Over the last 50 years, Jonas Mekas has been without doubt one of the most important figures in experimental film. Along with his own filmmaking, he started the magazine Film Culture in 1955, organized the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (1962) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque (1964), and, finally, founded Anthology Film Archives in 1970, where he later became (and remains) director. (All are, or were, in New York.) By gathering these different roles—director, critic and curator—in one person, he not only actively combined the fields of theory and practice, but over a long period significantly shaped our perception of experimental film, and expanded what independent cinema could be.

Pantelis Arapinis of AD Gallery set out to connect the dots between older and younger generations of Greek artists in the group show “What Does New and Interesting Mean?” Arapinis’s title alludes to the historic 1996 exhibition at the Athens School of Fine Arts of works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, called “Everything That’s Interesting Is New.” In the exhibition at AD, the works—high quality though by no means seminal in all cases—were installed on two floors, with juxtapositions of recent and older works spanning 1950 to the present.

Kalup Linzy began gaining recognition several years ago with low-tech videos featuring schlocky editing gimmicks, stilted acting and a cast of recurring characters based on soap-opera archetypes and Hollywood melodrama stars; many are played by the artist himself, often in drag.

By repopulating art-historical imagery with young black men, Kehinde Wiley has been infusing histrionic poses from the past with an edgy street dynamism for almost a decade now.

High on a wall near the gallery entrance, Olaf Breuning wrote his name five times in large black letters in various styles and then finally scratched them all out. Failing to find an appropriately striking tag with which to emblazon the wall, he scrawled in smaller letters the pathetic excuse, “At least I tried,” and left it to herald the exhibition, his fifth New York solo.