“Blues” here is defined somewhat loosely, as an expressive trope for mournful resistance. Speaking truth to power is blues. So is making art in the face of injustice. If the memory of slavery is present, so is the reality of homophobia, racism, sexism and inequality. Cultural work has a lot to do with the blues, as a form of struggle.

A memorable work is Wu Tsang’s Mishima in Mexico (2012). The 14-minute video is a remake of Yukio Mishima’s tragic novel Thirst for Love. Featuring pretty, body-oiled, kimono-clad men (the artist and a writer, Alexandro Segade) doing yoga and buying each other tube socks, the video delivers lines that alternate between gay porn clichés (“I want to date a big, hunky gay samurai”) and Alain Robbe-Grillet-appropriate witticisms (“desire is so depressing, it makes me want to kill myself”). The video shows an artist who refuses to be pinned down (one exchange goes: “It’s so gay” “maybe queer” “So Japanese” “That’s why we’re in Mexico” “Sometimes I think I’m so queer that I’m straight”). The protagonists switch roles: desirer and desired, woman and man, master and servant. It’s a must-see for anyone enamored of gay samurai tragedies, but it’s also a thoughtful meditation on the complex pinballing of art, identity and desire.

Works in the show range from 1951 to 2012, but its aesthetic sensibility would seem to derive from identity art of the 1990s. Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992-3), is a room-sized installation that imagines the anthropological appropriation of African-American culture in Germany during the ’90s. A sign reading “Funk Station” covers shelves of books and magazines including a well-thumbed copy of iconic rap magazine The Source, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and an anthology on “Black Conflict With White America.” Magnifying glasses hang over these specimens and definitions of words like “Fly” and “Hoe” are written on the walls. The work focuses on the dissemination and commodification of hip-hop, and also on its political potential.

More historical work includes Romare Bearden’s collages from the 1960s and ’70s, and Bob Thompson’s massive painted homage to 1960s jazz greats and Gauguin, Garden of Music. Senga Nengudi’s splayed nylon mesh stockings stuffed with sand seem repeats of the “Now Dig This!” exhibition, which ended February 23 at PS1, and Glenn Ligon’s paintings echo the Whitney’s own recent retrospective. Fresher is Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit, in which four orange peels and three empty banana skins are sewn to look like so many baseballs and footballs. The fruit peels have browned and weathered to a leathery texture.

A room of 13 videos and projections gets at the show’s more eclectic roots: The Wire, Henry Flint, Duke Ellington, Richard Pryor, Sun Ra and Azealia Banks. It’s aesthetically cacophonous to the point of being almost overwhelming. Music is as much a presence in the show as visual art. The Whitney has programmed live performances by musicians like Lonnie Holley, Keiji Haino and Annette Peacock. These promise to be great.

Mark Morrisroe’s pretty, elegant Chromogenic prints of drag queens and outsiders are also self-portraits, like Blow Both of Us Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978. Stan Douglas’s handsomely projected video Hors-champs uses outtakes from a French jazz performance recording to meditate on the Rodney King beating (an event also captured in the space “hors-champs,” or “off camera”).

Despite its seeming lack of a clear lineage or progression, and its mix of contemporary and historical work, “Blues for Smoke” has a surprisingly clear through-line. Blues is a set of aesthetic strategies in response to tragedy and oppression. For those without power, blues is agency, and art. (Through April 28)

A bathroom that Keith Haring painted in 1989 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York. (Getty Images)

The Whitney announced today that it has received a $1 million donation from the Keith Haring Foundation to support exhibitions in the Renzo Piano–designed building that it is scheduled to move into in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

Haring, who died of complications relating to AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31, had a long history with the museum. The Whitney noted in a release that his work appeared in the 1983 and 1991 Whitney Biennials. In 1997 the museum organized his first full-scale retrospective.

"The Whitney has been a longtime believer in Keith’s work and a supporter of his legacy," Julia Gruen, the executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said in a statement. "We are honored to present this grant in support of the exhibition program that the Museum will carry on in its new building downtown.”

The Whitney's director, Adam Weinberg, said in a statement, "This wonderfully generous grant from the Keith Haring Foundation, the first we have received from an artist’s foundation to support exhibitions in our new building, helps to propel us forward as we prepare for our future."

Various blps. (Courtesy the artist and Brooke Alexander Editions)

The Whitney's major Richard Artschwager retrospective—handsomely titled "Richard Artschwager!"—does not open until Oct. 25, but those wandering around Chelsea or the Meatpacking District over the next few days have the chance to see a bit of a preview.

In conjunction with the show, a number of the artist's trademark "blps"—the monochromatic ovular shapes that look a bit like thin slices of huge sausages, which he has been affixing throughout his exhibitions and in different outdoor locales for years—are going up on buildings along the High Line, where the Whitney is at work on its new home.

Some are already up, on the outside of David Nolan Gallery (one of the artist's dealers) and the Standard hotel, according to a representative at the Whitney, and more will go up in the days to come.

The Whitney has a long history with the blps, having once facilitated Artschwager's 100 Locations piece, which called for 100 blps to be placed around the museum for the 1968 Whitney Annual, the precursor to the Biennial.

The retrospective, which will bring additional blps into the Whitney's Upper East Side home, runs through Feb. 3. All the blps will remain up at least through that date.

(Image courtesy BA Editions)

When Picasso purged color from his work, he did so to emphasize the formal autonomy of the picture plane and focus on problems of form. The show starts with a 1904 painting of a woman, from the artist’s so-called Blue Period, but moves swiftly into the most radical of Picasso’s styles, his 1909-1914 cubism, rendered in the sepia tones of faded newspapers. The show leaves you wanting more of the collages, like Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (1912), but there is a gallery of five great, rare sculptures, including the volumetric, monochrome Woman’s Head (Fernande) (1909), with her Klingon-looking forehead.

Ms. Giménez has a light touch with the linear Picasso of the 1930s: two languid paintings of sleeping figures—Sleeping Woman (1931) and Sleeping Nude (1932)—contrast with the spiky forms of The Kiss (1930). The show gives us the full spectrum of Picasso’s women (Olga, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, moon-faced Marie-Thérèse) rendered in lush grisaille: pneumatic breasts and buttocks modeled in monochrome like so many dirty postcards from the 19^th century. Elsewhere there are rarely-seen gems, such as the sculpture Head (1928) (made from interlocking brass shapes on a delicate iron tripod) and several sheet metal sculptures that read as freestanding paintings and are paper-doll-like in their delicacy.

Heat rises in this show—its fiery core is the late work, at the top of the rotunda. Still Life with Blood Sausage (May 10, 1941) depicts Picasso’s wartime fantasies of food from his native Spain; it’s shown alongside studies for Guernica. The Women of Algiers (Version L) (1955) is Picasso cheekily rendering the 19th century’s greatest colorist, Eugene Delacroix, in black and white. And The Maids of Honor, in which he drains the color from Velázquez’s Las Meniñas, is a knockout, from the Infanta’s tiered cake of a dress to the playing card Jack standing in for Velázquez.

PICKING UP chronologically where the Guggenheim show leaves off is the Whitney Museum’s “mid-career” retrospective of Wade Guyton, who was born in Hammond, Ind., in 1972, the year before Picasso died. Mr. Guyton’s paintings are studies in the beautiful seams, glitches and errors that result from jamming linen through inkjet printers—it is the drips, smears and striations accidentally produced by modern technology that render his chalkily-colored abstractions seductive. The Ab-Ex-sized canvas Untitled (2006), which dominates one wall of the show, is made up of pretty, saturated red horizontal stripes that thin out as the Epson Ultrachrome printer on which it was made ran out of ink.

As the pedagogical apparatus around it makes clear, with its talk of “our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common technologies,” this is an exhibition about the ways in which a whole generation of viewers thinks about materials. In Mr. Guyton’s work are sights that will be familiar to many—the slight grit that we associate with a reproduction, the mechanical mishaps inherent to the analog output of digital files. Anyone who has experienced desktop printer mishaps, problems caused by the constraints of printer paper size, file corruptions or depleting ink cartridges will be able to relate to Mr. Guyton’s process. Like a post-Pictures Generation Frank Stella, he makes gorgeous, adamantly banal paintings using average office technology: desktop computers, Epson printers, flatbed scanners. His works, which embrace accident and technological failure, suggest something of the wobbly, ersatz materiality of a Blinky Palermo. Mostly, with their black “X”s on white ground, they look like what might happen if someone tried to print out full-scale Christopher Wool paintings or enlarge Russian Constructivist abstractions using an inkjet printer.

The wall text focuses on process to an almost comical extent, as if you might indeed go home and try to make your own Guytons: “He began with rectangles of 50 percent black, which he converted to bitmapped files,” one reads. “Because his medium-size printer can accommodate materials only up to 44 inches wide, Guyton generally folds the canvases in half and prints each side separately,” another informs. “Relying on an optical sensor that determines where to begin dispensing ink, the machine draws in the canvas unevenly and often gets jammed by the thick linen, which Guyton has to yank to continue printing,” yet another tells us. Convert bitmapped file, fold, print, yank. Got it. Such instructions make apparent that despite the pleasure the show takes in supposed accidents and mishaps, this work is not about subverting any given system, technological or social, but is instead, it would appear, about following directions.

The show’s title, “OS,” is short for “Operating System,” as in a computer or mobile device, and the open layout, established by curator Scott Rothkopf in collaboration with the artist, is terrific: the staggered arrangement of the walls mimics the layers of a computer’s windows. The paintings suggest the way images jitter and pixelate on a laptop screen. The show has its thrilling moments: one portion is taken up by nine large glass-topped vitrines, seven containing pages from art history books, two left enigmatically empty; 18 mirrored stainless steel sculptures of the letter “U” in a variety of sizes form the centerpiece of the show’s main area; a wood rod printed with inkjet stripes (an untitled work from 2009) leans in a corner, in the manner of works by the late sculptor André Cadere.

But questions remain: Why is it significant that the five colorful Marcel Breuer chairs in the piece Untitled Action Sculpture (Five Enron Chairs), 2007, were taken from the Enron offices? A museum exhibition can be an opportunity to show an artist’s B sides, or bring out the subtext of a body of work—the kinds of things the tight focus of gallery exhibitions and group shows doesn’t tend to accommodate. But here, what Mr. Guyton means to say about Enron is tough to suss out. The inclusion of an early work, The Devil’s Hole from 1999—two small photographs of red-lit spelunkers in a cave—is also opaque. The presence of these awkward pieces only makes one feel relief at the fact that Mr. Guyton has stopped using original subject matter. Critics like The Brooklyn Rail’s John Yau have called out Mr. Guyton for a lack of “curiosity of any sort” as an artist, and therefore such moments of engagement with the world are worth some explanation. (Potentially a better use for wall text than those how-tos.) Mainly, though, Mr. Guyton’s early, Erased de Kooning moments revolve around eminently legible encounters with modernism: one evening in 2001, he found a Breuer chair on the street in the East Village, and wrestled its steel armature into a sculpture; the resulting Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair), (2001) also on display at the Whitney, indicates a face-off with high modernism that is easily resolved by the piece’s installation in the Whitney’s Brutalist Breuer building.

But it is fitting for a young artist that the exhibition looks forward, rather than backward. Instead of dwelling on juvenilia, “OS” gives us two monumental new works. Untitled (2011) consists of twin canvases that mirror the Whitney’s grey concrete walls. The red and puce striped friezes of Untitled (2012) have a museum-scale ambition that tests the pretty, gallery-friendly formalism of his work. That much of what is included here is borrowed from the collection of the artist, rather than from an institution or collector, gives the show a present-tense feel.

If Picasso’s and Andy Warhol’s most biting work was often about something—the Spanish Civil War, car crashes, presidential assassinations, sex, America’s most-wanted criminals—Mr. Guyton’s relatively hermetic body of work evinces no desire to sully art with the stuff of life. Mr. Guyton’s true subject may be the museum itself, and the process of making images. Some might say this is art about nothing; others will point out that the medium is the message.

editorial@observer.com

(Courtesy the Whitney Museum)

It should be impossible to make a dull exhibition of work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a feisty 83-year-old whose scale-defying work—”infinity net” paintings, polka-dot installations, happenings, as well as dabblings in media, fashion and commerce—might play equally well in a closet and an arena. Yet the Whitney Museum has managed to put on a tepid retrospective: a dutiful and limited presentation of an artist who is larger than life.

Ms. Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto; her Japan was the one of war brides, American GIs and food shortages. The fragile paintings like Heart (1951) and Fern Kingdom (1953) that she made in the early 1950s using oil, enamel and housepaint as well as sand and—sometimes in place of canvas—seed sacks, on display in two rooms at the Whitney, are sweetly hallucinatory and surrealistic. Her conservative family disapproved of her painting habit, and while the Whitney’s wall text informs viewers that rationing in postwar Japan necessitated the use of such eccentric materials, Ms. Kusama herself recalls that her teenage rebellion took the form of pilfering goods from her parents’ plant nursery business to use as art supplies. The works often feature flower buds, and her hallmark dots start to appear in the painting God of the Wind (1955).

When she decided to move to the U.S., Ms. Kusama went to the American embassy, looked up Georgia O’Keeffe’s address in Who’s Who and wrote one of the determined, slightly deranged missives that would become her calling cards. O’Keeffe’s 1955 reply is on display: “It seems to me very odd that you are so ambitious to show your paintings here. But I wish the best for you.”

She finally made it to New York in 1958, when she was 29, and took up residence in a Zen center. The paintings she made shortly after arriving are still her best: rhythmic, cellular monochromes with surfaces so thick that the oil paint looks like baked porcelain. Her larger artistic project begins in earnest here: patterns cut up and spread out over flat surfaces and, eventually, sculptural forms. Her austere and labor-intensive work made an impression in New York, where the art world was still in thrall to Action Painting. Before long, she’d rented a floor in a Downtown loft where she used an old door for a bed and couldn’t afford milk for coffee but had artist neighbors in the building: Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain and Larry Rivers. A tiny self-portrait from 1959 shows her looking fresh-faced and headstrong.

She was different from her artist peers, though, in that she’d experienced visual and aural hallucinations since around age 12, visions of nets and dots climbing onto her skin that regularly landed her in Bellevue. But her visions’ trippy effects were not unlike the psychedelic experiences the hippies embraced in their quest for counterculture utopia, and she became famous with her next series: happenings, “polka-dot dance parties,” “body festivals” and “impromptu nude-ins” like her Endless Love Show in 1966, which, according to the Whitney’s wall text, featured “pot-smoking, go-go dancing and general carousing until dawn.” Her film Self-Obliteration (1968), a 24-minute psychedelic orgy of lighting effects and shamanistic polka-dotting, shows the tone of rapture that struck a cultural vein. If she rebelled against hierarchic and conservative postwar Japanese society, her promise of “self-obliteration” resonated with the mood of America during Vietnam. Her staged sex parties,in which Ms. Kusama used comely hippie girls and gay call boys as canvases for her endless polka dots, looked political enough for the tabloid press: antiwar, pro-gay, feminist and pro-drug, breaking laws in the name of art.The work found an international audience and the performances traveled to Belgium and Germany. (There’s a “did she or didn’t she?” feel to Ms. Kusama’s participation in the most outré elements of her own work; she claims that she had no interest in sex or drugs: “I absolutely never slept with one of them,” she has said of the scores of young nude dancers who hung around her, but plenty of people went to her performances to get laid.)

The best-curated room at the Whitney is the one occupied by her accumulation sculptures, ordinary objects covered with sculptural forms: there are macaroni suitcases, as well as couches, rowboats, high-heeled shoes and dresses sprouting forests of phallic shapes made of fabric. These are humorous and have a kinky glamour. It would have been nice to see her boat wallpaper, said to have inspired Warhol’s famous cow wallpaper, and the pornographic posters she sold mail-order, with dodgy entrepreneurial flair, once her happenings started to catch on.Articles from the late 1960s show “Miss Kusama” turning up at art events decked out in phalli-covered dresses and handbags.

She had a gift for navigating the weird sexual politics of an era when free love made headlines and yet many women, even in artistic circles, found themselves stuck in their roles as wives and mothers. She lived alone in her loft, a savvy self-promoter who staged prescient and fierce self-portraits in catsuits that still look edgy today. Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic would later toe this flash-a-tit-feminist party line. But the show doesn’t quite capture the flavor of this gaudy fun; the video and fliers on display seem timid in relation to her truly untrammeled self-obsession.Ms.Kusama leveraged her outsider status—a pretty Japanese woman in New York—into drinks with Frank Stella and Salvadore Dali, and a decade-long love affair with the reclusive Joseph Cornell. Works by Cornell from her personal collection are on display, including one that reads: “Fly back to me spring flower and I shall tie a string to you like this butterfly.”

As the show’s high-decibel commercial tie-in with Louis Vuitton makes clear (Marc Jacobs has inducted Ms. Kusama into the blue-chip handbag-artist brotherhood of Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince), she has new resonance these days as a proto-Murakami. (The irony inherent in Louis Vuitton promoting someone who once had as her manifesto “Nudism is the one thing that doesn’t cost anything. Clothes cost money. Kusama will cover your body with polka dots” is, however, well worth pointing out.) The grand dame of Japanese postwar Pop wore dresses with circles cut out of the tits and ass, and a rack of such “orgy dresses” would have been interesting objects to see at the Whitney. As if in reaction to such institutional reserve, Kusama-mania has spilled out onto the streets of New York with an installation at the Christopher Street pier of red and white polka-dotted biomorphic sculptures, and a display inside and on the exterior of Fifth Avenue’s Louis Vuitton store, which has already spread her dots onto the homepages of countless tween fashion bloggers.

Since 1977, Ms. Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Japan. Her 1980s pieces, like the large-scale Cornell Box-like construction Leftover Snow in a Dream (1982), or some lovely, biomorphic plant drawings from the late 1970s, are more introverted, but also more ambitious than her happenings and social sculptures of the ’60s and early ’70s. Her continuing eagerness to be photographed in front of her work makes her, perhaps, the world’s most photographed recluse.

One problem with the Whitney show is that it fails to place Ms. Kusama’s work in relation to either her artistic peers from the past (Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou and Louise Bourgeois come to mind) or to today’s artists like Kembra Phaler and Ryan McGinley, whose brand of naked downtown self-promotion and shamanistic rocked-out art-making seem resonant with Ms. Kusama’s practice. Instead, the Whitney gives us, in the show’s final gallery, Ms. Kusama’s pretty terrible Keith Haring-like recent paintings, low-grade hothouse acrylics hung floor-to-ceiling.

The larger problem, though, is this: in any exhibition, a curator’s sensibility should be evident; this show, which comes to the Whitney after stints at the Tate and Pompidou, feels instead as though it were created by committee. The installation has no instinct for what might be interesting or dramatic, no sense of which projects might look best large or small, and no conviction about what pieces are important and what work just fills a room. The objects themselves do a lot of heavy lifting here, as does the artist’s oversized personality. (She may not be the best artist, but she has panache.) Even the Whitney’s focus on American art is lost here, with most of the revelatory work coming from Ms. Kusama’s lesser-known years in Japan.

There is one pointedly local angle to the show, despite the spotty curation: New York was, and remains, a great place in which to reinvent yourself, as Ms. Kusama did. She was a hard worker, a bit of a hustler and a savvy survivor. Note the 1964 photograph of Ms. Kusama, age 35, in Brooklyn, looking fabulous in a long faux-fur coat, full of affectation and ego, beautiful and confident.

The best moment in the show is her 2002 room-size, romantic, low-fi installation piece Fireflies on the Water. Only one person at a time can enter: alone, with 150 Christmas tree lights mirrored so that they look like a cosmos, you experience an interior as infinity. The Infinity Net paintings and polka dots have this same effect: a little, repeating motif on a simple field can, with a trick of perspective, look like an entire world. This fragility, and willingness to improvise in her seemingly boundless project, is the best of Yayoi Kusama.

editorial@observer.com

Marsden Hartley, "Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement," 1940. (Whitney Museum)

One of the first things one sees walking onto the third floor of the Whitney at the moment is a small oil painting of a shirtless, dark-haired man posing in front of a dark red background. Titled Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement, it was painted in 1940 by the great Marsden Hartley, who died in 1943. But here it is in the 2012 biennial.

The man responsible for its presence is the New York artist Nick Mauss, whose main contribution to the show is a recreation of a luxurious antechamber that illustrator Christian Berard designed for the French perfumer Guerlain in 1939. Its interior is a rich golden velvet, and its details are articulated with bits of white and purple cotton. Sumptuous stuff.

Around the installation, Mr. Mauss has hung piece the Hartley, along with a circa 1976 Warhol piece made of four stitched-together photographs of a man in tight bicycle shorts, a 1966 Ellsworth Kelly lithograph called Locust, a 1917 Charles Demuth watercolor, two sketches by Eyre de Lanux, a May Wilson sculpture and a Gary Winogrand snapshot.

An exhibition within the exhibition (a para-pavilion of sorts), it's one of the show's most elegant and concise moments--the artist carefully aligning himself with a few of his forebears in terms of style and sensibility. The installation piece is titled Concern, Crush, Desire (2011)--all synonyms, a quick Google search reveals, for "affection."

Blouin Artinfo reports that, unlike Sotheby's—whose art handlers have been locked out since July as part of ongoing negotiations—the Whitney isn't likely to play hardball:

"Those close to negotiations said the contract issue is particularly sensitive in light of the Whitney’s impending move to its new downtown location in 2015. The union was careful to negotiate a five-year contract so that their jobs would be safe after the move. 'We have a long history with the Whitney — they’re rather progressive,' said [Teamsters Local 966 manager James] Anderson. 'They’re not coming at this from a place where they’re going to lock people out. Hopefully, we’re not going to be another Sotheby’s.'”

A representative for the Whitney told the website that negotiations have been "cordial and respectful."