New Yorkers could be forgiven this month for confusing their museum itineraries with the schedule of a vintage film festival, or an Anna May Wong-inspired Netflix binge. Two exhibitions, China: Through the Looking Glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men at the Museum of the Museum of the Moving Image each make manifest (if not exactly “real”) cultural phenomena that are likely to be more familiar to visitors from something they’ve seen on TV or in the movies than from something they’ve encountered in a museum or a gallery.

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Of his extensive collection of ceramics, Oscar Wilde once remarked: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” What Wilde felt he was increasingly failing to “live up to” was probably the sort of bourgeois respectability that is often symbolized by a set of good porcelain — something, he was surely aware, to which even a spectacularly talented gay man in Victorian Britain could never hope to aspire. It is a sign that Wilde was onto something that most people only deploy “the good china” a few times a year, on major holidays; the rest of the time, we keep it neatly tucked away so that it won’t get broken.

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An elegant black envelope arrived in my mailbox last week. Inside is a square, burgundy-colored folder containing a catalogue of 1950 and ’60s snapshots. On the cover, an off-white, hand-lettered logo reads “Casa Susanna.” The photographs reproduced inside appear at first glance to portray a group of women at leisure: posing in the kitchen, dressed smartly for dinner, sporting fashionable bathing suits, sitting in a field of wildflowers. They are to be sold as a single lot by Wright auction house on October 30.

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NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial is the closest thing you’ll find to a crowd-sourced exhibition on view in New York right now — perhaps anywhere. Conceived during his first weeks on the job last fall by the Museum of Arts and Design’s (MAD) new director, Glenn Adamson, the show was organized at lightning speed, by museum standards: eight months. A brain trust of 300 leaders from New York’s cultural community nominated a pool of artists, designers, and fabricators of various sorts, which was then winnowed to about 100 participants by a jury that included Adamson, the exhibition’s curator, Jake Yuzna, and MAD Chief Curator Lowery Stokes Sims.

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There are two public works on view in the Northeast right now by the Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse. One, in Philadelphia, zips past as you ride a moving train; the other, in Brooklyn, inspires you to stand still and look closely. Both works introduce unexpected bursts of saturated color into ordinary, even dreary urban settings.

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The first thing you see when you enter Collective design fair at the Moynihan Station Skylight space is a mini-exhibition of work by Hella Jongerius, organized by Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell of design think tank Moss Bureau. The presentation includes a group of stuffed “Quilted Vases” (2006) by the Berlin-based Dutch designer. These rather cozy versions of Jongerius’s famed “Red White Vase” from 1997 tell you that this is not a deadly serious presentation for expert eyes only. The pair of well-behaved live chickens at the center of Dienst + Dotter’s booth confirms this hunch.

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On the afternoon that I visited the 2014 Whitney Biennial, I caught sight of a high school group being led through the exhibition by an engaging young arts educator. I slowed down as our paths converged on three large ceramic sculptures by the Los Angeles–based artist Sterling Ruby. Each one is roughly the size of a major appliance, hand-built, and covered with bold, exaggerated finger marks. Every square inch is uneven, almost obsessively so. The color palette of the glazes ranges from brilliant copper red to soft black and army green.

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