Art all around

Museum of Fine Arts - The Boston Globe: "THE YACHTS outside the Museum of Fine Arts have sparked familiar controversy. Are the boats art or just part of a blatant attempt by the museum's director, Malcolm Rogers, to seduce their owner, businessman William Koch, to donate his art collection to the museum?

Motive rests in the eye of the beholder. The yachts could be a sop to a rich patron. Koch founded the Oxbow Group, a conglomerate that mines and markets energy and bulk commodities, like coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Given Oxbow's annual sales of nearly $1 billion, Koch has had money to buy art -- including the work of Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne. Koch is also paying for part of the exhibit that includes the yachts and his other holdings. It's called ''Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch."

But these yachts could also be the boats that launch a thousand museumgoers. With these eye-catchers on the lawn, passersby are bound to wonder What is that? and then wonder what else is in the museum, and maybe even go see.

For those inspired to look, the Museum of Fine Arts should be only a first stop. September is the season of new museum exhibits.

To see other huge pieces of art on a lawn, go to the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln. In the park is ''Two Big Black Hearts," artist Jim Dine's 12-foot bronze pieces, the surfaces of which are covered with objects -- hands, faces, seashells, hammers. It's best to go and look oneself, since a guy who's making two giant hearts clearly wants viewers to decide for themselves what he loves. The DeCordova building itself reopens on Sept. 10, after a brief hiatus for renovations, with new shows and a newly constructed front entrance. The Dine sculptures remain.

A show that opens on Sept. 21 at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Boylston Street explores the metaphor of military camouflage in war and fashion. The artist, Thomas Hirschhorn, who served in the Swiss Army, uses exaggerated elements of museum displays -- signs, illustrations, and art -- to look at how camouflage affects people. This can seem a painful inquiry for Americans who are trying to understand the conflict in Iraq. But in an essay, Hirschhorn writes that his work is to explore hope as a principle for taking action.

On Beacon Hill at the Museum of Afro-American History, the ''Words of Thunder" exhibit reignites the fiery words of William Lloyd Garrison and other antislavery abolitionists. It is a history of interracial cooperation, the art of human effort, and a reminder of the possibilities of change -- even in the face of 21st-century problems like AIDS, homelessness, and poverty.

Art feeds curious eyes, changes minds, and sculpts hearts. If it's a yacht that sets this process in motion, that's just fine."