At Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery last month, visitors were faced with a choice—for 25 cents, they could gain admission to Great Power, Martha Rosler’s show about the Iraq war or, for a dollar, they could play the interactive arcade dancing game, “Dance Dance Revolution” (the money would be donated to anti-war charities, a sign explained).

Spending the summer in Quito, Ecuador, I found scarce evidence of contemporary art. The few galleries I visited were still basking in the light of mid-century painters like Oswaldo Guayasamín and Eduardo Kingman.

The piece leading into Take Your Time, the first major U.S. retrospective of Olafur Eliasson’s work, consists of nothing more than some fluorescent lights hung in a hallway. They emit a sickly, single-frequency mustard-yellow that suppresses every other color in the spectrum.

How can we find meaning in historical memories—Iwo Jima, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., 9/11—when our only apprehension of these events is the superficial photography and video, which reproduce them in numbing proliferation?

In his show Enjambment at Canada Gallery, Matt Connors’ paintings can be charming and refreshing but also exasperatingly clever. Connors builds his work from simple shapes that enact bizarre and engaging formal relationships. Quasi-geometric forms nuzzle together, long stripes come close without touching, and opaque rectangular brushmarks cluster in tenuous harmony.

Each day, Martin Wilner scavenges the papers for scraps of images and ideas to feed his art.

Cajori’s camera takes us into Close’s work station where, to his right are brushes, cans of paint-thinner, and rows of oil paint all neatly laid out; to his left is suspended a large Polaroid of his own bearded face, ponderously emerging from the dark.