THERE IS A SEQUENCE in René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) in which the image of a folded-paper boat floating on a deluge of water is superimposed over shots of the rooftops of Paris, so that it seems to be moving through the watery skyline of a mysteriously postdiluvian city. Watching the film at the Centre Pompidou, where it was screened as part of the exhaustive survey exhibition “Dada”—jointly organized by the Centre Pompidou and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and spearheaded by curators Leah Dickerman, of the National Gallery,

Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian artist now working in Paris, uses a wide variety of media without revealing a preference for one over another or a hierarchy among them. This show included staged photographs, drawings in colored marker on ripped-out sheets of notebook paper, animated films, a video, and sculptures. There is, nevertheless, a common point that unites all these apparently disjointed practices—the simplicity of the materials (paper, polystyrene, terra-cotta) and of the methods employed (folding, rudimentary animation techniques). This allows the viewer immediate contact with the work,

Hedi Slimane’s selection of works by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–89) followed earlier selections from the late photographer’s oeuvre by Cindy Sherman (Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2003) and David Hockney (Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 2005). Slimane, Dior Homme’s artistic director as well as a photographer, steered viewers away from flowers and erotica toward portraits, still lifes, and several fetish objects. But the choices revealed his own penchant for rock music’s stylistic nihilism. (He dresses rock musicians and has made photography books about backstage ambiences.)

In the entry gallery