What’s the difference between graffiti and painting?  Can you paint (I mean, like Picasso and Rembrandt) on the outside of a building, and can you graffiti on canvas?  After seeing George Condo’s paintings at a fancy Upper East Side gallery I would answer no to both.

I’d never seen Condo’s work in person before, and what I’d seen of it online and in print made it look like very cool decorator art, the kind that sits beautifully in a large, lacquered, all-white interior.  But the canvases in the gallery, with powdery, not-quite-opaque, overlapping layers of charcoal, pastel and paint, have a bristling urban energy.  There are obvious references to cubism, cartoons, and pornography, but the paintings are really cityscapes.  There’s one particularly elegant one, in black and white, that looks like it captures the view outside a window, with a band of clouds sitting on top.  And there are graffiti-like colored ones which, in addition to the architecture of the city, suggest the patina of the city – grime, noises, voices, and violence.  After one of these paintings gets purchased and hung in a living room in Beverly Hills, what happens?  Does it dissolve into the interior design, or does it carry some of the city with it?  Maybe the power of graffiti is that it can’t be carted off.

New Banksy works have been spotted in LA, which means that he might be in town to attend the Oscars on Sunday and, if he wins, to claim the Best Documentary award for “Exit Through the Gift Shop."  I saw the movie at MoMA last month, which itself is sort of hilarious.  The street artists it celebrates (with the very major exception of Thierry Guetta) are in pursuit of the marginal, the incongruous, and the ephemeral.  They're  not looking for recognition.

Banksy has worked hard to retain his anonymity.  Some British tabloids tried to expose him, publishing washed out shots of a plain-looking, ginger-haired man who very well could be Banksy.  But his presence in "Exit,” obscured with an oversized hoodie and a voice processor, is shrewd and indelible.  My hope is that he wins on Sunday night and stays away.

My friend Natasha is visiting India for the first time and emailing postcard-ready images of palm tree-lined beaches, rainbow-colored bungalows, and cows roaming the street.  But none of it conjures India for me like this happy, dopey painting from a slideshow of Indian street art compiled by graphic designer Meena Kadri.  I like everything about it: the pre-Renaissance perspective, the orangey colors, the girl’s crazy hairdo, and her mannish, moonish face.

The painter commissioned to make a sign for the roadside phone booth (they’re called, alarmingly, STD’s) that’s being advertised probably wasn’t given complete instructions but just told to make something attention-grabbing.  So he imagined this girl having a conversation with a friend.  The simplicity and exuberance of the message shine right through.