For the first U.S. screening of his short films, Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli transformed the New Museum's Media Lounge into an old-fashioned movie theater, draped with red velvet curtains and dimly illuminated along the baseboards by tiny yellow lights. The space took on a hermetic, empowered feeling, which seemed appropriate to the spirit of campy idolatry that suffuses Vezzoli's art.

Inaugurating this gallery’s new space in Chelsea, “Parts of a World,” an exhibition of Sharon Horvath’s most recent work, included 20 paintings on canvas, or on paper mounted to canvas, in dispersed pigment, ink and polymer.

An elegiac mood pervaded this exhibition of works in various mediums by Portland artist Pat Boas, a former critic for Artweek, Art Papers and artUS. Several of the serial projects use the New York Times as a source. Given the current twilight of newspapers, the artist’s meditations on the publication’s archive as communal memory stir feelings of nostalgic regret.

Like perfect pitch, a gift for painting affects different people in different ways. Norbert Schwontkowski mostly shrugs it off. Born in 1949 in Bremen, he is just a few years younger than Anselm Kiefer, and something of that scenery-chewing artist’s polar opposite.

A cross between a magician, a mime, a comic performer in the mode of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, a theatrical impresario and a high priest, Stuart Sherman was a well-known figure in the downtown avant-garde scene from the late ’70s through the early ’90s, when his career was cut short by AIDS. (He died in 2001.)