On July 16, I decided to go to an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, so I went online to get additional information. One particularly compelling detail emerged: the exhibition had closed July 15.

I missed it.

It’s a familiar feeling and extends way beyond museum exhibits. Last year and the year(s) before, there were the plays (Good People, with Estelle Parsons, among others), movies (Winter’s Bone) and concerts (Barbara Carroll, any night she performs and I’m not there). Yes, living in New York City means being right in the center of it all. Swell. But living here also means missing more than most Americans are ever even offered.

So many of us walk around with a list, sometimes in our minds and sometimes on our schedules, of things we hope to catch before they leave. I stopped my Time Out New York subscription after becoming too good at chronicling, at any given moment, what gallery opening was happening without me. Keeping track of club dates and Restaurant Weeks and music festivals, even when out of town, eventually made me wonder about my own mental health.

Other cities are different. There are places where you catch a touring Broadway show and a few fine other performances, throw in a night at the opera or symphony, see the occasional flick…and you’re done for the calendar year. The local performance center shutters in the summer. You’re keeping up—at least enough to feel equipped for dinner-party chatter.

Our town is different. Right now we’re heading into the dog days of August, right? But not really—not here. There’s that Monet garden recreation at the Bronx Botanical Gardens through Oct. 21. The Jewish Museum, at 92nd and Fifth Avenue, has an unusual exhibit on the artist Edouard Vuillard, one of my favorites. At least I think he’s one of my favorites, but that hypothesis needs to be tested—before time runs out on Sept. 23. Oh, the plays. Don’t I need to see Tribes, that interesting off-Broadway one in the Village? And what about that woman from England on Broadway, the one pretending to be Judy Garland?

There are ways to play this game successfully. The experts advise going right after the opening crowds leave the exhibit/play/whatever. Don’t wait. That’s easier said than done, though, especially when there are jobs to do and lives to live and money worries. Some people even choose buying groceries over theater tickets.

The most precious commodity remains time. It gets eaten up. At summer’s start, I wrote in my Google calendar an exact date for that trip to the Museum of the City of New York. The day came and I didn’t go.

So I never saw The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, which was a smart look at longterm planning in the city. At least that’s what the New York Times said on its front page. And what my mom said after she went and issued a report. Mom won this round.

Sometimes, though, I score. My pal Liz and I went two weeks ago to the Morgan Library, which leaves me a bit cold when I see the books locked up there like they’ve done something wrong. But the Winston Churchill exhibit, especially the audio of his fantastic speeches, made it all worthwhile. What an election-year treat, seeing a political leader who rallied people in common cause instead of talking down to them and dividing them up into special interests.

So much to see and do. That’s one of the things that drew me to the city. Then, amidst all the rushing from the reading at Barnes & Noble to the Film Forum retrospective, I realized the ultimate irony: My favorite thing to do here is simply to walk down a street.
There’s a lesson there. But I might miss it, hurrying to get to the next big thing.

Christopher Moore is a writer living in Manhattan. His email address is ccmnj@aol.com and he’s on Twitter @cmoorenyc.

UPPER EAST SIDE
Crossroads of the World
You don’t have to head south to the Carribean to the beach this summer, just take the subway up to the El Museo del Barrio. It, along with The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Queens Museum of Art, is presenting the culmination of the decade-long collaboration of research and scholarship Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, which includes more than 500 works of art spanning four centuries from the Caribbean islands and coasts. The exhibit covers topics such as politics, pop culture, language, the various cultures and history, among many others.
June 12 – Jan. 6, 2013, El Museo Del Barrio, 1230 5th Ave., elmuseo.org.

UPPER EAST SIDE
Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940
An artist searching for his muse is a theme that reverberates back to Greek mythology. French artist Edouard Vuillard found inspiration in his career stretching from the 1890s to the 1940s in a variety of sources, from experimental theater to urbane domesticity. This exhibit at The Jewish Museum looks at six periods of the artist’s career and the impact his friends and patrons had on his work, from his artistic beginnings to his later portraits.
Through Sept. 23, The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave., thejewishmuseum.org.

UPPER EAST SIDE
Women Work
With conservative politicians intent on rehashing decades-old debates that everyone thought were long settled, it’s fitting that the National Academy Museum & School has chosen now to kick off its new exhibit, Women Work, featuring the artwork of women from the 19th century to present day. The series brings together works by Mary Cassatt, Colleen Browning and May Stevens, as well as female sculptors.
Through Aug. 26, The National Academy Museum & School, 1083 5th Ave., nationalacademy.org.

UPPER EAST SIDE
Activist New York
New York City has always been a city that thrived in the midst of social change and progress. Activist New York, the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, brings that history into focus, exploring the history of social activism in the city from the 17th century right up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. From picket lines to civil rights, the exhibition uses artifacts, photographs, audio and video to tell the history of agitation in the city.
Through the summer, The Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave., mcny.org.

UPPER EAST SIDE
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
The Guggenheim hosts this mid-career retrospective of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra. The artist, best known for her striking portraits of humanity in transition—adolescents and new mothers have been prime subjects for her lens—has been working for more than two decades at her craft. Like all great portraitists, Dijkstra’s work captures fleeting moments and fills them with meaning. “I make normal things appear special,” she said in an interview for the book Image Makers, Image Takers. That this is not a brag but a statement of successfully fulfilled artistic intent says it all.
June 29 – Oct. 3, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave., www.guggenheim.org.

UPPER WEST SIDE
Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History
New York has a rich (albeit unheralded) history of brewing that stretches back to colonial times. The New-York Historical Society hopes to rectify this with its new exhibit. With artifacts and documents that showcase the city’s long-lived love of suds, Beer Here covers what the soldiers were drinking in the Revolutionary War, famous hometown brewers and the Prohibition era. When you are finished, step on over to the beer hall for a taste of New York City and state’s best local brews.
May 25 – Sept. 2, The New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park W., nyhistory.org.

MIDTOWN
Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper
What better way to spend your summer than hanging out in a library, especially if you’re going to see the Morgan Library & Museum’s Josef Albers exhibit. Albers, the iconic 20th-century artist who died in 1976, is best known for his painting series Homage to the Square, in which he explored color relationships in concentric squares. This exhibit displays the less well-known studies and sketches for these paintings. The materials in this exhibit were never shown during Albers’ life and are rarely displayed since his death; The Morgan is the only U.S. stop for this exhibition before it heads back to Europe.
July 20 – Oct. 14, The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., themorgan.org.

MIDTOWN
Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets
Filmmaking identical twins the Quay Brothers—or The Brothers Quay, in their preferred nomenclature—end the summer with a major retrospective of their work at the Museum of Modern Art. Born in Philly but developed as European surrealists in the grime of London, the Quays have been conjuring up their creepy-crawly, stop-motion animated work since the late ’70s. Featuring repurposed doll heads and other unsettling motifs of mold and decay, the Brothers’ oeuvre became a major aesthetic touchstone for the burgeoning industrial goth movement of the late ’80s and ’90s. This collection promises a rare view inside their work, with never-before-seen images, moving works, installations and artistic output, as well as screening of their best shorts and filmic output.
Aug. 12 – Jan. 8, 2013, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., www.moma.org.

DOWNTOWN
The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg
Bird is the word at the New Museum’s Studio 231 space as Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg, known for her nightmarish animations, and videographer Hans Berg show off five trippy animations and an unnerving menagerie of more than 80 free-standing bird sculptures. These hybrid, sometimes monstrous forms speak to the artist’s interest in physical and psychological transformation, as well as pageantry and perversion.
Through Aug. 26, The New Museum, 235 Bowery, newmuseum.org.

By Mario Naves

Long gone, I hope, are the days when the French painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was pooh-poohed as being insufficiently radical or, if you prefer, overly bourgeois—as if art steeped in domesticity and comfort somehow precluded pictorial innovation. If Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, doesn’t put that avant-gardist trope to bed, nothing will.

Actually, make that the first three galleries. In them, we encounter an artist of brooding intensity and startling economy. The standard telling of Intimism underlines how a select group of painters brought Impressionist facture out of the sunlight and into the dining room. Dubbing themselves the Nabis—from the Hebrew and Arabic, meaning “prophets”—these artists looked for inspiration in the color-laden symbolism of Paul Gauguin, the decorative flourishes of Art Nouveau and the flat spaces found in Japanese prints. The resulting imagery spoke (as the novelist André Gide had it) “in a low tone, suitable to confidences.”

Low, confidential and given to unnerving moments of introspection. New Yorkers familiar with MoMA’s “Interior: Mother and Sister of the Artist” (1893), a cornerstone of the permanent collection, know Vuillard wasn’t inspired by hearth and home so much as haunted by them. In the best paintings, familial complexity is distilled into images of daunting psychological nuance. (Not for nothing is Proust’s name bandied about when speaking of Vuillard’s art.) A blunt emphasis on pattern and architecture reinforces a signature strain of emotional pressurization. The curators insist on the theatricality of “Marie Opening the Window” (1893), a portrait of Vuillard’s sister, as if its cloistered drama were somehow diminished by it.

The organizing conceit of A Painter and His Muses is the role Jewish patronage played in the Parisian art world—a fascinating historical fillip and as good an excuse as any to mount a summer crowd-pleaser. But a truer title might be What’s Love Got to Do With It? It was, after all, about the time Vuillard began an extended relationship with his dealer’s wife that the art slackened, its gains in scale, vigor and sumptuousness being a lousy recompense for a marked loss in tone, pith and bite. Which is no reason to forego the astringent pleasures shunted toward the front end of this handsomely mounted, if lopsided, exhibition.

Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., until Sept. 23.