IN New York

That you would want in a museum retrospective. Devoted to Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan and at the Guggenheim Museum, Nov. 4-Jan. 22, All is shocking, shameless, shameful, thought-provoking, funny, lewd, imaginative, iconoclastic, irreverent, blasphemous, mordant, critical, bemused, optimistic and unforgettable. Cattelan’s a mass of contradictions. So’s the show. So’s the world he depicts in a hyperealism that embraces taxidermy and wax figures. Not since Matthew Barney blew the roof off the Gugg a few years back has there been such an audacious, amusing, thoroughly enjoyable show. I mean, Cattelan literally gives us the finger. Check out the site-specific installation, too: the entire show hangs, drips, falls from the museum’s oculus, leaving the ramp denuded of art. JFK lies in his coffin; Picasso strikes a pose in a Roy Lichtenstein bedroom; Hitler is brought to his knees; dogs sleep; donkeys bray; Pinocchio flies; a woman skulks in a refrigerator. Cattelan’s hung out his life’s work out to dry or maybe he’s put it all on the gallows. The retrospective is, after all, a death knell: The artist, born in 1960, is retiring/resigning from the art world following this show. For us, that may not be such great news, though. We need Cattelan, if only because art means never having to say, “Isn’t that pretty?”