The party that really has something to answer for is the New Museum. Inaugurated as an upstart venture with aims to realign the art world’s chi (or at least disintegrate a bit of its ossified power), 30 years later, it is following the standard template: anointing white, male, European artists in an attempt to build a reciprocally beneficial art history. And, more importantly, doing the reciprocity thing with benefactors like Dakis Joannou, a major Fischer collector and museum trustee who is also showing his collection at the New Museum (curated by Koons, to close the circle) next February.

The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.

She said the United States should be a “democracy of superiors only,” with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It’s useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.

Ayn Rand is one of America’s great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that “the masses”—her readers—were “lice” and “parasites” who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave.

The contractors who built the New Museum’s two-year-old, $50 million facility on Manhattan’s Lower East Side returned this week. Their task: lower the second floor gallery’s ceiling by 2 feet. The change order came from artist Urs Fischer, whose upcoming exhibition requires the museum to upend everything from its lighting to its architectural plans. Last-minute changes and delays have meant shipping thousands of pounds of metal sculptures by airplane instead of by boat, at the museum’s expense, says the show’s curator Massimiliano Gioni.