The new show at Verve Gallery of Photography is billed as a “three-person exhibition of documentary photography.” By my count, there are three persons and there is photography. I must be missing the documentary part.

The Susan Rothenberg retrospective, Moving in Place, meets the criterion for museum show titles: It is vague and paradoxical in a way that hints at profundity. But it does a pretty good job of locking in on an essential component of the artist's work—namely, the depiction of motion in a still medium.

Intellectually, it is hard to disagree with some of the claims the  Nicolas Gadboist makes in his exhibition of apocalyptic Americana—namely, that we suck and we are making a lot of mistakes—but, as is often the case with dystopian work, Gadbois also vilifies some things that are fairly benign

222 Shelby, the smallish house, converted to a three-room gallery, is handsome, right down to the rug that sits at the foot of the desk. But don’t be fooled by the cozy atmosphere—Tom Tavelli, the gallery director, is every bit as intellectual as a museum curator and, if you’re not careful, you could end up in a lengthy debate with him.

At first glance, I believed Sharon Core’s works to be slick oil paintings, specifically an homage to the 17th-century Flemish still life. There are ripened fruits and fanciful ceramics arranged carefully on neutral surfaces, all rendered with painstaking detail.

Since becoming SFR's art critic I’ve seen almost 150 shows, drank 4,000 plastic cups of chardonnay and written 20 reviews covering 23 different venues. In the fading sunlight of the calendar year, I began flipping through my official Critic’s Notebook (99 cents, Walgreens) to reflect on these past five months.

Christmas is a weird time to go to art galleries. On the one hand, there are spaces that continue with regularly scheduled programs and risk seeming indifferent to Santa’s birthday. And then there are the galleries that attempt to capitalize on the spirit of the season and the extra foot traffic by hosting a holiday-themed show—ugh. There is already a year-round, holiday-themed exhibition. It’s called the mall.

Usually I am suspicious of plein air painters. Setting up an easel to work in public feels like an activity of the attention-starved, like bringing a book to a party. Besides, the art it yields tends to be less of the gallery caliber and more in the realm of the craft fair hobbyist.

Mountains and oceans are favorite subjects in the arts. As far as I can tell, this is solely because they are really, really big. Unless you are an astronaut, mountains and oceans are the largest things on which you will ever lay eyes. So I found it strange that Bernd Haussmann’s paintings of mountains and oceans are not only small, but also devoid of discernible labor.

Double Entendre, Fay Ku’s exhibition at Eight Modern, is a crowd-pleaser. Or maybe just a crowd-teaser. Or maybe I’m a pervert. Whichever it is, I was left wanting more, both for the beauty of the art and, at only six drawings, the brevity of the show.