That gruesome photograph of Whitney Houston’s last supper, first posted on TMZ shortly after her death, stuck in the visual memory of the German photographer Thomas Demand. There were the remains of room service delivered to her at the Beverly Hilton Hotel: a rolling table draped with a soiled tablecloth on which were a partially eaten hamburger and French fries, a Heineken can, a Champagne glass and a small white vase with purple flowers.


“I don’t have anything to say about Whitney Houston,” Mr. Demand explained in a telephone interview. Rather, it was the way the shot itself had the quality of a 17th-century Dutch still life that intrigued him.


“The proliferation of that kind of image at the time when she was not even in the coffin amazed me,” Mr. Demand said. “It amazed me that it would ever have been released.”


So he decided to recreate it.


First he checked into the Beverly Hilton, in a room with the exact layout of Houston’s. Then he ordered the same food, he assumed from news reports, that she had ordered.


The shot could be seen as an intimate glimpse of the circumstances surrounding Houston’s death, but to Mr. Demand it was more than that. It was also an impersonal setting: a hotel room that could have been anywhere, a meal that could have been ordered by anyone. His own version of the scene, called “Junior Suite,” is part of an exhibition opening on May 5 at the Matthew Marks Gallery on West 22nd Street in Chelsea.


“I am neither a detective nor a policeman nor a journalist,” Mr. Demand said. “So I took that image as a point of departure.”


He was more precise, however, when composing another image, which is also to be in the show. It is a photograph of the vault containing 30 paintings and sculptures worth millions of dollars that had been missing for decades until they were unearthed at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris by the French police.


The canvases had been carefully turned around so that all that was visible were the backs of paintings, leaning against the walls, leaving viewers to imagine what they were. The vault itself, a long room with steel beams, Mr. Demand said, made the paintings look “like frames within frames.”


He was able to obtain images from the French police, and he reconstructed the scene as accurately as possible. “I like the idea of vanishing images,” he said. “There’s something surreal about that.”


MET AUDIO TOUR UPDATED


With all the talk about technology and museums — the Google Art Project, smartphone apps — many tech-aware people probably assume that the museum audio tour has gone the way of the typewriter. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at least, some 200,000 visitors a year still enjoy being guided through the galleries the old-fashioned way: with a hand-held device that delivers a comforting voice of authority.


Playing to this loyal throng Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, has released a new museum tour. The last iteration, which came out in 1999, featured the aristocratic tones of Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s previous director, who recorded the tour himself in five of the eight languages on offer. This time around only the English version features the voice of the director, Mr. Campbell, who leaves the Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean versions to the pros.


“Forty percent of our visitors are international,” he said. So in addition to the choice of languages on the tour there are free floor plans in 11 languages, including Portuguese, Russian and Arabic.


This audio guide will be one of several ways to learn about the Met. “There’s no question that we are seeing a transition more and more toward the use of smart phones,” Mr. Campbell said in a telephone interview. “And we are in the process of wiring our galleries so people can download tours from our Web site to their phones.” Realizing that an institution like the Met can be daunting, especially to first-time visitors, Mr. Campbell said, the new guide offers more of a walking tour than simply a run-through of greatest hits. His version is filled with anecdotes from the museum’s 142-year history. Users can visit parts of the museum as they wish or take a tour that gives them a broad sampling.


The audio guide ($7; $6 for members; $5 for children under 12) offers 3,600 descriptions of works in the permanent collection by Mr. Campbell and curators — 110 hours of commentary. And every year the Met will add some 250 more explanations about additional works of art.


Among the highlights on the new tour: the Temple of Dendur, a prayer niche from 14th-century Iran, El Greco’s celebrated landscape “View of Toledo” and the Saint-Gaudens sculpture “Diana” in the American Wing.


NEW TRIENNIAL CURATORS


“The Ungovernables,” the New Museum’s triennial exhibition, is winding down. Curators are dismantling the show floor by floor and it will close Sunday. But Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director, is already on to the next.


The 2015 triennial will be organized by the museum’s adjunct curator, Lauren Cornell, and the adventurous video artist Ryan Trecartin. Ms. Cornell is also executive director of Rhizome, an affiliate new-media organization based at the museum, and will step down from that post in July.


“I appointed Lauren, and she immediately came up with the idea of inviting Ryan to co-curate it with her,” Ms. Phillips said.


The recurring exhibition, which showcases a young generation of international artists, began in 2009 with “The Generational: Younger than Jesus.” Both that show and “The Ungovernables” established the triennial as the institution’s signature exhibition, with each drawing more than 100,000 visitors.