“Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945” must have seemed like a great idea when curator Kerry Brougher began working on the show almost a decade ago. Here was a way to infuse the hushed spaces of the museum with the vitality of popular culture, to draw in the art-shy masses and give them something they couldn’t get at home. The scope of the exhibition is intentionally broad, covering artists from Joseph Cornell to Cindy Sherman, and taking into account both the cinema’s dominant Hollywood mode and its avant-garde tangents. Indeed, the show’s catalogue, edited by Russell Ferguson, does manage

If Allen Ruppersberg has always had a severe case of bibliomania conceptualis so much the better for us. His most recent show investigated the secret lives of books—as admired and debased objects, embodiments of a zeitgeist, and repositories of laughter, value, and mourning.

Portraits of books were presented as though the tomes themselves were famous personages. Fiction, 1991, is a drawing of a book whose cover modestly declares: “Good Stories by the Best Authors of the Day. 10 cents.” This piece sets the show’s tone: tongue-in-cheek reverence mixed with sly elegance. Low to High, 1994–96, gives