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There are so many ways to talk about the cultural differences between the performance and visual art worlds (and curators seem at pains to do so, emphasizing which ''context'' an artist should be seen in, so we poor huddled masses might better direct our gazes). Comparing and contrasting the consumer mores of each world is one of the more enjoyable methods for framing the conversation. Which group tends to be titillated by nudity and which bored, for example, or which will spend lots of time to see something but not lots of money, and vice versa? When the French choreographer Marie Cool cycled through ''Untitled (Prayers) 1996-2007,'' her collaboration with the artist Fabio Balducci during Performa 07, the sizable crowd at the Clocktower Gallery hustled for the best viewing positions, getting as close to the action as possible. Audience members only gradually siphoned off as the repetitive, reductive evening wore on. (The diminutive Ms. Cool does not so much perform as mechanically enact whimsical little tasks: sliding pieces of paper together into peaks on a tabletop or deftly pushing white string into fluid patterns.) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jasper Johns is a famously reticent artist. So it may strike some visitors to the Museum of Modern Art as comical when they read his words quoted in a wall label next to his 1985 painting ''Summer'': ''In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.'' Funny that Mr. Johns would view his later work, which is not much less enigmatic than his early work, as unreserved. The quotation appears in ''Focus: Jasper Johns,'' an exhibition of 87 paintings, drawings and prints from the permanent collection organized by Deborah Wye, the museum's chief curator of prints and illustrated books. The show focuses on a handful of motifs that Mr. Johns has recycled over the years, including the target, the numbers, the flag, the can of brushes and the so-called crosshatchings. Ranging in time from his first painting of the American flag in 1954-55 to a recently acquired series of works on paper from 2001, it would make an excellent introduction for anyone just getting to know Mr. Johns's work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TAIYO ONORATO/NICO KREBS: 'THE WHOLE SHEBANG' Marcel Broodthaers's ''Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles,'' that textbook example of postmodernism, seems to have inspired this installation by a pair of Swiss artists better known for their photography. But where Mr. Broodthaers created a fictitious museum department from a single, powerful symbol, Mr. Onorato and Mr. Krebs offer a series of oddities and one-liners. Thirty-two crudely fashioned, quasi-representational assemblages are displayed on pedestals throughout the black-walled gallery. Included are a brown paper teepee covered with peace signs, a laptop computer made of Styrofoam and painted silver, an urn oozing a Play-Doh-like substance and a small figure urinating on a cracked mirror. Birds appear to be a theme, perhaps in deference to Mr. Broodthaers: one is roasted on a spit, and another is covered with white droppings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]