“Mr. and Mrs. Briand, the bakers of the ‘accursed bread,’ have left town on a pilgrimage to Lourdes.” “These inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit ate the bread. . . . Some had to be locked up in padded cells for several days.” “Mrs. Payen was the last to recover. . . . She sometimes still suffers from delirium.” A 1951 copy of Paris Match, opened to a sensationalist story on a mass poisoning by bread made from grain infected with ergot (a parasitic fungus found in rye and wheat), lay on a table in Mathieu Briand’s “Prologue” to the ten-chapter project “Ubïq: A Mental Odyssey.” Offering keys to what

Perhaps you remember those T-shirts printed to look like the kind sold at rock concerts but peddled by street vendors at the exits of the Armory Show or the Venice Biennale? They were printed with the names DAMIEN HIRST, VANESSA BEECROFT, AND MAURIZIO CATTELAN—the new pop stars of art. If so, then you already know something about Cyprien Gaillard, the artist who (with Payam Sharifi) made the shirts and documented them in the book World Tour 2002–2003 Archive.

You may have also seen Gaillard’s beautiful videos of romantic landscapes suddenly inundated by a thick, white smoke. Gaillard and accomplices,

Audrey Nervi’s practice relies on a photographic diary that she keeps during her travels around the globe. She brings back innumerable photographs that depict details seized on the fly, sometimes unbeknownst to the pictures’ subjects. The camera records more information than the eye or brain can immediately process; back in the studio, the artist sorts through her images, and, inevitably, more is seen in retrospect. She chooses pictures to rework on the computer (reframing, rebalancing the color, minimally retouching) and then paints the images on canvas. Far away from the event, what seemed