P.S. 1 boasts the most energized curatorial program in New York right now, as is exemplified by Biesenbach's "Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values," June 30-Sept. 30, 2002. Despite its unwieldy title, this focused exhibition of works by about 20 artists has a pronounced curatorial point of view. Like the Oscar-nominated Mexican dog-fighting film Amores Perros by director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, which was recently released in New York, the artworks here embrace a kind of esthetic of brutality that derives very clearly from economic deprivation.

Thus, the opening images for "Mexico City" are several large, gray aerial photographs of the city by Melanie Smith, showing a densely packed, ramshackle metropolis, apparently stretching for miles without cease. Brutality is a keynote, whether seen in Ivan Edeza's found-footage video that seems to show safari-costumed riflemen in helicopters hunting Indian tribesmen in the jungle, or in Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okon's 1994 videotape that supposedly documents the two young artists stealing 120 car stereos -- which sit in a stack in the gallery.

Other works demonstrate the economic extremes of the Mexican economy. Daniela Rossell's color photographs of wealthy Mexican women in their kitschly appointed homes illustrate the astonishing levels of vulgarity that excess capital can achieve. In a nearby gallery, a slideshow by Francis Alÿs called Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) shows a series of photos of vendors dragging their absurdly overburdened carts through Mexico City streets, a pathetic document of an unofficial economy of poverty.

The show also includes works by Santiago Sierra, the Mexico-based Spanish artist who participates in the exploitation of manual workers and illegal aliens in his art (in one case, paying unemployed Cuban teens to have their backs tattooed in a horizontal line). For two weeks at the beginning of July, down at Deitch Projects in SoHo, Sierra had temporary workers engaged in aimless hard labor, in this case holding up large wooden beams. "It's like life," said one of the laborers, when asked to comment on the job.

It's no accident that such an esthetic of brutality should emerge from Mexico, where a decade-long process of privatization has brought riches to some but poverty and unemployment to many more. This new Mexican art stands in distinct contrast to Arte Povera, whose embrace of humble materials like piles of rags and slabs of stone now seems entirely formal and almost effete, and to the antisocial efforts of the yBa movement, which is narcissistic and decadent in its affronts to English convention.

Up at Sotheby's, the usually rapid-fire progression of auctions has slowed a bit for the summer, and the house has turned its spacious 10th-floor galleries over to Robert Littman, who runs the Vergel Foundation, which is based in New York and Mexico City and is charged with administering the collection of the late Mexican art patrons Jacques and Natasha Gelman. Fees from the touring show of the Gelman's Mexican masterpieces, currently on view at El Museo del Barrio, extended through Sept. 8, 2002 -- in the "five figures," said Littman, noncommittally -- have enabled certain purchases of contemporary Mexican art, some 60 examples of which are now on show (though not on sale) at Sotheby's, July 8-30, 2002.

The selection is something of a grab bag, and suggests the behind-the-scenes market effect of the foundation's acquisitions. These range from works by more familiar New York gallery stars like Gabriel Orozco, who shows with Marian Goodman, and Miguel Calderón, who exhibits with Andrea Rosen. In any case, it's great to see Calderon's outrageous 1995-96 photos of model tourist landscapes set against the "landscape" of his testicles (the "Greetings from My Hairy Nuts" series) and darkly comic images of a wooly headed Neanderthal about to execute a zebra and other rare wildlife.

The show includes watercolors copied from photos in Artforum by Marco Arce (seen previously at Galeria Ramis Barquet) along with a distastefully large screen of hair cuttings made in 1993 by Silvia Gruner and ingenious, folkish carved wood reliefs of masks and faces from 1991 by Germán Venegas. Out in the entrance foyer are a couple of homoerotic works. A short video loop from 1995 by Thomas Glassford shows two men in a hesitant but passionate kiss -- or is it a single man with a mirror, teasing the viewer with a narcissistic exercise? Nearby are several large unframed color photos by Javier de la Garza that bring a blurry suggestiveness to a subject that is usually handled more aggressively.

Downtown at the Battery, the Museum of the American Indian has opened a touring show of some 300 works by 181 artists called "Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art from the Collection of Fomento Cultural Banamex," July 21, 2002-Mar. 15, 2003. From the evidence here, the collecting program of Mexico's largest bank has allowed dozens of Mexican artisans to make unusually large and elaborate showpieces. The result is a broad selection of crafts and folk artifacts that are professionally made and seem quite marketable, though sadly lacking in the kind of authenticity and charm that make more modest folk efforts so desirable. It's an odd outcome for what is certainly a progressive effort.

Some strangeness remains in the show, however. There are skeleton piñatas and decorated skulls of sugar, a Christ figure made of corncobs and a painted clay Aztec Nativity made in 1996 by Zenón Martínez García. Strangest of all, though is a group of clay figures of Frida Kahlo made in 1997 by the Oaxaca artist Guillermina Aguilar Alcántara. Its Frida, Frida all the time here.

Their subject matter is largely their own lives on the rock-star tour. Both present pictures of stadiums full of fervid fans, views out airplane windows and down vacant hotel hallways. Auf der Mar uses color, and often takes remote-control self-portraits of herself in performance. Her sensibility is fairly upbeat, as demonstrated by a grid of nine images of avid fans titled The Kids Are Alright, U.S.A.

Yemchuk, who makes black-and-white prints, has a slightly darker and more melodramatic sensibility. Thus, there are images of disturbed-looking rock stars -- Courtney Love, Billy Corrigan, Marilyn Manson -- and abject situations, like a shot of a girl's feet wearing only one shoe in a dirty outdoor toilet. In contrast, Yemchuk is also drawn to the rock picturesque, with pictures of a white horse in a field by the road and a brooding figure (that looks like the bald Corrigan) posing by a stormy sea.

All this material is drenched in fashion and glamour, and it's the dumb photo collector who doesn't whip out his checkbook and buy the whole lot.

Also on view is a large gallery featuring seven Minimalist, conceptualist works by the contemporary Greek artist George Hadjimichalis, organized by P.S. 1 director Alanna Heiss, and several studio rooms with installations by individual artists. One standout is a room by Sol Sax that includes a kind of "endless column" constructed out of the blue jeans, several shamanistic headdresses made of shredded jeans, and a videotape of the indefatigable artist acting out in the same costume.

This exhibition, organized by the High Museum in Atlanta and slated subsequently to appear in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, features late works that use the color yellow, which Delaney thought represented "light, healing and redemption." He made both allover abstractions and portraits. The latter are especially good, telling but folkish renderings of people like Baldwin, Marian Anderson and art historian Richard A. Long that seem saturated with a brilliant yellow-colored light.

Also on view uptown at The Project on West 126th Street is an installation by the notorious William Pope.L, a small room whose outer wall is painted red with a sentence in yellow in which the artist makes reference to both "my mother's penis" and his father's awakening covered with vomit and spilled beer. Inside, after entering through a tiny, Alice-in-Wonderland-sized door, are several stuffed animals covered with peanut butter and hung on the wall. Among so many artists today who are expected, one way or another, to make sense, Pope.L seems to be the exception who is allowed to exist "in his own world," and even relished as someone who does.

Down the road at Triple Candie is an installation of three video projections, called "Triple Theater," including Bruce Nauman's single-channel, 51-minute video from 1968, Flesh to White to Black to Flesh. Inordinately slow and even meditative by today's standards -- the artist may in fact have covered his shirtless torso first with white and then with black makeup, but during the 10 minutes your correspondent was on hand Nauman was shown sitting unremarkably in a chair -- the video is overwhelmingly of interest today due to its stature as an art-historical relic, to adopt a phase used by the San Francisco critic Mark van Proyen. Wasn't it great, back in those originary days of black-and-white process and body-art video?

Bargains galore are available at the retrospective of posters, postcards and other multiples by Postmodernist Feminist Conceptualist Jenny Holzer that opened on July 18 at Printed Matter. Postcards made of thin wood paneling and imprinted with red maxims, favorites like "money creates taste" and "private property created crime," are available for a mere $5. And yes, they can be sent through the mail, for 60 cents postage.

No report as yet on David LaChapelle's show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo, called "All American" and opening July 16-Sept. 21, 2002. LaChapelle's fans swamped the opening, and our reporters were too inhibited to find their way inside. A view through the window, however, indicates that the flamboyantly Baroque fashion photographer has taken his prints up a notch, printing them at large scale.

As Anderson noted, the collecting imperatives of the museum have changed over the years, with most of the 19th-century material originating in rural New England, while more recent acquisitions have focused on Outsider Art, much of it from the South. An entire wall in the new installation is given over to works from the mid-20th-century by African American folk artists.

The boutique spaces of the new museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, have come in for a certain amount of negative criticism. In fact, the museum's use of its stairwells and central atrium for displays of duck decoys, fishing lures and an impressive collection of weather vanes is a nice, almost suburban touch.

The Museum of Modern Art, by the way, will probably earn $20 million or so from fees for lending its collection while it builds a new museum facility, as alleged by Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens in the New York Times recently -- a Berlin newspaper recently reported that the Neue Nationalgalerie there is paying $8 million for a MOMA masterworks show next year. The show is also going to Houston, and it's probably not a coincidence that the two venues are both in well-heeled cities.