Jean-Michel Basquiat, precocious and self-destructive painter, street artist, and musician, was fated to have a brief but momentous life.

Annie Leibovitz photographs the Reverend Al Sharpton at Prima Donna Beauty Care Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Is a lamp still a lamp if it’s made of bubbles?

Octogenarian feminist painter Joan Semmel combats sexism.

Nir Hod has always been fascinated with mortality, beauty, loneliness, and glamour.

Allen Ginsberg’s photography, like his poetry, is spontaneous, daring, and insouciant.

Clement Valla collects distorted snapshots from Google Earth, windows into an alternate reality. The sublime, melting lanscapes are technically mistakes, glitches in the computer mapping process formed when the aerial view intersects with the ground view. Valla says: “These collected images feel alien, because they are clearly an incorrect representation of the earth’s surface. And it is precisely because humans did not directly create these images that they are so fascinating. They are created by an algorithm that finds nothing wrong in these moments.”

What better artist to inaugurate Hauser & Wirth’s expansive new gallery than the sprawling and unwieldy Dieter Roth?

William Burroughs in front of two of his paintings.

Liberate your unconscious! Drawing Surrealism at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Laurie Simmons has made a career of staging miniature domestic scenes with meticulously constructed sets (inspiring the title of her daughter Lena Dunham’s film, Tiny Furniture). All that changed when Simmons uncrated a life-size “Love Doll” from Japan, complete with a transparent slip, engagement ring, and genitalia. The ensuing photographs, titled chronologically from the day she received the doll, are unnervingly intimate and evocative. First exhibited at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Bowery, the series has now been collected in a book: The Love Doll: Days 1-36.

New York Will Turn You into a Razor Blade: Harif Guzman’s collages stave off the calamity of the city.

Endearing portraits of New Orleans’ eccentric and bizarre characters by Hudson Marquez.

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, is one of the world’s most widely recognized and reproduced artworks. The critic Robert Hughes called it the first painting that “made the leap from artwork to an icon of mass consumption.” In a new show at Allegra LaViola gallery, Andrea Mary Marshall invokes a line of artists riffing off the icon, including Dali, Duchamp, and Warhol. (When the painting visited the Metropolitan Museum in 1962, feted by the Kennedys, Warhol quipped, “Why don’t they just have someone copy it and send the copy? No one would know the difference.”)

Marshall takes the homages one step further and becomes the portrait’s subject, a character she calls “Gia Condo,” in an ongoing performance at the gallery. If you’re at all familiar with Marshall’s work, you won’t be surprised to see Gia Condo in a transparent dress and cat eye sunglasses with cigarette in hand.

The Horror of High-Def: Ed Atkins at MoMA PS1