NEW YORK—The summer doldrums having come to an end, New York’s art season is lurching into motion, and there is much to look forward to in the city’s museums. On the one hand, there are surefire blockbusters such as the Guggenheim’s Kandinsky survey, which runs from Sept. 18 to Jan. 13; on the other, there are eye-opening group shows such as the Asia Society’s “Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan,” which runs from Sept. 10 to Jan. 3. Here are a handful of others you won’t want to miss.

“Slash: Paper Under the Knife,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, Oct. 7, 2009 – April 4, 2010

Much as the topic deserves some form of exegesis, "Slash" is not a show about the former guitarist for Guns N’ Roses. No, it’s about crazy things international contemporary artists have done with paper. One of the Museum of Arts and Design’s missions is to make “craft” less of a four-letter word. Last year, “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery” changed minds about that fussy-seeming form, and this show is exemplary insofar as it explores how artists manipulate a traditional material in unusual ways. Look! Noriko Ambe has made a relief map in the drawers of a flat file; Ariana Boussard-Reifel has sliced all the words out of a book; Andreas Kocks has crafted what appears to be a giant splash of black liquid on the wall out of graphite and watercolor paper. And to think the best you could do were love letters, origami, and airplanes. For shame.

Urs Fischer, at the New Museum, Oct. 28, 2009 – Jan. 24, 2010

In terms of his innovative use of materials and the sheer punch his works pack, Urs Fischer may well be the most promising sculptor at work today. But considering the number he did on Gavin Brown’s New York gallery two years ago — tearing out the floor and digging a gaping hole — the prospect of giving him an entire museum to go to town on seems a dangerous one. And yet the New Museum, it appears, is game. In fact, Fischer is the first artist to get the run of the place, in what curator Massimiliano Gioni is calling an “introspective” featuring four years of work — much of it brand new — including, the museum promises, “towering monuments, tangled abstractions, and a labyrinth of mirrors.”

But as anyone who has experienced Fischer’s art will tell you, words don’t really do it justice. These pieces depend so much on the viewer’s physical presence that you, well, kind of just have to be there. Older works included in the New’s rich brew include the monumental, blob-like cast aluminum sculpture Marguerite de Ponty from 2006-08; more recent efforts include the jokey, mixed-media installation Noisette, 2009, which depicts a tongue sticking out from the wall, as if Fischer, hidden behind his creations, is having a laugh at the viewer’s expense. Which he usually is, a little bit. He’s laughing with us.

“Steve Wolfe on Paper,” at the Whitney Museum, Sept. 30 – Nov. 29, 2009

A few months ago in Vanity Fair, columnist James Wolcott lamented that electronic readers like the Kindle would eventually bring to an end the snobbish and immensely enjoyable practice of evaluating one’s fellow subway riders in terms of their reading preferences. In light of his gripe, this exhibition of Steve Wolfe’s art seems tailor-made for our times. Forget the Kindle — Wolfe brings us actual books! Well, sort of. His artworks look like books and are the size of books, but are in fact made from things like modeling paste and wood. The lovingly re-created covers — not one to shy away from the classics, he’s done Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Colette’s La Chatte, and Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, among many others — look a bit the worse for wear, and so are a sort of ode to readers’ handling of volumes. For what it’s worth — and Wolcott, who similarly laments iTunes, can surely appreciate this — Wolfe pays similar homage to LPs. This is the first solo museum show for this midcareer artist, and an overdue one.

“Pablo Bronstein at the Met,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 6, 2009 – Feb. 21, 2010