But actually seeing the works was a surprise. What Hilton Kramer once begrudgingly called an "esthetic of dread" has developed into something more sensuous and playful. Though still shrines to a lost Rust Belt physicality, the new works are heavy steel made all feminine, rust-splashed and striped, pretty as a lyrical abstraction. Wake, a group of five undulating 14-foot-tall steel walls, is as curvy as Stephanie Seymour. Serra's having an "Ellsworth Kelly moment," said one wag, pointing up the work's elegance rather than its industrial brute force.

Of the four sculptures, the exhibition's tour-de-force arguably is Blindspot (2002-03), a massive almond-shaped spiral that folds back on itself six times. Its asymmetrical spaces are as disorienting as a funhouse, like the roadside tourist-trap "vortexes" where the laws of physics are suspended, X-Files style. Vice-Versa (2003), a mirror-image pair of parabola-shaped steel plates that are more than 15 feet tall and 38 feet long, is Serra's version of Picasso's guitar or Man Ray's Ingres Violin. The fourth sculpture, Catwalk, is a two-inch-thick slab of steel measuring 16 x 19 feet that sits flat on the floor, or rather, a bit off the floor on a pair of long concrete shims.

Who owns these fantastic things? Barnes & Noble honcho (and Dia board chief) Leonard Riggio has one on his lawn in the Hamptons; other collectors include San Francisco art patron Steven Oliver and Sonoma County collectors John and Frances Bowes, insiders say.

Nearby, in Paula Cooper's airy, arched space on West 21st, is another big piece of steel, Mark di Suvero's XV (1971), a teepee-shaped structure of four 20-foot-long steel beams that has been on view at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis since 1976.

In the center of the gallery space is a huge model of the Kabba, supposedly made of 1,000,000 Legos. Also on hand are five life-size white fiberglass donkeys, five large white plastic camel toe bones (copied from a petrified camel toe purchased on eBay), a heap of camel saddle foot stools (also purchased on eBay), five polished aluminum "Mecca vulvas," assorted structures made of glue, Ivory Snow boxes and pellets that the artist calls PeaRoeFoam, and a lot more junk.

And if that's not frat-boy enough for you, the show includes as well 550 "vagina euphemisms" in neon -- missile silo, koo koo, sausage wallet, panty hamster, hairy clam, jizz receptacle, fish pie (that's seven). "It's not emancipatory," complained one critic, but if you ask me, who couldn't like all those synonyms for pussy, especially when marshaled to make fun of our enemies the Arabs. Rhoades may be the most pro-American artist out there. The neon vagina euphemisms -- in groups of two or three, mounted on colored plastic panels and with their own transformers -- can be had for $4,000. Buy one and buy American.

Uptown, at Michael Werner's classically proportioned townhouse gallery on West 77th Street (the former quarters of Leo Castelli) is an impressive assembly of works by the revolutionary post-war Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-63) -- nine Achromes dating from 1958-61 and a long line on a scroll that is sealed in a cardboard tube. The Achromes are various: two pieces of white felt with a stitched horizon line; two pieces of yellowing fuzzy velour in a similar configuration; a grid of square, fluffy cotton pads; canvas creased into rows and set with a coat of kaolin clay.

Minimalist art easily flattens out in our high-key culture, but here you can easily imagine that Manzoni's existential tabula rasas act like energy sumps, draining the life out of the room. The art market loves them -- Sotheby's London has two in its Oct. 20 sale of Italian art, estimated at 350,000-450,000 and 590,000-760,000.

And a few blocks away on East 79th Street, C&M Arts has assembled a lovely show combining some Roman and Greek marbles with an impressive group of works from Pablo Picasso's "classical" period in the 1920s (including the major Three Women at the Spring from 1921 on loan from the Museum of Modern Art). In addition to the gallery's hushed otherworldliness -- these are, after all, the remote upper precincts of the art world -- Picasso's uncanny ability as a draftsman and a painter is breathtaking. There's an illustrated catalogue with an essay by John Richardson. The exhibition remains on view till Dec. 6, 2003.

Robert Miller Gallery also temporarily takes over Annina Nosei Gallery at 530 West 22nd Street to present Horizon Home Sweet Home, a 23 ft. by 23 ft. room installation of color panels and mylar with a dry ice fog machine that was originally exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1970. That exhibition is up Oct. 23-Nov. 21, 2003 (get-well wishes to Annina Nosei, who is recovering from back surgery). Last but certainly not least, the new Jacobson Howard Gallery -- a partnership between former Andre Emmerich Gallery director Loretta Howard and London dealer Bernard Jacobson, who is Rosenquist's dealer -- opens at 19 East 76th Street on Oct. 22 with "James Rosenquist: Collages." The exhibition features almost 30 works dating from the early 1960s, including a study for Marilyn (1962) and the humorous and personal Collage for White Bread for Ellsworth (1964).

In the backroom at Elizabeth Dee Gallery on West 20th, a new work by Kevin Landers -- a flock of pigeons made entirely of gaffer's tape. How much is it? Dee was asked. "I don't know," she said. . . . New paintings by Chris Ballantyne at DCKT at Charles Cowles featuring suburban scenes done in flat fields of color -- the show is titled "Dream of New Jersey" -- has caught the interest of collectors, with eight smaller works on paper already sold at $1,000 each. . . . At Achim Moeller on East 73rd Street, a show of romantic, beautiful black-and-white photogravures of tempests, libraries, tree dwellings, zeppelins and such by the young (b. 1961) German artist Lothar Osterberg, who now lives in New York. The pictures are actually made from elaborate models the artist constructs. The exhibition closed on Oct. 11, 2003.

Painter Kevin Zucker's towering Edward Gorey-esque interiors at Mary Boone in Chelsea marked sold, ranging in price from $5,000 to $27,000. Greg Bogin's Pop Minimalist paintings at Boone's Fifth Avenue redoubt also marked sold or on reserve, at $6,000-$15,000. . . . See Kim Keever's evocative and mysterious little cave diorama at Cornell DeWitt Gallery, apparently a window to a prehistoric dimension. It can be yours for $8,000. . . . Tennis ace and art dealer John McEnroe consigns a 1984 embroidered map by Alighiero Boetti to Christie's "Italian Sale" in London on Oct. 21. The presale estimate: $240,000-$320,000.

Esthetic atmosphere changing at huge Starret Lehigh building over at 501 West 26th Street with new tenants -- the "investigations unit" of the Homeland Security Bureau on floors seven and eight.