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.

Graphite on Paper, the two-person show at James Kelly Contemporary, delivers on its promise, though the ratio of paper-to-graphite is strikingly disproportionate. The artists, Susan York and Wes Mills, each employ a restrained approach to mark making, but the similarities end there.

Mapping a Green Future presents issues that are universal—such as carbon emissions, pollution and depletion of resources—but it does a good job of examining them in a way that feels specific to the viewer, either by assessing the impact at the local level or by narrowing the focus of the data to the individual level.

How is it some people, operating under much more oppressive regimes than, say, an ad agency, can transcend mediocrity to design something original and beautiful?The Polish Poster: Paradox, Metaphor and Symbolism doesn’t answer this question. It simply demonstrates that good design can last well beyond its intended commercial purpose.

There are two kinds of landscapes to photograph: the ones we’ve messed up by living all over them, and the ones we’re destroying in absentia. Manmade: Notions of Landscape from the Lannan Collection focuses primarily on the former, while Selections from True: Photographs by Thomas Joshua Cooper presents the latter, with images from the Earth’s shrinking poles.

Of all art media, video is probably the most difficult with which to engage viewers. This seems preposterous when one considers the amount of time we spend in front of screens, but maybe that’s the problem. Video art is composed in the language of entertainment, yet so little of it is entertaining.

The photographs in New Mexico and New York: Photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are hardly transcendent. Except for a few formal portraits and some on-location shots that serve as illustrations of the landscapes she painted, the work is closer to a family photo album than an art exhibition.

UN's premise is audacious and funny, but curator David Solomon’s approach to unrepresented artists also is a missed opportunity. It is a gesture steeped in benevolence, but the subtext of inferiority (or is it superiority?) to the local market interferes with an otherwise strong assembly of work.