The Box Art Auction benefit for East End Hospice will present a preview of the cigar box creations of area artists beloved locally and internationally on Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. at Hoie Hall of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton Village. The boxes will remain on view next Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The auction itself will be held Sept. 6 at the Ross School.

The artists who have transformed cigar and wine boxes this year include Paton Miller, Gabrielle Raacke, Ronnie Chalif, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Bill King, April Gornik, Randall Rosenthal, Charles Waller, and Frank Wimberley. Eleven other artists are participating for the first time.

The benefit’s honorary committee includes Alec Baldwin, the Rev. Denis Brunelle, Michael Cinque, Ted Conklin, Eric Fischl, Ms. Gornik, Sheldon Harnick, Charles Hitchcock, Barbara Layton, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., David Wilt, and Susan Kennedy Zeller. Ms. Layton, the owner of Babette’s restaurant in East Hampton, will receive a community spirit award.

The proceeds from the event will benefit the hospice, which is located in Westhampton but serves the entire East End, providing end-of-life care to terminally ill patients and support for their families. The facility will break ground on an inpatient center in Quiogue soon.

Late summer on the South Fork can sometimes seem like a mostly deflated balloon: paunchy, flaccid, and spent. A sense of scraping bottom often takes hold, and any new endeavor, show, or exhibition is met with suspicion or derision, often borne of the same contagious exhaustion.

An initial suspicion that the “Storage Wars” show at East Hampton’s Eric Firestone Gallery was part and parcel of this overall trend — art in storage crates? Really? — turned out to be a symptom of a larger sense of ennui and not specific to the show itself. It’s actually . . . well . . . rather good.

Context is often, if not always, the thing in viewing art, and this exhibition, which puts art objects on display with their shipping crates, plays with the white cube gallery sterility in a pleasing way, adding warmth and a further dimension to the interaction with the works.

Firestone joined with the Hole, a Lower East Side gallery with a similar sensibility and aesthetic, to present works that, while part of each gallery’s collection, rarely see the light of day. The twist, as mentioned previously, is that the works are shown in or near their crates. The show features new works recently acquired, old inventory from gallery artists, and a few secondary market pieces.

With such a focus, the show has something to say about consumption and commodification of artworks. If art’s intrinsic value is visual, shouldn’t it actually be seen? And if not, what other forces are at work?

That’s a rhetorical question, but one that bears repeating time and again. The bloated wallets and offshore bank accounts of the 1 percent have contributed to the insatiable appetite of that group’s collectors, who buy art the way others might gobble down salted peanuts. The purchase could be about the art or just as easily about having one of the next big thing’s works or beating out a competing bidder in an auction room. What if the next big thing isn’t to your taste? What happens when it gets to one of your houses, if it makes it that far?

This isn’t just a syndrome for individuals, either. Many museums, which stake their reputation on their collections, often show mere microcosms of what they have in storage, counting on temporary themed exhibitions and loans to other institutions to put their works on view.

The real question becomes “Why are these works not receiving attention? Is there anything wrong, weak, or failed about them?” In the case of this show, for the most part the answer is no. Not everything will be to one’s liking and there is a lot of that abstraction that is coming under critical scrutiny these days for being too similar and, yes, market-driven.

But I like the show. It’s exuberant and bright and doesn’t tax a late-summer brain too much. The sum is definitely stronger than the parts and the raw wood cases make a grittier and unusual foil to the often highly finished pieces within them. Each piece has a freshness about it that is derived very much from the context.

Two of my favorite pieces, recent small works by Ross Bleckner, seem to have wandered in from another planet, but are reminders as to why he is such a powerful artist. Matthew Stone’s photograph-print veneers on glass are also game, offering quite a bit to unpack in terms of medium and support as we begin to decode them.

Sanford Biggers’s happy and not-so-happy clouds, backlit in vinyl and plexiglass or drawn and spray-painted on fabric, are a great dose of whimsy for the weary viewer. It’s hard not to smile when looking at them. Evan Robart’s ball-and-chain-link fence sculpture was another piece that had a simple premise that still managed to trigger relational thinking and an appreciation for the tension between balance and irrationality.

Many of the surprises in the show came not from the unfamiliar works and artists, but from known works decontextualized in this setting. A good exhibition will offer that change up, and this one succeeds in making an end-of-season group show something to think about in the quieter months ahead.

The exhibition will be on view through Sept. 7.

For more than a half century, a group of writers and artists have met in East Hampton to duke it out for supremacy on a softball diamond. Some of the most vaunted names in American arts and letters have participated, making it an almost sacred ritual in some circles.

Yet, as in all homegrown events that began casually and humbly, the Hamptons could not leave the game alone. For many years now, the “artists” have been infiltrated by celebrity actors and the writers, mostly journalists now, appear to be rounded out by a mixed bag of broadcasters, publishers, and producers. Further, the game appears to have more corporate sponsors than some major league baseball teams.

It’s all for local charity, so it serves a higher purpose, and more glitz always equals more money on the South Fork. Still, it gives plenty of fodder for curmudgeons who bemoan the loss of the “old days.” An exhibit at Guild Hall last year, put together by some of the game’s longest participants, directed attention back to the game’s roots and meaning.

Taking up the reins this year, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller has joined with Leif Hope, who guided the game into the modern era and was one of the Guild Hall show’s organizers, to help foster a new tradition that allows some of the spotlight from the game to shine on practicing and historical South Fork artists and writers.

Lauren Miller Walsh, who coordinated the books and manuscripts for the show for Glenn Horowitz, said Mr. Hope approached them a couple of years ago around the time the Guild Hall show was being planned. The idea was to have a show where the objects on view could be sold to further benefit the local charities the game supports.

“What I had in mind,” Mr. Hope said, “was a show of artists and writers working full time, their minds not occupied doing something else.” He said the artists he chose, who include Eric Ernst, Randall Rosenthal, and Walter Bernard, may have had a long involvement with the game or merely passing participation. Audrey Flack, who is in the show, told him she played one year and was surprised she actually hit the ball. Dan Rizzie, John Alexander, Dan Christiansen, and Jim McMullen are some of the many other artists on view.

Glenn Horowitz will have a number of impressive writers represented in the literary pieces on view, which include many signed first editions. Among them are Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Roger Rosenblatt, Jay McInerney, E.L. Doctorow, Ken Auletta, Abbie Hoffman, and Walter Isaacson, some of whom still play in the game.

They also have a trove of art-related books and manuscripts, such as a collection of Franz Kline’s letters from the 1940s to 1958 to a friend who lived in Massachusetts. There are 12 in all, a rare find, Ms. Walsh said. “Letters by him don’t really come by that often.” They discuss his struggles to sell work, among other things.

In addition, rare monographs and catalogues raisonne by artists such as Elaine de Kooning and Jackson Pollock link the historical to the contemporary art. A Vonnegut lithograph with a baseball theme will round out the mix.

Another initiative for this year is a charity auction on Paddle8 that features a number of artists, some with affiliations to the game and others who just wanted to participate. The auction opened on Aug. 1 and will continue through tomorrow. The exhibition will have a reception tonight from 6 to 8 and continue through Sunday.

This year’s charities are: Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center, Phoenix House Academy, and the Retreat, which will receive 20 percent of the proceeds from the gallery sales and at least 50 percent from the auction. The link for the auction is paddle8.com/auctions/artistsandwriters/.

New at Halsey Mckay

Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is presenting two concurrent exhibitions through Aug. 24. “Waterworks” features Karl Haendel and Adam Helms, both of whom transform pre-existing images from pop culture, news media, the Internet, and other sources, in this case, water-related subjects.

“Killer Moon” is Glen Baldridge’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The works in the series are derived from images shot at night with a game camera triggered by wind, insects, and other forces. The resulting photographs are put through several subsequent processes before emerging as haunting, glowing night images.

In Storage at Firestone

In collaboration with The Hole, a New York gallery, Eric Firestone in East Hampton is presenting “Storage Wars,” a group exhibition, through Sept. 7. The premise of the show is that most art works spend far more time in storage than on view, wrapped in plastic or in crates.

Work in the exhibition is presented “as is.” The gallery is stacked with crates that are opened to reveal their previously hidden contents. Some have just arrived from overseas, some have been languishing in the galleries’ archives, and others are secondary market works.

Plank Paintings at Marder

“Jason Middlebrook: Every Tree Is a Map,” a solo exhibition of recent painting and sculpture, will be on view at Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton Saturday through Sept. 14. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

 The exhibition consists of Mr. Middlebrook’s recent plank paintings of hand-selected, rough-hewn slices of various hardwoods adorned with brightly colored patterns that use manufactured materials to mimic the trees’ natural growth rings.

Joel Gray Photographs

Turpan Sanders in East Hampton will hold a reception and book signing for Joel Grey, the Oscar, Tony, and Golden Globe-winning actor, singer, and dancer who originated the role of master of ceremonies in “Cabaret” on Broadway and on screen, Saturday afternoon from 4 to 6.

“The Billboard Papers” is the fourth book of photographs by Mr. Grey. It contains 28 full-color images of torn and decaying billboards from the streets of New York City, resembling collages with strange and unexpected layers. Published in a limited edition of 600 copies, with a preface by Ross Bleck­ner, the book retails for $95.

Art on the Green

The Montauk Artists Association will hold its 20th annual juried Fine Art Show on the Montauk Green tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday. The exhibition, including sculpture, painting, digital artwork, photography, jewelry, glass, ceramics, wood, and mixed media, affords the opportunity to meet the participating artists.

The free event will be open from noon to 6 p.m. on Friday and from 10 to 6 on Saturday and Sunday.

Water, Water Everywhere

“Water 2014,” a group show of photographs billed as “an ode to the sea,” is on view at Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor through Sept. 20. The show includes both classic and contemporary photography by Dan Jones, Karine Laval, Herb Friedman, John Margarites, Blair Seagram, Tulla Booth, Anne Gabriele, and Jay Hoops. A reception will take place Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

New at Crazy Monkey

The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will feature the art of Bobbie Braun, Anna Franklin, and Dianne Marxe from today through Aug. 31. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Ms. Braun’s paintings use a full palette to capture the power of the moment. The sea is the subject of the paintings of Anna Franklin, who was born into a family of fishermen on the Adriatic Sea in Italy. Dianne Marxe’s sculptures of animals reflect her powerful connection to their world. Works by other members of the gallery will also be on view.

“ToasT,” a new play by the acclaimed spoken-word artist and Tony Award-winning writer Lemon Andersen and directed by Elise Thoron, will be given a staged reading at Guild Hall tonight at 8. A Public Theater commission first presented at the Public’s Under the Radar festival, “ToasT” weaves characters from black oral narratives into a drama about a group of inmates at Attica during the 1971 riots at the prison.

Toasts, part of the African American oral tradition, are narratives of often urban and always heroic events, traditionally performed in pool halls, bars, and prisons. When Lemon, as Mr. Anderson is commonly known, was invited to be on Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam, it was a challenge.

“I was competing against poets who slammed,” he said. “I was a theater poet, and I had no idea what slam culture was. But I had memorized a couple of my favorite poems, and I had a Shine poem by Etheridge Knight. When I got up and did ‘Shine,’ they were laughing, it’s a really funny poem. It’s in the play now.”

It came as a surprise to him when a friend said her father used to read her the poem — actually titled “Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine,” about a black stoker aboard the Titanic who was “hip enough to flee the fucking ship and let the white folks drown” — when she was a child. “I started looking into the history of the poem and discovered Dolomite, Stackolee, Hobo Bang, and that there were these character-driven poems called toasts. That was it for me. I fell in love with that tradition.”

While in prison in the early 1990s, Mr. Anderson learned about the Attica uprising from a fellow inmate who had been there. “And it hit me. What if I stuck Dolomite in Attica during the inmate revolt?” The story grew from there, with Dolomite — “the baddest badass out of San Antone” — given the name of his arch rival, Willie Green, and other folklore heroes such as Jesse James, Hobo Ben, Stackolee, Voodoo Queen, Shine the Stoker, and Hard Rock as fellow prisoners doing hard time as word about the coming riot spread.

Willie Green is played by Keith David, a veteran stage, screen, and television actor whose credits include Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” Clint Eastwood’s “Bird,” and Paul Haggis’s Academy Award-winning “Crash.”

“Lemon and I have a mutual agent, and he spoke to her about my reading the play,” Mr. David said. “I absolutely loved it and wanted to be involved with it.” As the play developed, each of the actors had input. “Fortunately we had a playwright who was open to suggestion — not everyone is. ‘ToasT’ is a wonderful piece of work.” Originally from Harlem, Mr. David was familiar with the black narrative tradition.

In addition to Mr. David, the cast includes André De Shields, Tony Plana, Hill Harper, Armando Riesco, Kevin Mambo, Colman Domingo, and Peter McRobbie. Prime orchestra tickets are $50, $48 for members. Orchestra and balcony seats are priced at $30 and $28.

Also at Guild Hall

Guild Hall will present “Edward Villella: Live and in Person,” a 90-minute dance history program spanning his legendary career, Saturday morning at 11. Recognized as one of the world’s best male dancers, Mr. Villella has just completed a successful 25-year residency as founder and artistic director of the Miami City Ballet.

The program will utilize video clips from his many dancing roles, including performances with George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Gene Kelly. His daughter Crista will moderate the program. Prime orchestra seats are $50 and include a 10 a.m. continental brunch reception with Mr. Villella. Orchestra and balcony tickets are $35, $33 for members.

Christine Ebersole, a two-time Tony Award-winner best known for her performance in the dual roles of Edith Bouvier and Edie Beale — a k a Big and Little Edie — in the Broadway musical “Grey Gardens,” will perform her cabaret show onstage at Guild Hall Sunday at 7:30 p.m.

The versatile Ms. Ebersole has appeared on Broadway in “42nd Street,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Dinner at Eight,” and “Blithe Spirit.” Her film credits include “Amadeus,” “Tootsie,” and “Richie Rich,” and she has appeared on television in everything from “Saturday Night Live” to a plethora of dramas and sitcoms. Prime orchestra seats are $100, regular orchestra $65, $63 for members, and balcony seats go for $55 and $53.

“Stirring the Pot: Conversations with Culinary Celebrities” will feature Martha Stewart, founder of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, television host, and writer, on Sunday morning at 11. Ms. Stewart will be interviewed by Florence Fabricant, a cookbook author and food columnist for The New York Times. Tickets are $15, $13 for members.

Arlene Slavin, who is exhibiting translucent colored sculptures in Guild Hall’s garden and paintings that reflect her obsession with color, light, and shadow in the Wasserstein Family Gallery, will give a gallery talk, free with museum admission, on Sunday at 3 p.m.

Bay Street Theater’s Comedy Club will feature Robert Klein, who has sold out the Sag Harbor venue several times over the years, on Monday at 8 p.m. A Grammy and Tony Award nominee, Mr. Klein is one of the most familiar faces in comedy, having performed on stage, screen, Broadway, and television for more than 40 years.

His performance in the hit Neil Simon musical “They’re Playing Our Song” earned him a Tony nomination for best actor, and two of his albums, “Child of the Fifties” and “Mind Over Matter,” received Grammy nominations for Best Comedy Album of the year. He has appeared on “The Tonight Show” and “Late Show With David Letterman” more than 100 times.

The few remaining tickets are $69.50 and are available at the box office or baystreet.org.

 “Weimar Cabaret: When All the World Lost Its Reason,” a tribute to the songs and songwriters who flourished in Germany between World War I and the rise of Nazism, will take place at the Montauk Library Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Sung by Mark Singer and Darcy Dunn, accompanied on piano by Julia Mendelsohn, the songs will trace the censorship and impending danger faced by such writers and performers as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, who were eventually forced to leave their homeland. Among the songs are “Tell Me Tonight,” “Falling in Love Again,” and “September Song.”

Take whatever musical comedy you recall and be ready to suspend disbelief when you go, as you should, to see “My Life Is a Musical,” which had its world premiere at the Bay Street Theater on Saturday night.

Adam Overett, who wrote the music, lyrics, and book, knows what’s been on stage and in film in the last few decades, and he draws upon that familiarity in a two-act tour de force, which is both satiric and sentimental with a bit of pop psychology, romance, and Marx Brothers mayhem. They’re ingredients for success.

There are four main characters with whom you might empathize, or sometimes think you resemble, and a four-person peripatetic Greek chorus, an ensemble whose members sing and dance and change personas and costumes in the blink of an eye. With so much going on the play might well have fallen apart, but this is a talented cast who, we were told, rehearsed exhaustively, and in the hands of Marlo Hunter, the director and choreographer, they pull it off with impeccable timing. Even the silliest clichés are howls.

The hero is Parker (Howie Michael Smith), an accountant and nice guy who’s a freak because he hears everyone sing when they speak and dance when they move about, accompanied by off-stage music. He is permanently stuck “on a 1950s MGM sound stage.” It should be noted that the set on Bay Street’s semi-circular stage is primarily a series of doors, used to good effect. The musicians are above it all behind a scrim at back.

There’s the love interest, J.T. (Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone), a Pat Benatar or Cindi Lauper wannabe who can’t carry a tune so she manages a band in order to star “through someone else’s music.” Then there’s Zach (Justin Martin Sargent), a hopelessly untalented singer and guitarist in a terrible rock group called Zeitgeist. Parker’s boss sends him on tour with Zeitgeist with the idea of keeping the group from bankruptcy. Zach’s songs are atrocious. He wriggles to “I am a condor, rising over mountains, coming to eat your dead,” until Parker comes along and secretly provides the songs he’s hearing all around him. The group skyrockets to success.

And there’s Randy (Robert Cuccioli), a double-oh-seven-style blogger who wants a scoop on what’s behind Zeitgeist’s sudden success, and eventually confesses that his life isn’t a musical — it’s a spy novel! Parker has encounters with Randy at 1 a.m. in a bar called At Midnight and at a hotel called At the Corner (which is in the middle of a block). Brian Sills, Adam Daveline, Danyel Fulton, and Wendi Bergamini, the ensemble players, and the staging when Parker goes to the hotel looking for Randy, are ridiculously funny. And, of course, everyone sings.

Parker and J.T. really can sing, and in character. He has the best songs, and the most. We begin to care about him when he pleads for silence in sweet tones: “Only a breeze that rustles the trees, then perfect silence — no one to sing and dance.” As for J.T., Ms. Monteleone certainly has what it takes to belt it out, but she brings down the house when, doing karaoke in a bar in Springfield, Ill., where Zeitgeist is on tour, she is hilariously off-key.

It’s during the karaoke episode that Parker begins to realize what he’s missing by hiding the truth about his life, and although J.T. soon sends him away thinking he’s betrayed her, it’s no surprise that love takes over. He decides to come clean and chases her across the country — there are several jiggly trips by bus, train, plane, and kayak — to the Scorched Earth Festival (think Burning Man), where Zeitgeist is to star. He bursts on stage as Zach is about to sing. J.T. comes out from the wings, and Parker tells her, and the world, that his life is a musical. It even seems that she has begun to hear the music.

All good musicals need at least one song to take away as you leave the theater, and there is one here. We hear “Sing to Me” at the end of the first act after Parker, for the first time, doesn’t want the music to stop, and again in the finale when he sings, “Speak to me. All you have to do, I swear, is speak to me, and it’ll be the Symphonie Fantastique to me. I’ve never heard this melody before. My life is a musical . . . and you are the best song in the score.” Everyone joins in as the footlights fade.

My guess is that Adam Overett goes about his daily life with a song in his head. If so, “My Life Is a Musical,” which will run through the end of the month, is a metaphor taken to zany extremes.

“Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, 1944-1952” will open Saturday at Guild Hall and remain on view through Oct. 13. The exhibition will include 22 works from important private and public collections that illuminate a portion of Motherwell’s work that is not well known or often exhibited.

Phyllis Tuchman, a critic, curator, and art historian, has organized the show, which she feels is long overdue. “The retrospectives of other Abstract Expressionists, among them Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, and Newman, included those artists’ work from the 1940s,” she said. “You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of early works in Motherwell’s retrospectives, so they are relatively unknown. And some of them are astonishingly great.”

Born in Aberdeen, Wash., Motherwell grew up on the West Coast, studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, and earned a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford. In the late 1930s, working toward a Ph.D. at Harvard, he moved to Paris to further his research, but with war on the horizon returned to the United States at his father’s insistence. In 1940 he moved to New York City to study with Meyer Shapiro at Columbia.

Asthma kept the artist out of the war. During the summer of 1944, he and his first wife, Maria, rented a house in Amagansett. That fall he exhibited work at Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim’s groundbreaking gallery in Manhattan. Also that fall, the Motherwells moved to a rental on Main Street in East Hampton, and in 1946 they bought two acres on Georgica Road, where Pierre Chareau, the French architect known for his Maison de Verre in Paris, designed their house and studio from a Quonset hut. The artist divided his time between East Hampton and New York until 1953, when he sold the house to the publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press.

Ms. Tuchman pointed out that Motherwell was pivotal in bringing the Abstract Expressionists to the East End. While he was teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1945, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived in his East Hampton rental while they were house-hunting. In 1949, Leo Castelli, the art dealer, bought a house across the road from Motherwell’s. Both Elaine and Willem de Kooning spent the summers of ’52 and ’53 at the Castellis’ and in the summer of ’53, when Motherwell was not using his house, de Kooning worked in his studio.

“In a way,” Ms. Tuchman said, “the entire exhibition is bookended by Motherwell’s connection to Pollock and de Kooning.” Motherwell was a friend of Mark Rothko, too, when Rothko first visited the East End, and Clyfford Still made his first trip to East Hampton to see Motherwell.

Lenders to the exhibition include the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, the High Museum of Art, the collections of Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Dedalus Foundation, which Motherwell established.

“It’s not easy borrowing works today,” said Ms. Tuchman. “There’s a lot of wheeling and dealing, and some people were surprised I was able to get the loans I did for an institution that can’t trade with larger ones. I was fortunate that MoMA lent us ‘The Voyage,’ because once you have a masterpiece from MoMA, it becomes a little easier.”

Museums purchased Motherwell’s work during the 1940s, she noted, and the influential critic Clement Greenberg wrote enthusiastically about it. The 1945 “In Beige With Sand,” for example, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art immediately after it was exhibited at Art of This Century.

In 1985, when new owners decided to demolish the Quonset hut, there was criticism from different quarters, Mr. Rosset included. Eugene Futterman, the architect hired to build a new house on the site, said it was a wreck and there was no alternative to tearing it down. Motherwell told The New York Times he hoped the building could be saved. “I did some of the best work in my life there,” he said.

On Saturday afternoon from 3 to 4, Ms. Tuchman will moderate a panel discussion featuring Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation; Catherine Craft, associate curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and Clifford Ross, an artist. Admission is free.

Ms. Tuchman will also give a gallery talk on Motherwell at noon on Sept. 7. The publication of a full-color 120-page catalog will coincide with the opening of the exhibition.

Lady Gaga is a musical artist with a strong visual sense who transforms herself regularly from public appearance to public appearance, record to record, video to video. Robert Wilson works with performers, composers, and writers to create highly visual, mostly musical productions.

While much was made of Gaga’s collaboration with Jeff Koons on the art work for her “Art Pop” album and the related art pieces, launch parties, and joint appearances, a more satisfying union has occurred with Mr. Wilson, the results of which are on view now at the Watermill Center.

Mr. Wilson employed his signature medium of video portraits in this alliance, working on them with the performer in London in the weeks before his show “Living Rooms” opened at the Louvre in December. The subjects in this series were taken from art in the Louvre or have strong French cultural resonance, such as Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat,” the French revolutionary who was killed in his bath by Charlotte Corday.

There was a 1963 Peter Weiss play about the Marquis de Sade directing a play about Marat in an insane asylum where he was an inmate. The association with modern drama, and even a Brechtian-style musical score, may have had further resonance for Mr. Wilson’s, and the pop singer’s, own flair for the dramatic.

Lady Gaga takes up the guise of Marat, and it’s a worthy interpretation of the neoclassical David image ingrained in anyone with a hint of cultural literacy. To happen upon it just for a minute or so, it would appear the image is static, but as time passes little tics and blinks and tears appear in each of the portraits on view with more surprises worth the wait.

The other images the artist appropriates in stunning detail include Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s “Portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere‚” from 1806 and Andrea Solari’s “Head of Saint John the Baptist” from 1507. Both of these paintings are in the Louvre. And all of them, even the Ingres portrait of the teenaged girl, are about death (the subject having died not long after it was painted).

The evocation of themes of still life, specifically memento mori and vanitas, carry over into these modern recreations. Rebels like St. John the Baptist and Marat lived dangerously and perhaps courted death, but even the young and innocent are not immune to its fickle nature. In today’s culture, is there anything that evokes vanity more than pop celebrity? Lady Gaga, with her own cultish following, is a suitable icon for this kind of treatment, and her chame­leon-like transformations into these subjects is striking.

“Flying,” an unrelated image of the artist upside-down, naked, and bound in the form of Japanese shibari, is fascinating as well in this context. Throughout the exhibition Mr. Wilson merges classical imagery and its timeless themes with traditional theatrical techniques and modern high-definition technology. Here the motion is more explicit and the presentation black-and-white and lo-fi. In this context, however, the binding loses its inherent titillating properties and adopts a more meditative tone, becoming a reflection on the human spirit bound on earth, a medieval Western theme with parallels to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Except for the Solari work, the images are presented on single large-format high-definition screens at opposite ends of the gallery. On the walls in between, details of John’s head in the silver salver are done serially. Instead of recreating the scene entirely, in these works Lady Gaga’s features are super-imposed on the actual painting. This gives the series an eerie, animated quality, bringing to mind the rigor mortis of severed heads and the classic horror-film trope of the portrait with moving eyes.

The works are on view through Sept. 14.