With the art world knee-deep in both nagging insecurities and a backlash desire to appear confidently hip, in-jokes are all the rage; indeed, about the worst thing you can say about a work of art these days is that it looks simply clever. This spells trouble for Carter Potter’s latest output, which is, if nothing else, as smart as a barbed whip. Potter weaves together motion-picture film strips as if they were colored thread and displays the resulting “fabric” on stretcher bars like paintings. Clever, yes, but Potter’s celluloid quilts manage to lead a surprisingly robust afterlife; the gesture

Subtitled “a collection of bad-girl art,” this exhibition featured work by 14 contemporary female cartoonists. Though it included a few watercolors, pastels, and other forays into more “conventional” art media, the main thrust and most potent aspect of “Twisted Sisters” was its display of original black-and-white artwork for comic strips that first appeared in publications like Weirdo, Wimmen’s Comix, and Young Lust.

Since book-length comic works are frequently referred to these days as graphic novels (scoot over, Flaubert), it seems fair to describe this show as a sampling of notable developments