Sharon Butler sat down with Louise Fishman to discuss her two current exhibitions: Five Decades, a 50-year retrospective at Tilton Gallery (September 5 – October 13), and Louise Fishman, at Cheim & Read (September 13 ­– October 27).

A great deal of recent art found in global biennials and blue-chip galleries (think of Damien Hirst’s spots or Kehinde Wiley’s portraits) is made by teams of acolytes under an art superstar’s supervision.

The other day, when I came out of the C-Town at Wyckoff and Dekalb, I saw a woman wearing beige leggings made of polyester lace that featured a big repeating flower pattern, and I thought of your paintings.

Lois Dodd’s great gift as a painter is her ability to pose complex questions without seeming to try.

In the competitive maelstrom of 20th century art, philosophies became dogmas, and the dogmas outright manifestos. In the new century, many abstract painters are saying goodbye to all that didactic thinking and exuding a kind of calculated tentativeness.

It’s one thing to understand the empiricist philosophers’ notion that the observed and the observer cannot really be separated, quite another to vivify it through visual art. But in The Nearly Endless Line, a new installation at Sue Scott Gallery, Pat Steir does just that, with both subtlety and force.

Why were so many artists, art bloggers, and critics glued to the television Wednesdays at 10 p.m. this summer watching Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, an often embarrassingly lame television show whose producers clearly had no idea what it means to make art, let alone recognize a great artist?

In the recent spate of articles about Bushwick’s innovative DIY arts projects and spaces, artists almost invariably cite Austin Thomas as a key early influence. Thomas opened Pocket Utopia—her groundbreaking salon, international residency program, and exhibition space in the neighborhood—in 2007, while the art market was still safely and unadventurously ensconced in the airtight studio/gallery bubble.

For years Louise Belcourt has divided her time between Williamsburg and a small Canadian town on the south side of the St. Lawrence river where she spent summers as a child. More than 12 years ago, she built a studio on a high cliff overlooking the river; the clear Canadian light, majestic water views, and looming, manicured hedges that surround her family’s nearby property have figured prominently in her work ever since.

In New Mirrors: Painting in a Transparent World, a group show at Exit Art, curator Herb Tam suggests that painters, confronting a digital onslaught in which shifting identities are continually updated and instantly distributed, are compelled to deconstruct the logistics of painting in a similar fashion.

Social Curiosities, work by the 2008-09 New York Academy of Art postgraduate fellowship recipients—Matthew Miller, Annie Wildey, and Phillip Thomas—gives me hope for what has become a dire situation for the art profession.

In 1931, during the early days of the Depression, before the Works Progress Administration was put in place, an outdoor art exhibition, modeled on those in Europe, was held in Washington Square to help struggling artists make a living. Not yet thinking in terms of their careers, but simply trying to pay the rent, artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Alice Neel are said to have been among the more than 200 artists who participated.

What a great idea. Artist Jonathan Schipper, with vital help from engineer Karl Biewald, manages to transform a car-crash into an observable work of art by slowing it way, way down.

In 1924, the middle of the age of the Charleston, wealthy businessman Gordon Strong asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a tourist destination for the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain in Maryland.

In stark counterpoint to the New Museum’s wryly titled Younger Than Jesus show featuring artists under 33 years old, Cheim & Read is exhibiting the Abstract Expressionist paintings of seventy-year-old Louise Fishman, an artist who has been dedicated exclusively to painting for over fifty years.

Immediately confronting visitors to The Mood Back Home, a thoughtful and evocative group exhibition organized by Suzy Spence and Leslie Brack at Momenta Art, is Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s 70s-vintage spring-mounted hobby horse, whose head has been covered with crudely applied wads of clay in tumor-like growths.

What’s so good about Facebook? Most art bloggers will tell you it’s a good way to connect with the people who read their blogs.

After suffering through eight years of dangerously misguided Bush administration policies, we all heaved a sigh of relief when Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States.

Ever since the Abstract Expressionists held forth at the Cedar Tavern in the 1950s, the unwritten rule has been that making art is a consuming obsession that leaves no time or space for worldly responsibilities like childrearing.

This month over 138 international publishers, booksellers, and antiquarian dealers will stock their bookshelves at Printed Matter’s annual fair for contemporary art books, art catalogs, artists’ books, art periodicals, and zines. In addition, the Art Library Society of New York is hosting a four-day conference to examine contemporary directions in artists’ books.

In a recent review of “How Soon Is Now?”—the 28th annual exhibition for the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists —Roberta Smith laments the failure of the current crop of artists to embrace skill-building courses like painting and drawing, replacing the direct, tactile connection to materials with theory and artspeak.

Up in Beacon, New York, during the early June heat wave, I stopped by Dia for some air conditioning and happened upon a two-gallery installation of 21 oddly-shaped 10-foot panels, each painted with a single, unmixed, straight out-of-the-tube color.

Renaissance artists were members of professional guilds, maintained studios known as workshops, and staffed them with assistants to help complete monumental commissions. But that was an era in which princes and popes extolled artists as the aesthetic lifeblood of the city-state and supported them accordingly. In modern times, artists haven’t been able to count on such public largess.

Tomma Abts’ paintings seem a natural, even predictable, choice for the inaugural painting exhibition at the putatively forward-looking New Museum. Despite her use of conventional media, Abts’ Turner Prize win in 2006 has paved the way for a hipper assessment of her work than most painting generates in a climate that favors improvisational, site-specific installation projects.

During the 20th century, while American artists did not generally take the country’s integrity for granted, they did tap the rich vein of its mythic virtue with a tacit understanding that it was not all illusory. In the mid-'50s, Jasper Johns adopted the American flag as the subject for a series of groundbreaking painterly meditations.

In my first college painting course, which I took several years after completing an art history degree, my teacher Arnold Trachtman said that my painting of the bathroom sink reminded him of Loren MacIver’s work.

To feed Two Coats of Paint, my daily blog about painting, I comb the Internet for art reviews and commentary from all over the world. It’s an enriching process but not very tactile: online, the artwork, galleries and museums remain distant and two-dimensional.

I spent Black Friday in the city with my nuclear family. I wanted to see the Richard Prince show at the Guggenheim, but my eight-year-old daughter Lena was not keen on the idea.

With the economy slowing down, hedge funds getting shaky, and investors seeking refuge, the art market seems certain to contract in a big way.