Roberta Smith. Still from "The Sweet Spot." (Courtesy The New York Times)

We enjoyed this little video called "The Sweet Spot," published by The New York Times today, in which culture columnist David Carr skewers film critic A.O. Scott for being a harsh critic and takes a brief respite by talking to Roberta Smith about the power of criticism to make or break careers.

In addition to our delight in hearing Mr. Scott defend himself by saying things like, "This is not a progressive kindergarten," we enjoyed the interlude with Ms. Smith, around three minutes in.

"Too many artists whose work I've written negatively about have museum retrospectives and sell out gallery shows all the time," said Ms. Smith, "for me to think I'm making or breaking careers. Everybody's voting in one way or the other." She mentions a few ways in which people cast their votes, including Twitter, declaiming "it's a mess." In relation to all these people casting their votes, in all these many ways, her own viewpoint, she says, becomes "just another vote."

Sure thing, Ms. Smith. Though, we appreciate your humility.

View from 21st Street. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in March 2012. (Courtesy Tom Crane/Barnes Foundation)

The reviews have been streaming in steadily since the opening of the Barnes Foundation, the collection of early modernist masterworks of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, on Saturday at its more centrally located site along Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, at a cost of $150 million, replicates the galleries of the original structure while expanding its footprint to add new amenities like a central court, a café, a gift shop and an auditorium—a total of 93,000 square feet, compared to the original in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, which was only 10,000 square feet. The critics are all over the place on the new building. Here’s a cheat sheet of where some of them stand.

"I couldn't imagine that the integrity of the collection—effectively a site-specific, installational work of art, avant la lettre—would survive,” writes Peter Schjeldahl for The New Yorker. "But it does, magnificently." Considering that in 2004, Mr. Schjeldahl, writing for the same publication, called the proposed relocation of the Barnes Foundation to its current site "an aesthetic crime,” the critic's delighted reaction was a surprise. Regarding the repositioning of Matisse’s The Joy of Life (1906), Mr. Schjeldahl asserts it looked "bigger" than he remembered and "less confusing,” but had nonetheless "suffered a grave loss of cadmium yellow across a central area." Mr. Schjeldahl’s kudos extended to the architecture by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which he called “spectacular.”

Roberta Smith, writing for The New York Times, also likes the new Barnes, though she, like Mr. Schjeldahl, was initially a naysayer. "Against all odds," she writes, "the museum...is still very much the old Barnes, only better."  She made note of the new lighting, claiming it was one of the "systemic improvements" that make "everything breathe in a new way." For Ms. Smith, the move of Joy, from its "humiliating position on the stairway landing" to an alcove on the balcony, was a positive one, but the biggest virtue, it seems, is the potential afforded by the new 5000-square-foot temporary exhibition gallery, which "pulses with curatorial possibility." Her recommendation? "Set out all the African works, for example. Give us a Cezanne or a Matisse retrospective."

Christopher Knight, for The Los Angeles Times, unlike Ms. Smith and Mr. Schjeldahl, is skeptical, calling the new Barnes "America's weirdest art museum" and a victim of "The Bilbao Effect—museum art as a civic profit opportunity." He called the new building "bland" and claims the new Barnes "shuns adventurous imagination." About the new place for the Matisse's Joy, Mr. Knight claims its original position in the stairwell was an "imaginative installation" and likely took the risky move because he "surely knew" of the Russian art collector who had commissioned paintings for the stairwells of his mansion in Moscow in 1910.

Jerry Saltz and Justin Davidson did a joint review in New York divvying up the art and architecture. Mr. Saltz claims the art "never looked better," though he disparaged the system-less style of presenting the artwork, the "Smorgasbord Mundo" as he calls it, where paintings are "wedged into 24 small galleries " along with an array of folk art, crafts and art from all over the world that is unevenly heaped together. Mr. Davidson calls the work of the architects "virtuosic," considering what they had to work with—a skimpy parcel of land on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, "a cultural corridor with all the friendliness of a parade ground."

Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic for The Los Angeles Times, viewed the attempt to re-create the galleries of the old Barnes Foundation site in Merion as an "architectural equivalent of a paint-by-numbers exercise." "The problem," he writes, "is not simply that the architecture of the rebuilt galleries feels a bit hollow and insubstantial. It is that the artworks themselves are diminished. They hang in rooms where the relationship between architecture and art is not deeply personal and eccentric, as it was in Merion, but precise and clinical."

Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter. (Courtesy The New York Times)

Two bits of news about The New York Times’ co-chief art critics, Robert Smith and Holland Cotter, just came across our desk.

Ms. Smith is set to receive an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute during its commencement ceremony on May 12, according to a statement released by the school.

Meanwhile, Mr. Cotter is at work on a book of his collected writings for Knopf, says an item in The Times-Picayune. Mr. Cotter had been a scarce presence at the paper for much of this year, until returning midway through April with a huge set of articles about art in Africa.

Photo courtesy Rozalia Jovanovic

“I’m speechless,” said Ryan Estep, a visitor at the opening of "The Illusion of Democracy," Charles Atlas's show at Luhring Augustine Friday night. Mr. Estep was standing in front of Plato’s Alley, a 2008 video work by Mr. Atlas, comprised of a black and white projection of a grid of rapidly flashing numbers. The video was cast across several walls of a nook in the gallery the size of a small bedroom. An artist and art handler who works at a Chelsea gallery and lives in Bushwick, Mr. Estep was one of the first visitors to the show. He seemed mesmerized. “Things are coming toward me and receding. I’m blown away.”

This was a night of several firsts. It was Charles Atlas’s first solo show in New York, though he is an artist who has been working since the 1970s, when he began collaborating with Merce Cunningham. This was also the first opening of Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick location—the first outpost in the neighborhood of any Chelsea gallery. As the night wore on, and Mr. Atlas’s projections became swarmed by the silhouettes of the masses—both beanie-hat-donning Bushwick artists and slickly dressed Chelsea brethren—it felt like a historic event.

“We’re thrilled to have this exhibition,” said Lauren Wittels, a director at Luhring Augustine who is incredibly tall and was wearing skinny dark jeans. “So many people have followed Charlie for so long. To be his first major gallery show in New York is just an honor.”

When asked if she thought the opening of Luhring Augustine in Bushwick would mean more traffic to the neighborhood, she said, “Can’t say. We’ll see. I mean, I think tonight will be crazy.”

Mr. Atlas was quietly moving around the gallery in black jeans, white sneakers and a bright orange hooded sweater. His white hair was cut in a sharp line in the back, and he had an orange triangular marking on either side of his face.

“I haven’t had a gallery in New York in probably twelve years,” Mr. Atlas told Gallerist. “The gallery I had before,” he said, smiling and pointing to a corner of the gallery, “could probably fit in that space over there.” That’s all we got out of Mr. Atlas before a friend came up and kissed him on the cheek.

“Biesenbach’s here,” someone whispered.

“I’m just texting Marina [Abramovic] and Antony [Hegarty],” said MoMA PS1 Klaus Biesenbach, in a gray suit, looking up from his silver BlackBerry when Gallerist approached him. “They’re in the car, on their way over.”

“I love Charlie,” said Mr. Biesenbach, when he was done texting. “I think he’s both an amazing collaborator—look at what he did with Antony, or Marina, or Leigh Bowery. But then he’s also a great solo artist. And you normally don’t have this, have a person who can have a solo career and really kind of be themselves, and then be the best, best, best collaborator ever. I think what he did with Marina or Leigh Bowery is art history."

Why so long for a solo New York show? “Everybody who’s ahead of their time, it takes a long time,” said Mr. Biesenbach, smiling. “But that’s the definition of being ahead of your time.”

Later, Mr. Biesenbach walked arm-in-arm with Ms. Abramovic, who was clad in a black dress. Antony, a lugubrious giant, was seen talking quietly with Mr. Atlas in front of Mr. Atlas’s "Painting by Numbers," a 2011 video that shows an explosion of numbers in a psychedelic swirling pattern.

“You guys,” someone said. “The video only uses the numbers 1 through 6. There’s no 7,8 or 9.” We inspected it and found they were right. Later over email, we asked Mr. Atlas why he used only those numbers. He replied, “In this first work I wanted to make a piece about "number-ness", something  that I thought would exist even if human beings didn't exist.  In the end I was forced to use numerals, but I didn't want the subject to be about numerals, so I limited the field to 1 through 6.”

Some flashes went off. "OMG. Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz are here," someone said, of the art critics.

Some people seemed confused by Mr. Atlas’s work. Known for his multi-channel video installations, live electronic performances, and documentary film, this abstract work seemed different. “I’m confused," said Mr. Estep, "as to where this new work fits in Atlas’s canon.” Another young artist claimed the work felt a little “old-fashioned.” “When I came in and I saw all the numbers,” she said, “I thought it would be connected to some live-feed, or the Internet. But it’s just an animation. Maybe I just have a very new-media approach.”

“At the time I started making the first of these pieces (Plato's Alley, 2008)," said Mr. Atlas over email, "my goal was to make a piece that didn't  look like any other work that I had done before.  I tried to imagine I was an unknown artist with a different sensibility—realizing of course that on some level it would probably be surprising but still be recognizable as my work by the people who have known my work through the years.”

Others weighed their observations against their expectations of the highly anticipated show and what it might mean for the Bushwick arts scene. “I actually thought it would be smaller,” said Peter Hopkins about the space, which Luhring Augustine purchased in 2010, to the consternation of local artists, and will use partly for storage. Mr. Hopkins runs The Bogart Salon, a gallery at 56 Bogart in Bushwick and recently held a salon on the topic of what changes a Chelsea gallery would bring to Bushwick. “I thought they were going to use less for the work, I thought it was going to be more storage. It’s really more about the work. But I didn’t think it was going to be this big. I’m very impressed.”

Mr. Hopkins looked around. “I think it’s better,” he said, of the mixed Bushwick-Chelsea crowd with a blend of triumph and despondency. “There are so many more types here that are rougher around the edges. There are still non-Chelsea types. But I don’t recognize every face. Which is good.”

A Gagosian gallery T-shirt. (Patrick McMullan)

Damien Hirst's 11-gallery spot-painting exhibitions is probably impossible for just about single working critic to review.

Even the most frugal writer making the worldwide Gagosian tour—crashing on couches, taking trains throughout Europe, etc.—would need to spend at least a few thousand dollars on airplane tickets to cross the Atlantic, the Pacific, the U.S. and the gigantic gap between the Gagosian outposts in Athens and Hong Kong. Though critic Adrian Searle floats the rumor that one journalist is making the trip, it is hard to believe any publication—or even major media company—would be willing to back the sojourn.

One is left, then, to assemble a grand review from local writers in each city. As Magda Sawon, the co-owner of the Postmasters Gallery, pointed out on Twitter, just about every critic has by this point written a review of part of the show, and a "[h]uge database ripe for direct comparison study was created." The list below is an initial, partial stab at analyzing—at celebrating!—that. (A note: the selection is limited to reviews published by critics who saw all of the shows within their local city—three in New York, two in London, one each in the remaining areas—with the exception of Katy Siegel's report from the show's press preview, published on Artforum.com, since it remains the most biting, brilliant article we have yet read about the show.)

Here's hoping someone completes the Spot Challenge, and flips the reward—a Hirst print—to recoup at least some of the cost of the journey. And now the reviews:

Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, "Spot On"
"I can enjoy looking at one for a while, but to like them would entail identifying with the artist's cynicism, as herds of collectors, worldwide, evidently do. Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth. That's not Old Master status, but it's immortality of a sort."

Roberta Smith, The New York Times, "Hirst, Globally Dotting His ‘I’"
"Some of them are wonderful; some aren’t really paintings, they’re just expanses of inert spots that happen to be hanging in a gallery. The fluctuations in quality is itself a kind of affirmation of the whole idea of quality."

Katy Siegel, Artforum.com, "It's All Over"
"In effect, Hirst, Murakami, and Koons run medium-size businesses; exploiting their workers, they are in turn exploited by speculators, who themselves make nothing but money. There’s something slightly pathetic about the artist’s ambition to join their ranks, to be a big man—a painting with a million spots! $100 million for the diamond skull!! Golly!!!—on the scale of the real assholes."

Richard Dorment, The Telegraph, "Damien Hirst, The Complete Spot Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, Review"
"They are perfect corporate artworks, ideal for banks, board rooms, and modernist collectors who have no particular knowledge or taste. Cheerful but not cheap, you don’t have to look at them for more than a second or two to get the point."

Christopher Knight, The Los Angeles Times, "Art Review: Damien Hirst at Gagosian Gallery"
"The spot paintings are as blank in Mumbai as in Manhattan, as empty in Dusseldorf as in Shanghai, as vacant in Buenos Aires as in Beverly Hills. They speak visual Esperanto. They look machine-made only if you see them in reproduction, rather than in person, where artistic handicraft -- pristine or sloppy—is visible."

Blake Gopnik, The Daily Beat, "Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings Take Over the World"
"Doesn’t high-school physics tell us that the world is just a void filled with atoms? Hirst’s atomistic artwork captures that worldview, which dates back to ancient Greece, and ignores all the higher-level order that normally attracts and distracts us."

Adrian Searle, The Guardian, "Full Circle: The Endless Abstraction of Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings"
"Because the colours never touch, there's no real conversation or friction between them. Everything is insistently frontal. I long for a black spot, a wobble, a smear."

Ben Luke, London Evening Standard, "Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, Gagosian–Review"
"But the volume of paintings here creates a monotonous blizzard - 90 per cent are superfluous. And their abundance only serves to amplify a whiff of filthy lucre that underscores the whole endeavour."

Martin Gayford, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, "Hirst’s Druggy Spots Circle World in 11 Gagosian Shows: Review"
"Once, say about 1995, his spot works seemed to catch the zeitgeist, at once energetic and nihilistic. That time has passed. Now, they seem to capture something less desirable -- the cheery cynicism of an era that has not so much passed as collapsed."

Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, "Still Spotty About Damien Hirst"
"And yet it must also be said that visiting the two London galleries at least is a visual pleasure. … However they reproduce on paper, faced as real paintings, they have a reality that is quite compulsive."

Photograph of Helen Frankenthaler in 1964 by Alexander Liberman. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Painter Helen Frankenthaler died yesterday at the age of 83, and The New York Times published an obituary by Grace Glueck, which featured an anecdote about a time that Ms. Frankenthaler danced with John Travolta at the White House. It's well worth a read. This morning, we take a look at the tributes, complete with a few jabs, in other publications.

Over on Artnet, Charlie Finch declares that Ms. Frankenthaler "was another one of those painters who, like the recently deceased George Tooker, basically made one painting," Mountains and Sea (1952)—which, he writes, "inspired so many lazy imitations in studios across the world, including that of Frankenthaler herself." [Artnet]

Jerry Saltz is a great deal more positive, musing that Ms. Frankenthaler "may have been the first artist not regularly referred to, demeaned, neutralized, and made safe with the label 'woman artist,'" and says that she "was often belittled, her work called merely decorative." [NYMag]

Speaking of, Bloomberg's new critic, Lance Esplund writes that "[t]he openness in Frankenthaler’s work at times can be too thin and merely decorative. The lack of meat and structure can give the impression of something wishy-washy." That sounds, to our ear, like fair criticism. He also notes the precarious state of her legacy, given the recent closure of her gallery, Knoedler & Co. [Bloomberg]

The Wall Street Journal's Eric Gibson, who has perhaps the most complete summation of the progression of Ms. Frankenthaler's art and career, has similar concerns. "There hasn't been a full-dress retrospective in more than 20 years, and her gallery, Knoedler & Co., suddenly closed last month, leaving no forum for the regular exposure of her work," he writes. "She deserves better. Greatness abhors a vacuum." [WSJ]

Roberta Smith notes the strange coincidence that Ms. Frankenthaler and sculptor John Chamberlain (who died on Dec. 21) passed away within days of each other, "considering that they occupy such similar positions within the history of American art." Ms. Smith adds, "Both brought a new, unfettered approach to materials that pushed their respective mediums toward greater expressive freedom, unabashed physicality and a rough-edged, aggressively color-based beauty." She also emphasizes the startling fact that, when Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis paid a supposedly pivotal visit to Frankenthaler's studio in 1953, the artist was not there: her lover at the time, critic Clement Greenberg, brought them in. [NYT]

Update, 1:20 p.m.: Jeff Weinstein points us to a Los Angeles Times obituary that notes Ms. Frankenthaler felt that grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano in the 1980s showed that the organization was supporting work of "of increasingly dubious quality."

Also, make of this what you will, but, at the time we went to press with this post, Google News' page for Helen Frankenthaler's death had 196 results, while John Chamberlain's had 126.

In other news, Martin Gayford previews the trinity of major British artists—Hockney, Freud and Hirst—with retrospectives coming up in London in 2012, the year that the capital will host the Olympics. [Bloomberg]

The contemporary art auction market grew by 35 percent over last year, according to Scott Reyburn, with the major auction houses bringing in a total of $1.7 billion at the year's 12 major evening sales. [Bloomberg]

The sister to whom Ms. Bernhardt’s referred is the Brooklyn painter Katherine Bernhardt, who is perhaps best known for her vigorous portraits of supermodels, all rail thin and sharply angled.

Given that massive acquisition of Moroccan carpets, it is perhaps unsurprising that they have begun appearing in Katherine’s work. For her 2010 show at the Canada gallery, on the Lower East Side, some of her paintings featured the bright, energetic patterns of kilims, and there were carpets for sale, too.

On Dec. 8, a new batch of carpets will arrive at Canada. Elizabeth, Katherine, and Katherine’s husband, Yousef Jdia, whom she met at a souk in Essaouira, Morocco, recently went into business under the name the Magic Flying Carpets of the Berber Kingdom of Morocco, and they will install a “pop-up souk” at the gallery. Pieces will be available at prices from $200, for smaller, contemporary examples, to more than $8,000 for the largest vintage work.

“This is an extension of her interest in women’s work and portraiture,” Suzanne Butler, a partner at Canada, told us on the phone this afternoon. “It’s part of her practice and her persona.”

Canada is not taking a cut of revenue from the four-day sale, which has been scheduled in between exhibition. “We’re helping them get the business going,” Ms. Butler said. “She has an absolute love for and devotion to these rugs, and her rug paintings.”

Those who visited this year's Armory Show may recall that the gallery also had a number of Moroccan carpets for sale at its booth. "[P]aintings by Michael Williams, Xylor Jane, Carrie Moyer, Katherine Bernhardt and others establish a rewarding pictorial dialogue with the floor, which is thick with Moroccan rugs," New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote at the time.

Elizabeth, who has a Ph.D. in Renaissance and Italian Studies, handles the details of the business, but said that Mr. Jdia, who has sold carpets for a number of years, and Katherine pick most of the works, on visits to Morocco. “She has an incredible eye for them,” Elizabeth said.

“Sometimes people call these carpets fallen paintings, and they hang them on the wall” she added. “They’re art for the wall, or the floor.”

Click the slide show above to see works that will be on offer at Canada, unless they sell privately before Dec. 8. Elizabeth Bernhardt has written commentary to accompany each image.

Elizabeth Taylor. (Photo courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

As we move into the second half of October, much of the art crowd is off in London for Frieze. Next week, a good portion of it will move to Paris for FIAC, returning to New York as temperatures begin to drop and dealers ready their second shows of the season. Nevertheless, critics have been busy on these shores. In The New York Observer this week, Will Heinrich reviewed Algus Greenson’s just-closed “Invitation to the Voyage” and declared that it “could easily pass for a small museum show.” Below we offer a quick look at what critics are saying elsewhere.

Christopher Knight on the Christie's Elizabeth Taylor Lots at MOCA
In The Los Angeles Times, critic Christopher Knight goes after Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, for leasing space to Christie’s that the house will use to show off memorabilia from the late Elizabeth Taylor’s collection, including a diamond that is estimated to sell for $2.5-3.5 million. Tickets sold out at $20 each, though with special tickets now available at $50 each. MOCA will get a cut of the sales. “The Christie's deal is just its usual commercial enterprise, with the auction house doing what auction houses do and MOCA doing what art museums don't do -- acting as a shill, publicist and partner for a business,” he writes.

Blake Gopnik Meditates on Graffiti
Former Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, who is at The Daily Beast/Newsweek now and runs a really nice, regularly updated blog, takes to the pages of Foreign Affairs to chart the history of graffiti and its role in recent international political uprisings. “By now, grand graffiti gestures are as tired as could be, at least in the context of the Western art world,” Mr. Gopnik writes. “But across the rest of the planet, the static language of the American ‘piece’ has moved on to a second life as the visual lingua franca of genuine political speech.”

Roberta Smith on Braque, “The Other Father of Cubism”
New York Times co-chief art critic Robert Smith is the first to review Acquavella Galleries’ Braque show, which she describes as “a 42-gun salute” to the artist—a gunshot for each painting, which are, she says, “almost all top-notch.” (Dan Duray wrote about how the show was brought together earlier this week.) As Ms. Smith notes, Braque’s later work is not widely known in New York, but she finds a lot to like among those paintings. “It is actually the less familiar, later work in this show’s second half that is most gripping,” she says, “as Braque continues on alone with Cubism, expanding and filling it out, making its intersecting forms and transparencies and free-range details more legible and consequently more engaging and seductive.”

Holland Cotter Judges Bob Dylan’s Gagosian Debut
As Michael H. Miller noted earlier today, Times co-chief art critic Holland Cotter panned Bob Dylan’s current Gagosian painting show. “The color is muddy, the brushwork scratchily dutiful, the images static and postcard-ish,” Mr. Cotter writes. “The work is dead on the wall.” Mr. Miller had some ideas for how Mr. Dylan might respond. Take a look at them here.

Peter Schjedahl on Degas [subscription required]
The New Yorker critic took a trip up to Boston, and found the Museum of Fine Arts’ new “Degas and the Nude” exhibition “wonderful and weird." The artist, he says, was the greatest draftsman among the Impressionists. “More than a hundred women crowd the walls in paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels,” he writes. “Twenty others hold torturous poses in bronze. The cumulative effect is both steamy and cold, like the clinging efflux of a sickroom humidifier.” Mr. Schjeldahl singles out the artist’s Scene of War, an early work that depicts some women lying dead on the ground, others about to be impaled with arrows. “What to do with this picture, except gawk at it, is beyond me,” the critic writes. “It seems pathological.”