Its sheer spectacle inspires brief awe, then you figure it out, and it is reduced to technology, and fun. The fun is especially dense in the large, somewhat lighter areas of the drill hall floor called “clearings,” where the captured images erode more slowly. Visitors hold and repeat deliberate poses — for a kind of Muybridge, stop-motion effect. Or they collaborate, joining hands in rings. Dancers and yoga devotees may especially revel.

A timeline of the history of surveillance, meanwhile, makes one thing abundantly clear: Privacy is over. But if it’s any consolation, you can leave with a printout of your own image, seen from the vantage point of dear old Big Bro.

Writing from inside Yank’s deepest desires, dreams, and innocence, O’Neill created one of his more densely and poetically conceived scripts, about a world where language and the body confuse one another, and end up cancelling each other out.

“Few institutions have been as adept at pushing the cultural FOMO button that New Yorkers hate almost as much as slush puddles and bedbugs. ‪De Materie‬, seems poised to become one of the most talked-about events of the spring season.”

“Roderick Williams proved a natural and expressive communicator, with Susie Allan’s elegant playing an ideal foil for his eloquent delivery. He imbued each song with myriad colorful nuances, his rich, burnished baritone lovely throughout the evening.”

The fraught interiority of the xx’s music found an almost perfect expression in this stark but dynamic staging that suggested a meditation on distance and scale (and scarcity, at least where tickets were concerned). In an age of ballooning pop spectacle, here was an act of spectacular compression, one that served both to illuminate the songs and to interrogate their premise.

Blood, excrement, alcohol and M & Ms flew through the air as Mr. McCarthy took down targets ranging from Walt Disney (“WS” stands for Snow White backward), himself (the ranch house was a replica of his childhood home) and America’s lust for bigness and waste.

Long the most impressive interior space in New York, the Park Avenue Armory—in the midst of a sensitive rehab by Herzog & de Meuron, allowing us to see anew some of the best woodwork in town—is now even greater. It has been playing host to excellent performances, exhibitions, lectures, and all-out art installations. Being in a space so sumptuous and perfectly restored with virtually anything is a fantastic experience—as close to Rome as many of us might get, and by subway.

The play includes a snippet from the future as well: an imagined version of her funeral, which she asked Mr. Wilson to create. “Marina told me a lot of stories about her parents and family situations, the loves in her life and the sorrows,” said Mr. Wilson. “I constructed them into a visual poem about her life. I did it in my way.”

The glimmer of gold leaf is a sure giveaway to painstaking preservation as we expect it to be: involving experts in arcane crafts, scaffolding in the highest places and scores of Q-tips deployed in bringing back the original as exactly as possible… but go to the Park Avenue Armory, another landmark transformed into a performance and event space, to see a different approach to preservation. This one allows “age lines”—traces of alterations from different eras, and even the memory of past damage—to show through in the pursuit of something more vibrant than a one-dimensional re-creation. Park Avenue Armory asks us to pay closer attention to a space where history is still alive and under way.

Hollywood and the mechanics of film fantasy are a primary source of his art. This is particularly true of the recent works that tend to be big-budget projects, now that the market has finally discovered him. The Armory installation, his biggest so far, is a compendium of signature ingredients: violence, humor, sex, impotence, appetite, degradation, art history, politics and pop culture. The piece is based on two intersecting elements: the 1937 Disney animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and the suburban home of Mr. McCarthy’s childhood.

On Wednesday night, in the first of nine performances (three have been added to the initial run by popular demand), the armory presented another Stockhausen spectacular: “Oktophonie,” a 70-minute, electronic work in which the audience sits in the midst of eight speakers, which were placed as if in the corners of a cube. An audience of 375 (the maximum) sat in a circle as an eight-channel digital recording of “Oktophonie” was played, with Kathinka Pasveer, the sound projectionist, at the control board in the middle of the audience. The visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, in keeping with Stockhausen’s request that “Oktophonie” be experienced as it might be in outer space, turned the Drill Hall into a sort of lunar landscape.

Ernesto Neto offers another trip into maternal space with “anthropodino,” a spectacular installation of gauzy Lycra fabric, dangling pods, dinosaurish wooden bones and cavernous interiors. Occupying much of the Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000 square foot, 80-foot high Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Mr. Neto’s ethereal construction glows like a magical destination in a children’s movie.

The impressive Bochum Symphony, conducted by Steven Sloane in a tour de force, is positioned on a series of platforms on either side of the audience seating area. The high-tech set allows the audience to be close to the action as the audience seats flow gently up the length of the runway to the crossbar of the T. The production makes this former military drill hall seem almost intimate. Not everyone who wants to see it will be able to do so, but those who do will experience a miraculous realization of an opera once deemed unperformable.”

For nearly 10 minutes, a dozen bikers wheeled, skidded and fishtailed their heavy machines across a 72-by-128-foot surface of plywood, burning random lines through a layer of black paint to reveal shades of fluorescent orange beneath. Named after a 1944 Jackson Pollock painting, “Greeting Card” expanded exponentially on Harold Rosenberg’s characterization of the Abstract Expressionist canvas as “an arena in which to act.” It was action painting with lots of horsepower.