation.  Its fortress-like brick facades are broken with small, deep windows and elaborate ornamental terracotta bands.  (What happened to these masonry traditions?  Did they simply vanish?)  I remember Cambridge as a place that offered no respite, imaginatively or physically, whose structures were arch and overbearing.  While the city no longer feels that way, Sever Hall still does.

In 1996 Damien Hirst displayed two sliced-up cows at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. It was an act of art world bravado I believed would remain unmatched.  I was wrong.  Sculptor Maurizio Catellan, who’s career-ending installation All is on view at the Guggenheim now, tops it.  Catellan, who also publishes magazines, says he’s done making art.  So in lieu of a mid-career retrospective he’s suspended “140 or so” of his existing sculptures from the rotunda of the museum.  It’s both audacious and enchanting.  In taking over the rotunda he’s bludgeoned the iconic architecture and, at the same time, made perfect use of it.  If he’s attempting, metaphorically, to hang his artistic self, he’s failed.  Dangling in the air like this, his work looks terrific.

Catellan’s pieces, like that of the pope being hit by a meteor, have an appealing impishness.  They’re not just political, they’re also weirdly personal.  So statues of an elephant in a Klu Klux Klan robe, a kneeling Adolf Hitler, and a topless Stephanie Seymour, are funnier than you’d expect.  Some of his works, like figures of horses, and boys in nooses, were meant to be hung.  Some of them, when hung, take on an elegaic air, like JFK lying in an open coffin, and corpses draped with white sheets.  You need to walk up (or down) the spiraling ramp to get a look at each piece and with every few steps the view shifts dramatically, pulling you along.  The outer walls of the museum are left empty and visitors focus inwards, which makes absolute sense.  There’s always been something odd about mounting artwork against the rounded, sloping walls of the Guggenheim, while the enormous space in the center remains empty.  I think Catellan’s installation might have begun as an attack on Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture.  It’s really a magnificent salute. 

A tour guide leading a group of visitors through the new galleries of Islamic art at the Met explained that all of the works fell into four categories: calligraphic, vegetal (or arabesque), geometric and figural.  After seeing the galleries I understood that all four of those things are the same.  They are all about the line, and the art on display is essentially graphic.

The most powerful pieces are the manuscripts filled with text and illustrations.  Sometimes a page requires careful inspection, and you fall into tit like a diorama.  And sometimes a page compels you to step back so that the words, rendered in an extravagant, expressive Arabic script, collapse into a pulsating all-over pattern.  The drawings of the human figure are naturalistic but not realistic.  The artists were obviously looking at the body as they drew, but cared more about composing a fine, ideal figure on the page than about getting the proportions right.  The scenes – of mythology, courtly life, war, and love – are well-observed but, to a western visitor, stubbornly anti-perspectival.  Like so much of the artwork on display, it rests on the surface.