What really makes Currin's work interesting—and hard to dismiss—is the compelling weirdness of his imagery. He draws on an eclectic range of sources, both high and low, from '60s girlie magazines like Modern Man to Tiepolo, Cranach, and Courbet. If you know your art history, it's a lot of fun to parse the references. In his review of the Whitney show, for example, Kimmelman points out that while Nude on a Table immediately brings to mind Mantegna's famous Dead Christ, the actual source is a more obscure painting of the same subject by Annibale Carracci. This art-historical guessing game may not add up to much in the end, but as Schjeldahl says in his review, "It is pleasant to know things."