During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I had a chance to see Ai Weiwei: According to What?, an exhibit of the Chinese artist’s work that’s running at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, DC, until February 24. In recent years, Ai’s work as a critically important political provocateur has made him even more famous than his art. But the show’s a really stunning reminder of how indivisible his vision as an artist is from his vision for China as a more humane, democratic society.

While the show is framed, to a certain extent, by a huge collection of Ai’s photography from his time in the United States, including portraits of Allenn Ginsberg, images of AIDS patients during some of the worst years of the epidemic, snapshots of Bill Clinton in Harlem, and personal photographs that offer up a vision of New York that’s radically different, and much more Chinese, than the one that dominates popular culture, the best individual pieces in the show address China, not the United States. On a macro level, the theme of According to What? is the irreducible individuality of the parts that make up a whole. In a solid block girded by metal pipes, it’s impossible not to see the beauty of the individual pieces that have been fit together to compose it:

In a sea of ceramic crabs, which represent a feast to which Ai invited his followers, I was struck by the expression of one of them:

The pieces are a rebuke both to Party attempts to tamp down the individuality of its citizens, and to the tendency outside of China to see the nation as a monolith.

That same principal is at work in one of the largest pieces in the installation, and one that expresses a more recent theme in Ai’s work. An arrangement of rebar that Weiwei’s studio obtained from the remains of schools that collapsed—allegedly because of shoddy construction practices—during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed 68,000 people is overwhelming in the aggregate, but particularly beautiful when you get up close to the individual pieces of steel:

And he inverts that idea in an enormous snake, sewn together from matching backpacks representing the thousands of children who died in those schools. Individually, they represent their families’ private griefs. But together, their deaths anchor a collective and public outrage, an entity with coils and fangs—all that remains is the question of whether they’ll be used:

It’s a tremendous show, and a sharp rebuke not just to the Chinese government and to anyone who dismisses Ai as a simple political activist, but to the idea that art and politics somehow occupy separate spheres. Art doesn’t lose any of its dignity when it’s applied to protest. And politics is not somehow exempt from the powerful examination that comes from the outside perspectives of artists.

I was a vocal defender of the idea behind Smithsonian’s The Art of Video Games exhibit when the dates for it were announced last spring, and I continue to think that an excellent, comprehensive exhibit of video game art is a good idea. But despite some intelligent framing and good curation ideas, The Art of Video Games feels too defensive to be that show.

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Art of Video Games is how much space it feels compelled to devote to testimonials insisting that video games are, in fact, art and worthy of an exhibit of this magnitude. Judging by the massive crowds at the show, that might have been a necessary case to make to donors and curators, but audiences didn’t need to be convinced. One of the joys of attending the show was seeing how excited visitors were to it to see the popular art that’s been important in their lives treated as if it’s worthy of professional assessment and attention. And curating the show more confidently without stopping to justify it would have both eliminated waste space and given little ground to those who doubt the need for The Art of Video Games at all.

Waste space is a problem: the exhibit feels alternately stuffed and and under-full. It’s a three-room show, which doesn’t seem like very much space for an exhibit that’s meant to be comprehensive. The first has concept art, packaging for old games, video interviews with game creators, and a multi-media explanation of the evolution of graphics. But the show’s almost entirely uncaptioned, so it’s hard to tell why these artifacts and not others made it into the show, or what stages of game development they’re meant to represent. The second room has consoles set up that let visitors play classic games on large-scale screens. But once again, they’re captioned with basic summaries of the game rather than any framing that would provide clear context for their inclusion or the advances they represent, and it means that the middle of the exhibit is slowed down by lines of people waiting for their shot at a controller.

The final room is the most interesting, but it still illustrates the show’s weaknesses. The display takes viewers through key games for each major console, with walkthroughs of gameplay to illustrate what console improvements let designers do with everything from character design, to cut scenes, to incentives. It’s a fascinating way to present information, but it also means that viewers are fighting for space at the relatively small screens where the walkthroughs are projected. The audio for each walkthrough’s piped through a single phone at each screen, which means that, even though the narration is captioned on the screen, people end up close to the screen, blocking them. There’s basically no way for any attendee to access all the information in the exhibit.

It’s too bad, because—though I’ll leave it to experts like Harold Goldberg to critique what the voting system that got games into the exhibit included and what it ended up leaving out—there’s a lot of terrific information in the show, whether you’re a long-time gamer or an interested novice. I hadn’t known, for example, that Metal Gear Solid can be played all the way through without killing an enemy. And while it’s not very interesting to hear generic defenses of video games as art, listening to creator Jenova Chen talk about the games he’s designed, like Flow and Flower, which absorb viewers in the natural world, provides a fascinating look at how gaming might answer the demands of a new generation of gamers and a the creative aspirations of a new generation of game designers and developers. It would also have been fascinating—and a good defense of the idea that games are a minor commercial product rather than art—to see games in the context of other media. I really enjoyed seeing the similarities between how Rez, Hackers, and The Matrix visualized the internet in its early days.

But fan enthusiasm and justifying an exhibit don’t a coherent narrative make. There are stories to be told about the development of video games in the past, and where they’re going in the future. And there are stories to be told about the artists, who appear here only in testimonials, rather than accompanied by relevant biographical representation (the show is careful to represent both female gamers and game producers, but it doesn’t discuss institutional sexism in the industry much, or how it affects its output). We’re getting terrific fiction out of the role that video games play in our lives and our economy, like Ready Player One and Reamde. Maybe, if we can finally get a Bioshock, Halo, or Mass Effect movie adaptation off the ground, we’ll have movies to match. And The Art of Video Games won’t be the only museum exhibit we’ll get about this art, this industry. Hopefully, this will lay a foundation for a show that has confidence in itself, and a story to tell about these gorgeous alternate universes.

Regular-schedule blogging commences tomorrow. But while I was making personal resolutions, I thought of a couple of cultural ones I want to take care of, too.

1. Get over my anxiety about getting stuck on levels and finish playing Portal.

2. Film school: lots of Kurosawa. Lots of Truffaut.

3. Catch up on or finish: Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Cheers, The X-Files, Enlightened, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Misfits.

4. See John Lithgow in The Columnist and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman,” “Chinese Art in the Age of Revolution” and “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Strange Interlude” at the Shakespeare Theater Company, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ and “Zarina” at the Hammer Museum.

5. Read: a lot of Judge Dredd. Barchester Towers. Play It As It Lays. Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi. Manning Marable on Malcolm X. Swamplandia.

What’s everyone else working on?

It’s really impossible to say enough good things about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s revitalized and reopened Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, an astonishingly rich journey through the centuries and a cornucopia of artistic influences and achievements. I spent three hours at the exhibit, a meandering walk around a central courtyard, full of screens and deep chairs that let you better examine gorgeous manuscripts, before Thanksgiving. And I came away from it with a powerful sense not just that I’d seen something beautiful, but that the exhibit provides a striking sense of the long arc of history.

The galleries are a reminder that constraints can be a help, rather than a hindrance, in the production of astonishing art. It’s unfortunate that so much of the contemporary discussion around Islam and art ends up involving things like prohibitions on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad (a trend that some Muslims have exacerbated by reacting to free speech with violence), rather than the alternative ways Muslim artists have found to depict the divine. One of the things that struck me most strongly was the way that artists, in forms ranging from pottery, to weaving, to stone-carving, to competitions to create enormous, tiny, and innovative versions of the Koran, bring language to life. This isn’t just a matter of illuminating manuscripts. The language itself is alive, and stunning. In some pieces, the words literally grow into plant life on the page. In others, they spin off into geometry, languidly circling the rim of a bowl or packed tight into woven patterns. The signature of Suleyman the Magnificent isn’t just some colonial-style assertion of will through flourishes and scale: it’s gilded with the weight of his authority. Taken together, the galleries are a stunning testament to the sense that language carries divine power with it.

The show also provides an astonishing sense of scale — and of impermanence. It’s exciting to see the Chinese influence on Syrian Islamic figurative art, and to get a sense that the world was a more connected place than we imagine it to be in a book of constellations with deities who look more Chinese than Persian or Turkish. Similarly, there are beautiful pieces by Iraqi potters who were mashing up Chinese stoneware traditions and Islamic calligraphy. But as big, and as far-reaching as the Muslim-ruled world was, it didn’t last as a coherent whole: the juxtapositions of influences and assimilated styles are striking precisely because they seem out of such a distant past. The show includes a style of carpet known as Bellini Carpets not because that’s the name of the artist who made them, but because the Venetian painter Giovani Bellini painted his 16th-century Madonnas standing on carpets with their distinctive keyholes: Christianity takes Islam’s place on the world stage even in art history.

But it’s a useful reminder not to assume that any dominant power will persevere. Madonnas striding across Persian carpets may seem like a revelation in a couple of centuries, rather than the norm. As they present old art in a fresh and exciting new way, the revitalized galleries accomplish a rare trifecta, giving us a sense of and context for “what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Over the long weekend, I went to see both of the Andy Warhol shows that are being staged in Washington right now, “Warhol: Headlines” at the National Gallery of Art and “Shadows” at the Hirshhorn. Taken together (and it’s easy to do, the museums are within a few minutes walk of each other), the shows expanded my sense of Warhol as an artist — and my sense of the age.

One of the things that struck me most about “Warhol: Headlines” was the extent to which our concerns repeat across the years. In a copy of the National Enquirer, then labeling itself the “liveliest paper in the world,” a headline declares that “Connie Francis Tells Why… Hollywood Took One Look At Me and Said ‘ Too Fat.’” In an episode of a television show Warhol produced, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter interviews him about a recent trip to Afghanistan. He calls it the forgotten war, whips out Kipling. The conflicts never change, from Madonna’s nude pictures, to royal weddings and reproduction, to celebrity gossip, to the latest fulminations of the latest president. Sometimes, the extraordinary happens, and Warhol rises to the occasion, as when he intercuts reports of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder, with prints of the late president.

But in “Shadows,” Warhol’s far and away from his pop obsessions, repeating a shadow on the wall of his office over and over again, in neon series that look like the eighties, in grays that look like the edge of the New England woods at sunset, in demonic reds, in one particularly memorable image, in green and black swirls that felt like a malachite cave. I could have stared at it for hours. So much of Warhol’s work is about surfaces that it’s easy to forget about the depths he’s capable of creating — and everything those surfaces conceal.

I went to the opening of 30 Americans last night, a new exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art designed to spotlight the most important African-American artists from the last 30 years. The show’s somewhat inconsistent — the Basquiats, for example, aren’t particularly compelling representations of his work — but there are some wonderful, provocative pieces in it. And it’s refreshing to see all of the characters’ reference points and artistic frames in conversation with each other.

My three favorite pieces felt like a fascinating combination of the past, present, and future. Lorna Simpson’s display of gorgeous prints of hairpieces on felt next to phrases like “first impressions count” is simultaneously witty and cutting about the sense that African-American women have to radically transform their hair or hide it altogether. iona rozeal brown’s gorgeous, detailed images combine traditional Japanese portraits with darkened skin, corn rows, and extravagantly painted fingernails to play with how signifiers of black culture have been adopted in Japan. And Wangechi Mutu’s anemone-like collages incorporate eyes, lips, motorcycle wheels, and beads and glitter to suggest something post-human but still engaged with race.

And I’m always happy to see Kehinde Wiley in a show, and I’m glad to see him back in Washington after the hip-hop portraiture show he was a part of at the Smithsonian American Art museum. I could look at his lush, giant “Sleep,” for ages. I just wish the Corcoran had hung it on one wall and Mickalene Thomas’s “Baby I Am Ready Now” alone on the opposite one so the two would be in direct and clear juxtaposition, a man asleep and a woman waiting. It’s a good example of why even if the show isn’t perfectly staged, it’s very much worth seeing.