For most of his career, the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) has been trying to escape the pressures of the art system, attacking it with a sarcastic humor that he often directs against himself as well. Now, he seems to have yielded to its temptations.

Jesse Murry died not long after my opening at Elizabeth Koury gallery in SoHo, in January 1993. He was the most erudite person I ever met. He was physically grand: tall, with a big belly, and very dominant. He went to Yale graduate school in his late 30s to become a painter after publishing art criticism and being an art history professor.

Known for his precisionist, Pop-inflected paintings that often incorporate text, as well as for a series of tightly focused photo books centered on the environs of Los Angeles, California-based painter Ed Ruscha has achieved an international reputation. A high point in his career came in 2005, when he was the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale. His exhibition there was enthusiastically received by the public and the press.

A show at the Corcoran features hometown painter Chris Martin, whose paintings defy all manner of spatial, material and formal conventions.

For more than 50 years, the Los Angeles painter and musician Llyn Foulkes has decried both art world careerism and trends in popular music. At 76, he remains a dissenting voice. Often left out of histories of art, he refers to himself, bittersweetly, as the “Zelig” of contemporary art, referring to the Woody Allen character, a pervasive and influential figure ultimately uncredited for the role he played in 20th-century history.