In its highest form, cultural detective work yields spectacular deductions—equal parts tease and persuasion—permitting you to freely take a leap of faith just to see what happens were the speculation to be true. This was the case for “De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde” (Of or by Marcel Duchamp by Ulf Linde), an extravaganza of an exhibition organized by Jan Åman and Daniel Birnbaum with Henrik Samuelsson and Susanna Slöör, centering on Linde’s sixty years of sleuthing around Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre. Linde, once an acolyte of Duchamp and now an authority on his work, proposes that

In 2010, Ulla von Brandenburg made Chorspiel, a video in the form of a “choral play.” In this Ibsenesque family drama, a grandfather, grandmother, mother, and daughter move like pieces on a chessboard in front of a drawn backdrop that shows an open field near a forest, reminiscent of the settings of Lars von Trier’s films Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005). The interactions among these figures are characterized by ritualized gestures, such as the loosening of a tangle of yarn they pass between them. Rather than speaking, they lip-synch to the singing of an offstage choir, which gives them an