NEW YORK — The Manhattan museum scene has gone mad this season. By even a modest estimate, there are 14 shows that any art lover would want to keep track of.

With the "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" major show at the great Metropolitan Museum of Art closing today, here are quick takes on three others that cannot be ignored.

'GOYA'S LAST WORKS'

The exhibit, which fills a couple of rooms in the basement of the Frick Collection, is a small show of great art. Its modest scale, and the peculiar genius of its pictures — 10 oils, 10 tiny works on ivory, 31 drawings and prints — makes it the high point of New York's crowded art season.

The pictures were almost all made in a brief period before Francisco Goya's death at age 82 in 1828, when he was living in Bordeaux. Since at least the 1790s, Goya had been the leader of Spain's art scene — he became official painter to the Spanish court — though his last four years were spent in France, in flight from a crackdown on liberals.

The crucial question raised by the Frick exhibition, like other Goya shows, is this: How did Goya ever get away with the weird stuff he made, let alone win praise and patronage?

Many of Goya's portraits, for instance, have what look like massive flaws in their basic realist technique. The Frick's own "Portrait of a Lady" features a gold chain descending from the sitter's neck with no regard for gravity — more like a curvy yellow line on the surface of the canvas than real jewelry. Her right cheek is outlined in black, coloring-book style, against all the rules of academic painting of the day.

Long before flashbulbs, Goya washes out his sitter's face as though he'd based his portrait on an Instamatic shot.

Not for a second is any of this description meant as criticism: To modern eyes at least, the picture is a gem. It's painted with a freedom and a disregard for academic standards that you wouldn't expect to see until many decades later. But how is it that Goya's contemporaries embraced pictures as radical as this — pictures so unlike anything they could have seen before?

The great Spanish playwright Leandro Fernandez de Moratin wrote about his close friend Goya's plan to paint the portrait of him that's in this exhibition: "I infer that I must be awfully good-looking, if such a skilled brush wants to craft extra copies of me."

And yet by any kind of standard Moratin could have known, that brush should have seemed hopeless. When you compare the impressively clotted surface of this picture with any of the polished pictures favored at that time — or even with the free but more illusionistic brushwork of a much-admired predecessor such as Diego Velazquez — it's hard to imagine what its first viewers could have made of it.

And these were paintings conceived for public consumption; when Goya was working just to please himself, he pushed things even further. During his very last years, he painted a series of grim, extravagant fantasies in watercolor on little scraps of ivory, barely four inches square, which he'd first blackened with some kind of soot. They're hardly more legible than a Willem de Kooning "Woman" or a Francis Bacon "Pope," and are just as tortured: A man , barely scratched into the ivory's blackened surface, hunts for fleas in his shirt; a monk and an old woman stare out at us in wide-eyed horror; a crone embraces a fat, imbecilic boy.

How could Goya's peculiar work have been acceptable, to him or anyone else? The answer is also a crucial lesson: Humans seem to come equipped with an eye for art that absolutely overrules whatever writers or official culture tell us are the things to like. Some pictures can sit outside every "ism" of its day — can be essentially inexplicable and even count as "wrong" — and still speak to anyone who cares to look.

'ANDREA ZITTEL: CRITICAL SPACE'

Andrea Zittel crossbreeds art, design and marketing like almost no one else. Last year, when she won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's $25,000 Lucelia Artist Award, the art world was hardly surprised. Ditto this year, when the New Museum, one of the country's most important centers for contemporary art, launched "Critical Space," a full-scale retrospective for the 40-year-old artist.

The show provides a fine overview of Zittel's art, almost all produced under the banner of "A-Z Administrative Services," the corporate identity that the Californian assumed in 1991, soon after moving to New York.

The A-Z "brand" has been on clothing: In the early 1990s, Zittel went months at a time wearing a single "uniform" before replacing it with a new one, also of her own design and manufacture. This show features a slew of her outfits.

Also in the 1990s, she made a series of "A-Z Living Units," like room-size steamer trunks that fold out to reveal all the necessities of modern urban life: cot, hot plate, tea set, wardrobe, filing cabinet. Several are in this show.

And the brand has been on a series of luxury "A-Z Escape Vehicles," works that first brought Zittel widespread attention. Zittel customizes the 100-cubic-foot interior of the pods, which look vaguely like U-Haul trailers, to the specifications of its art-world owner. Los Angeles collector Dean Valentine had his done up in vintage wood, like some old cabin in the forest; Andrea Rosen, Zittel's powerful New York dealer, had her interior entirely upholstered in tufted velvet, with detailing in mirror and glass — like a cross between a coffin and an art deco cocktail lounge.

For a century and more, artists have wanted to set themselves apart from the corrupt and corrupting world of marketing and manufacturing. Zittel instead embraces that central aspect of our modern lives, to critique and undermine it from within.

If there's a problem with Zittel's work, it's that constant contact with the world of slick commerce may have made it too slickly commercial. Zittel's "uniforms" have as much tasteful style as rebellion in them; her living units are irresistibly elegant and well-designed, and owe as much to Ikea as to dada and Duchamp; her escape vehicles are so witty and good-looking, they fit right in with all the other stylish objects her well-heeled collectors own.

'DAVID SMITH: A CENTENNIAL'

Guggenheim Museum's major show this season is a joy to see. It's been a very long time since an exhibition has looked this good in the Guggenheim's difficult space.

Instead of fighting the circular architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright's building, and the angled floors of its spiraling exhibition ramps, Smith's art seems entirely at home. Maybe that's because the 1959 building, and the mature works Smith was making at the time it was built, so clearly belong to the same moment in our visual history.

That's meant as both praise and blame.

The Guggenheim show celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Smith, whom the museum is billing as "the greatest sculptor of his generation." And the show's overwhelming impression is indeed of a certain pastness — of art made by and for one generation, born a century ago. It feels as much of its time as a bobbysoxer's dress — or as Wright's old-time "futuristic" building. The greatness is there in Smith, but it's of a distinctly Old Masterish kind: Smith's works feel safe and vintage and eminently pleasant, rather than relevant and present and even vaguely threatening, as some older art still manages to be.

Smith was one of the first artists to fully realize the potential of messily welded steel, and of scrap metal in general, as a medium for abstract sculpture. Instead of building nice, orderly, well-composed, mostly solid objects, as sculptors had done for centuries, Smith cobbled together peculiar, open webs of rods and blocks and blobs of steel. Rather than taking the solid human form as the model for his art, Smith borrowed from the mark of the human hand: His works are "drawings in space," with all the gestural freedom that implies, rather than classic figure paintings fattened into three dimensions.

Smith is often said to be an "abstract expressionist in steel" — the sculptor's equivalent of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning — but that doesn't ring true when you look at his art. No matter how freely you work in welded metal, you'll never capture the vigor and spontaneity of someone splashing paint. There's a studied regularity to Smith that Pollock never had. The fact of Smith's innovations cannot be denied, but somehow his art doesn't have the raw energy that major innovations tend to gather round them.

A Pollock can still hold down any kind of contemporary space and scream at us across the years; it turns out that a Smith works best as decoration — wonderful, entirely winning decoration — for a building from the past.