Director John Waters’s ascent from notorious creator of Pink Flamingos (1972) to toast of Broadway is as instructive a lesson in the meshing of high and low American culture as is his film Pecker (1998), a cautionary fable—set in the art world—of redemption.

Long interested in both the subtext and paratext of, well, everything—from Road Runner cartoons to NASA images of outer space—Mungo Thomson has built a career on pulling back curtains to reveal the mechanics of production and reception. For “The Varieties of Experience,” the artist used predigital tools to expand on his tried-and-true themes and strategies.

Though it is wearying to track the dichotomies in the gleefully schizoid work of Aaron Curry, the artist presents them with undeniable panache. “The Colour Out of Space,” this young but established L.A. sculptor’s New York solo debut, opposes high and low, flat and spatial, abstract and figurative, rough and slick, esteem for the language of midcentury modernism and eagerness to send it up.

Kenneth Anger has long been celebrated as an important avant-garde filmmaker and a seminal influence on everyone and everything from Martin Scorsese to MTV.

“I would prefer not to.” Spelled out in a bright, warm yellow on the gallery’s front windows, this text work by Alterazioni Video (which borrows a refrain from Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener) is a distillation of the collective’s contrarian sensibility.