“What do you see?” To staff and visitors of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where more than a dozen objects and works of art were stolen in March 1990, Sophie Calle recently posed this simple question. Gardner’s will stipulates that the arrangement of works in her namesake museum’s galleries never be altered, so for several years after the theft, patches of bare, silk-covered walls punctuated the collection. As early as one year after the theft, Calle included remembrances of works missing from this Boston institution in her series “Last Seen,” 1991. A few years later, the museum rehung

One-upping Hollywood clichés of voyeurism, transvestism, and bloodlust, Brice Dellsperger’s employs conceptual and visual mirroring, looping, and duplication in his videos for maximum camp appeal. The artist’s series “Body Double,” 1995–, includes some thirty-odd re-created scenes from cult movies by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Lynch, and, most frequently, Brian De Palma. The recent presentation of six works from the series (four starring the artist himself in multiple roles) was a self-referential fun house of sorts—wherein a mirror, multiple projections, and a double-sided

In his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011), Simon Reynolds unpacks a less-discussed register of the Sex Pistols’ legendary exhortation “No Future.” In addition to its apocalyptic disregard for what was to come, Reynolds argues, punk valorized an outmoded past—the sound and fashion of 1950s American rock ’n’ roll—in opposition to hippie counterculture. Punk’s retrospective gaze figured in the interplay between past and present in “Duncan Hannah: Paris,” a sampling of the artist’s recent drawings, paintings, and collages, along with film clips and copies of