Like any artist whose livelihood depends on the whims of people less fabulous than himself, Currin is driven to find ever more clever ways of biting the hand that feeds him. In his recent genre paintings, he conjures arch vignettes from the everyday lives of the haute bourgeoisie: a man and woman drinking white wine and laughing too hard in a restaurant in Park City, Utah; a couple of gay men making homemade pasta; three young wives in a Westchester living room sipping martinis and puffing cigars after brunch. As satires, the paintings are flaccid and familiar. They evoke the emptiness of suburban life without really showing us anything we haven't seen in a New Yorker cartoon or films like Happiness and The Ice Storm. What Currin offers is not social critique but satire lite: familiar images of upper-middle-class life overlaid with a veneer of art-historical seriousness Simultaneously snide and ingratiating, the paintings sneer at the social milieu of the art-viewing public while appealing to individual viewers' vanity and erudition—which may account for the work's broad popularity.