Stare long enough, and your eyes might go gently cross-eyed. Or a flash of vertigo could overtake you, however briefly. The constellation of dots you’re gazing at might also begin to buzz, ever so slightly, as if there’s a battery pack behind the canvas. These dots are alive.

Those are some of the sensations you can get standing before one of Damien Hirst’s canvases of colored spots at the Gagosian Galleries during “Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 — 2011.” The abstract grids of primary colors become dancing fields of flatness. Certain colors pop out competitively and command your view.

Happy, veering on vapid, the spot paintings are almost laughably accessible, art without danger, if not without history. Some of the smaller dots bring to mind festive cupcakes, or those candy buttons on paper tape from childhood.

The bigger dots, the ones on gigantic canvases, gleefully recall the spotted tarps from the game Twister. These larger paintings, displayed in a hangar-sized room (at W. 24^th St.), don’t leave you dizzy, granting the eye and the brain a respite from the smaller canvases’ pointillist clutter.

You can dismiss these studies in color as frivolous, but they assume their own aesthetic right with post-Warholian heft. The paintings are mass-manufactured things, but no less provocative or pretty for it. Their pop whimsy is infectious.

Entering the gift shop, you can either sneer or chortle at the spotted goodies, a shameless push of polka-dotted consumerism. The store peddles buttons, key chains, t-shirts, mugs, clocks and, for a wee $735, a skateboard deck riddled with spots. It was the skateboard, ridiculous and divine, that dropped my defenses and had me rolling with it.

The exhibit is showing simultaneously at all 11 Gagosian Galleries, from New York to Hong Kong, Athens to Beverly Hills. It runs through Feb. 18 at the three Gagosians in New York.

Spacey is thrilling in the Bridge Project production of “Richard III” now at BAM under the visceral direction — smoke, drums, blood — of Sam Mendes. He reveals why one goes the extra mile to see certain plays, those with marquee names. He’s not just good. He’s a pro, and his craft and commitment blaze.

Richard, Shakespeare’s wannabe king, craves the throne with psychopathic bloodlust. The show opens with Spacey seated (crumpled, really) center stage, already hissing his disgust at the turn of events, already plotting his sanguinary path to royalty. No one, not woman nor child, will hinder him. And, in various murderous schemes, they don’t.

How he hungers for the station he believes is his. With roar and spittle, rafters-rattling rage, Spacey claws the air as he manipulates his executioners and the credulous innocents. He wipes the sweat from his head and brow with an ever-present handkerchief. Many are on to his madness, while others don’t catch his winks and smirks, sly, acid asides that signal a lurking fiend.

This production has toured the world, rewarding Spacey and his cast bounding confidence and mastery of the text. While the cast is uniformly excellent, Spacey in particular seems to relish his comfort with the role, eliciting great variety and nuance. He flings some lines like rotten fruit he’s bitten in to. He crunches down on others, gnawing, growling.

Mendes’ stagecraft includes drum corps, projections, video screens, smoke and piles of bloodstained attire. (Between scenes during the climactic battle, if you’re close enough, you can see Spacey smearing fake blood all over his face and shirt in the dark.) The blood is important, and it’s never excessive. This is the blood king, after all, the killer crown.

Richard’s fate is foretold, and Mendes devilishly delights in his king’s demise. (It’s Grand Guignol spectacle.) But before that Richard has snapped in the heat of a losing fight. Famously he shouts, “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse!” Spacey embodies Richard’s insanity here, howling, spinning out of control, sword flailing, soaked in blood. Doomed.

Chad Harbach’s debut novel “The Art of Fielding” is good, very good. It’s about life, baseball and literature, in that order, and even someone like me, indifferent to deeds on the diamond — to, well, the art of fielding —will glean riches from this sprawling book.

Harbach’s a firm traditionalist, not unlike his peer (and fan) Jonathan Franzen (who’s the superior writer). He finds grace in an implacably linear narrative form and stubbornly plain language — a great writer, he’s no poet — and it suits his unvarnished story about a group of college ball players, their loves (books, girls — and men), ambitions on the field and off, family, friendship and, yes, Herman Melville.

It’s not flawless. Things move in a leisurely fashion and sometimes you wonder if the amount of pages dedicated to a scene is really commensurate with its importance.  A few parts are flabby. Characters have distractingly knobby surnames — Skrimshander, Starblind, Affenlight, Loondorf, Suitcase — that are perhaps meant to be comic but are more like groaners.

Harbach’s triumph is how he seamlessly weaves the messy private lives of his likable young characters — including that of a superlative shortstop who seems to be losing his magic touch — with breath-holding drama on the field, and it’s consistently bracing. The book oozes the love of the game without fetishizing it. Even I found myself rooting for the home team (the Harpooners, a la “Moby Dick”).

“The Art of Fielding” is a first book that feels like a fifth book. It’s full of wisdom. Save for the college president, who I could see played by an older George Clooney, the story is about youth and figuring out who you are and what you’re going to do. These kids don’t know, but neither for that matter does the president. Life’s a game on and off the field — the book almost necessarily stoops to that cliché. But it works in a tale like this, suggesting that we work our hearts out practicing the game, if never mastering it.

I’m quick to call the middlebrow mediocrity “The Descendants” rashly overrated. “A Dangerous Method” — a stifling chamber drama that’s as stiff as a sepia photograph. “My Week with Marilyn” — a mushy trifle. Lars Von Trier’s weirdly hailed “Melancholia” (is it really his “best” film??) — inexcusably misshapen (the movie flatly doesn’t work). An otherwise conventional children’s bore that’s much too long, “Hugo” only came to life during scenes animating the work of silent movie wizard Georges Melies.

(What have I liked? “Pina,” Wim Wenders’ exquisitely rendered look at the dance of Pina Bausch, was nourishing art, and the silent bauble “The Artist,” cutesy as it can be, didn’t offend. The Iranian domestic drama “A Separation” was riveting. Some older titles: “Midnight in Paris,” “Ides of March,” “Moneyball,” “Bridesmaids.”)

All this disappointment serves as a fat yellow caution sign. Now I’m wary of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Shame,” to name a few.

I got suckered the other day. After a deluge of critical plaudits, I saw Spielberg’s Oscar-baiting “War Horse,” and damn I want my money back. Like most of the movies described above, it’s not a terrible work, it’s just a superfluous one. I can’t fault it for feeling like it’s based on a children’s book, since it is, but Spielberg does little with the material except stage it often beautifully. It’s a rote work, freeze-dried and hung up like a pretty picture.

There’s ghastly warfare and some horsies (and men) die, but it’s not all that bad. Amid it all is cornpone humor and cornpone valor and mighty pronouncements and emotions fluttering on gusts of John Williams’ thrusting score. Old-fashioned and overly long, it would try a kid’s patience. I have to quote David Denby, when he calls “War Horse” “bizarrely unimaginative.” He also, wisely, makes fun of the movie’s squawking impish goose, a barnyard critter that seemed to have walked off the set of “Babe” and lost his way, waddling onto the sun-drenched grounds of the squarest movie of the year.

I’m a mild fan of the series — I recall loving the second chapter, directed by John Woo (I was alone with that opinion, too) — so this isn’t an I-don’t-get-it, wrinkly-nosed huff at a cynical popcorn action blockbuster. This is a genuine say-what? to critical quotes like this from Roger Ebert, who granted the movie 3.5 stars: The movie “is a terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry.” That’s the least of it. Other critics have authored small rhapsodies that swoon and twinkle. The movie earned a spot in the 90 percentile at Rotten Tomatoes.

The writers are wise enough to avoid “masterpiece” terrain, knowing what they’re dealing with — a whiplash-kinetic, mega-budget Tom Cruise vanity vehicle directed by Pixar whiz Brad Bird. That said, that’s pretty strong pedigree for an action picture. Cruise doesn’t fool around with work he’s produced, and Bird has shown swoops of genius with Pixar flicks like “The Incredibles” (this is his first live-action film).

I’m one of the few people who actually likes Cruise’s on-screen persona, no matter what it is. He’s a classic silver screen specimen, a humanoid formulated to be a movie star and all that that definition entails (including a spectacularly sui generis personal life). I even liked him in “Vanilla Sky.”

So it’s not a Cruise bias that had me bored, yawningly so, during “MIGP.” The whole enterprise felt routine, been there, done that. I won’t (can’t really) limn the convoluted plot, but the action set pieces, the reason we’re there, rarely scraped novel, save for the now-well-known bit with Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world, in Dubai. Even that fell flat. You knew he wasn’t going to fall, and anyway didn’t he scale some monstrous skyscraper in the last installment? Cruise is joined by Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg to make a crack spy team. The physical chemistry is fine, but the writing — all those wisecracks and piquant badinage — could have used a serious polish.

There’s abundant tension in the movie — your breath will cease when, say, Cruise plummets a car head-first down several stories (he lives, unscratched, indeed perfect, in this most implausible of actioneers) — but it only works on a watery visceral level. I never cared about the characters, and besides I knew our heroes at worst would take a flesh wound from a bullet. I didn’t demand much from this “Mission: Impossible.” I  just hoped it would have delivered something the critics promised: a teeny thing called fun.

It was the summer of 1998 and I bestowed glowing praise upon Michael Bay’s unabashed, noisy, gargantuan slab of entertainment “Armageddon,” while weeks later I slammed Steven Spielberg’s embarrassingly trite and sentimentally pandering WWII melodrama “Saving Private Ryan.”

How the letters poured in. I won’t recount their content (mostly about how I’d be speaking German if the U.S. hadn’t rescued Europe during WWII), but reading Brian Kellow’s new superlative biography of preeminent film critic Pauline Kael jogged those old troublesome memories. (Yes, I still stick to my verdicts, yet the episode can’t help but twist the stomach a tad.)

Kellow quotes from Kael’s famous essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” — “perhaps,” he writes, “the boldest statement yet of her own moviegoing personality.”

He quotes her: “There is so much talk now about the art of film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.”

Then Kellow adds: “Again, she encouraged audiences to respond to what they genuinely enjoyed — not to second-guess themselves as they might have been taught to do in school. And if what they enjoyed was a cheap youth exploitation picture like ‘Wild in the Streets,’ that was fine, ‘because,’ she wrote, ‘it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t.’”

“The genuine movie-lover,” he writes, “knew in his gut that what movies had to offer was not an academic study in perfect artistic unity.”

Kael: “At the movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and registers as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful.”

Kellow finishes up with, “Pauline’s championing of the lowbrow — the good, vital lowbrow — was really a plea for some degree of emotional honesty on the part of the audience.”

Kael: “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies.”

Everyone, I think, has indeed enjoyed trashy American movies, be it “Dirty Dancing” or “Kill Bill.” But Kael’s argument seems to help vindicate, if just a bit, my predicament those years back.  For I sincerely think that even if she would dismiss “Armageddon” as onanistic bombast and a scalding machismo vision of world-saving junk, she would at least find it offering integrity and a little fun. Meanwhile, I think she would be merciless to “Private Ryan.” All that flag waving hoo-ha and humorless heroics — I think it would make her wretch.

The gigantic show — spectacular, surreal, sui generis, dizzying — presents all of Cattelan’s work — 128 imposing objects — dangling from the ceiling of the museum, filling the space’s famous rotunda with everything from taxidermied horses to oversized comic posters. It’s a gas.

With a flying Pinocchio that’s spread-eagle like a gleeful parachutist, a replica of JFK supine in a coffin, a dinosaur-sized skeleton of a fictional beast, a huge balloon-headed Picasso and a boy-sized figure of Hitler on his knees as if at least a smidge penitent (no, he’s not), the show’s a Felliniesque fantasia, funny as it is startling, provocative as it is disturbing. It’s a thronged airborne circus aloft in a single towering ring.

How to explain it all? I can’t. I won’t. Phantasmagorias are like that – trippy, prickly, tricky.

But the Guggenheim’s take veers from my comparatively sunny view of Cattelan’s whimsies, running from the joyous (you smile at the animatronic boy tip-tapping his drum) to the fancifully macabre (you gargle a slightly bitter taste before the JFK mannequin, or the young boy hanging by a noose).

The curators dub this clamoring scene, this monstrous marionette, a “tragic artwork.” They go on: “The exhibition is most certainly an exercise in disrespect; the objects are hung like laundry to dry. More somberly, they appear as if hoisted on a gallows, emulating a scene of mass execution …”

Ack. No. That giant Picasso is as benign as a Macy’s parade balloon. Those taxidermied Labrador retrievers look at peace, happy. OK, the life-size Pope, crushed by a meteor, isn’t enjoying himself, but that damn Pinocchio, as satirical as he might be, is thinking: Weeee.

Cattelan says this is it, that “All” is all, kaput, the end. Here is the whole of his work and now he will quit making art. This, then, is his curtain call, his final bow. Take one last look at everything, he seems to say. It should be a disconcerting occasion, as the museum hints, but it’s not. It’s downright celebratory.

“Maurizio Cattelan: All”; Guggenheim; through Jan. 22

My dream girl.

Willem de Kooning’s famed “Woman I,” an Abstract Expressionist masterwork cooked up from 1950-52, is chafing at first blush. The woman before you is large; she not only wants to sit on you, she wants to chew you.

"Woman, I"

Rest. Into focus comes the familiar. She is hardly a beast. She’s just a lady, represented is slashing colors and cyclonic movement to fashion something different yet the same. Maybe what you’re not used to, but it’s all there; embedded in its radicalism is familiarity. I see a woman sitting down. Zaftig and a little gruesome, wearing that tooth-baring mask, but she’s just sitting there. In real life, she’d be utterly approachable.

De Kooning’s knockout “Women” series from the ‘50s is up for ogling at MOMA during its nearly 200-piece de Kooning retrospective. The numerous women are the highlights, and they run from oils, to pastel, charcoal and colored chalk on paper.

“Seated Woman” also stirs a flinch. But wait. This woman, all jumbled angles and piled-on flesh, is actually smiling. Her eyes are open and bright, star-like with long lashes, and her mouth is irrefutably a smile.  She is, beyond the whorl of abstract flourishes, a babe.

"Seated Woman"

It’s noted that some of the women are conflations of elements of ancient fertility goddesses and ‘50s pin-up girls, and that looks about right. In abstract novelty, Picasso’s much earlier “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” of course springs to mind. Yet de Kooning’s nonetheless offer a different overall effect: They fairly seethe with provocative beauty and intimidating bite.

Typically, not all the critics dug it. These women were monsters born of misogyny and disgust with the second sex, etc. They were the artist’s painterly revenge, and so forth.

A speech at the 1954 Venice Biennale lambasted critics who found the artist’s representations of women “an appalling libel upon the good name of woman.”

The speaker, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, went on: “However one may feel about them … de Kooning’s Eves, Clytemnestras, Whores of Babylon, call them what you will, have a universality, an apocalyptic presence that is rare in the art of any time or any country.”

That’s one bubbly Whore of Babylon, never mind her two mouths and feral coloring, standing next to a bike and quite enjoying herself in de Kooning’s “Woman and Bicycle.” That’s all she’s doing. Getting ready to ride away. She’s beaming, and it’s infectious.

de Kooning: A Retrospective, MOMA, through Jan. 9.

Showing for a short time, “Summer” stars a sad-eyed, celery-thin Marie Rivière as a chronic Debbie Downer, who appears to suffer a metastasizing case of anhedonia while she tries to spend two weeks of unsatisfying vacation about Europe. Her heart is having none of it; nothing clicks, and she repeatedly mopes back to Paris.

But there’s something magical in the rayon vert (green flash) of the title, and our heroine finally finds a cure in the belated company of a simpatico young man. Together, this coltish couple experiences one of those indelible, nail-biting final shots in cinema that everyone talks— no, gasps — about. There’s a little bit of “City Lights” about it, but more hopeful.

Random sidelight: Last night re-watched Albert Brooks’ 1985 comedy “Lost in America,” now streaming on Netflix, and the damn thing didn’t hold up. I was stunned. It’s one of my favorite comedies of the ‘80s. Despite Brooks’frantic, hand-wringing toggling between desperation, resignation and apoplexy, the movie’s thin, underbaked. The Brooksian moments can be priceless, but even when the streaming went on the fritz during the movie’s last 10 minutes, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything much. The movie sort of fizzled out.