Warhol and Nadar each preferred blank backgrounds for their portraits, a blankness Warhol often found reflected in his sitter’s eyes. Both trafficked in portraits of performers, artistic peers, and other objects of affection. Handsomely hung in two adjacent galleries and represented by about forty works each—Warhol’s taken from his entire career, Nadar’s mostly from the late 1850s and ’60s—the photographers’ pictures were seen together only in a small antechamber. Because of the graphic power of the images, many correspondences could be found among the sitters, despite their being largely kept

There’s plenty talk of cynicism in art today, but art truly born of cynicism, in which the idealistic and romantic are forced to hold their own against a healthy dose of skepticism and pessimism, is a rare dish. Sam Durant served up just that with four jaded meditations on entropy and disintegration, which generally are forces one might consider in relation to nature, but which he shows to be steadily wearing away at culture.

Durant’s concern with these kinds of issues is apparent in his titles, as in What’s the Opposite of Entropy? (all works 1999). A color photo, it depicts a model of Robert