They are a species of cool-hunting, of celebrity obsession. The Radio City extravaganza was an extremely commercial, big-ticket enterprise. It was artistry, and extremely worthwhile. But it was also a concert at Radio City Music Hall, home of the Rockettes. Klaus Biesenbach has made his name as an exceptionally gifted cultural truffle hound—he’s not so much a journalistic beat, on the Moby model, as an institutional network unto himself.

For the moment, Damien Hirst still has to make things and we still have to look at them. The byproduct of his activities is the most starkly authoritarian corpus of art of recent times. All those hard, glittering surfaces, those rotting animals.

How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic.

To say that Lucian Freud liked clothes is a slightly odd contention to make about a portrait painter who once said “When I paint clothes I am really painting naked people who are covered in clothes.” But take a look at either of the two Freud exhibitions in London right now, and it becomes clear that while he eschewed clothes on some of his subjects and often in his own self-portraits, Freud had a fashion designer’s eye for detail and a deep appreciation for both his own clothes and those his subjects wore.

This is a timely exhibition. At a moment when too much art is dependent for its effect on lengthy explanations offered by wordy museum labels or nattering art dealers, Cindy Sherman has pursued an adamantly visual art that allows for — coerces, really — rich, free rumination on the viewer’s part.

Who knew Hello Kitty had so many interpreters?

Most political engagements with Hello Kitty have taken the mouthlessness issue as their impetus. They generally, through subversion or perversion, ironize Hello Kitty’s apparent inability to speak, suggesting her lack of expression is being upheld as a model, particularly for the young Asian girls who form Hello Kitty’s immediate target audience. A woman’s value, this particular feminine feline’s lack of mouth seems to say, is contingent on her voicelessness.

On Annie Leibovitz’s ‘Pilgrimage,’ now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This is about celebrating the goodness of people, the beauty of things and stoking an insatiable desire to have and hold the sacred relics of history. Again, Susan Sontag is the best critic: “Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world.”

This is no history lesson. This is an essay in consumption, the same restless appetite to feel close to famous people stoked by glossy images in glossy magazines.

No pictures by Edward Burne-Jones epitomized these tendencies more perfectly than the four canvases that make up the Briar Rose series. As originally conceived the series formed a single unified composition divided into four parts, with Prince Charming opening the story at the left, and ending with the sleeping figure of Princess Aurora at the right. In between we move from the enchanted wood littered with the entwined bodies of sleeping knights, through the Council Chamber where wise men slumber, and past handmaidens dreaming by the courtyard fountain until we reach the sleeping princess on her embroidered palanquin.

In this slow-motion world, time stands still. The action has either taken place in the past or will take place in the future. The prince appears to have neither the will nor the desire to bestow the kiss that will wake the princess. He is frozen with indecision as though asking himself whether a state of eternal dreaming is not preferable to the reality of waking to life.

Zoe Strauss’s subjects expose a black eye, a shark bite, a gunshot wound, an infected belly-button piercing, stitches from a hysterectomy, and a succession of tattoos (some in very intimate places). The marked and damaged surfaces of these bodies come to seem inseparable from the graffitied walls, scratched windows and stained pavement in Ms. Strauss’s many shots of architecture.

What it’s really like at Art Basel Miami Beach: rotting bananas, Dov Charney sitings, inscrutable photography policies.