Get ready to have your eyes rewired. For all the artist's ups and downs, the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is one of the greatest exhibitions of a 20th-century artist to be seen in a New York museum. This show comes at a time when contemporary art stresses language, representation, and social engagement, and younger artists often view Pollock's work as dated, drained, or irrelevant. It's good that he's no longer "our hero," but now he's only "Oh, him. . . . " Compounding the problem is a generation of second-tier abstractionists who use Pollock and his ilk to justify their vapid formalist paintings. Still, the Modern's show— the first U.S. retrospective of Pollock's work since MOMA's own 1967 exhibition— reminds you what art, and painting in particular, can do in purely formal terms, and how extraordinary... More >>>