Just as its majestic architecture and entrance-adorned with floor fountains and an airport-like glass pavilion that swallows natural light-never fail to impress, the Brooklyn Museum always has an eclectic and stimulating mix of installations and exhibitions on show.

At this writing, among the long-term installations is “Rodin: The Cantor Gift to the Brooklyn Museum”, which showcases twelve sculptures including La Porte de l’Enfer (The Gates of Hell), a preeminent commissioned group work completed by Rodin and other artists depicting a scene from Dante’s Inferno. On a more modish and whimsical note, there are 21st century walk-through exhibitions, including Taiwanese-born American artist Lee Mingwei’s “The Moving Garden.”

An Eye on Minority Groups

Yet from the ongoing set of over two dozen installations and exhibitions, what stands out are a few that serve as direct reminders of the long-ago-steep-and-still-evolving inequalities of power in contemporary American society. These include photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ “The Latino List”, similar to his “The Black List Project” exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. Also, on view in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is “Eva Hesse Spectres 1960”, showcasing for the first time nineteen oil paintings by a twenty-four-year-old Hesse, who became after her death an important twentieth century female artist who struggled for recognition in what was (and still is) a male-dominated art industry, recognized as an innovator in her use of latex, fiberglass and plastics.

Below are two more noteworthy shows that function as food for thought in the arena of dominant-minority power relations. Through the symbolic language of visual art, they provide conceptual stimulus to those who wish to reexamine the minority experience in America.

Michael Rolando Richard’s Untitled

Relevant quote: “Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.” –Langston Hughes

Minority group: African Americans, also victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack

On display as part of the exhibition Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered, is Michael Richard’s Untitled, a poetic and poignant sculpture. Untitled is the artist’s homage to the first black pilots in US military history-known as Tuskegee Airmen-who served honorably during the Second World War yet at the same time faced institutional segregation and stringent discrimination. Tuskegee Airmen were just as much officially part of the US military as they were kept out of it.

Richards (1963-2001), an accomplished African American sculptor of Jamaican and Costa Rican descent, died in his work studio in the World Trade Centre during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hence, the sculpture can also be viewed as a commemorative piece for all those who perished in the World Trade Center, symbolizing hope amid adversity and the resiliency of the human spirit. Viewing the sculpture on its own, and then seeing it through the label and frame of this exhibition, then introduces an ideological dialogue comprised of two recurring themes in the minority experience. On the one hand, there is the power and comfort of a stable sense of group belonging and identity in a discriminatory culture that amplifies the importance of social categories. On the other hand, pushing back is the desire to forge forward with one’s own individualistic identity, one-like Richard’s mixed sense of being African, Caribbean and South American—that eludes and breaks free from categorization.

Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party

Minority group: females

Relevant quote: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”  -Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

The Dinner Party, a landmark masterpiece of 20th century feminist art, invites the audience to reflect on the legal, cultural and other material changes brought about by the first, second and third waves of feminism. The installation walks the viewer through a dinner table chronologically set with distinct dinnerware and flatware for women celebrity invitees, all of whom had changed the course of Western history, from the ancient amorous poet Sappho to Joan of Arc to Georgia O’ Keefe.

The installation begins with an introductory video featuring Chicago explaining her process and the collective effort it took to complete The Dinner Party. Upon exiting, it compels viewers to reflect on the achievements attained by the Women’s Rights movement in the West, especially its mushroom cloud growth over the past century and a half, and to ask themselves whether we are truly living-as many believe-in a post-feminist age.

Chicago’s magnum opus serves as an architectural scale reminder of the all-too-familiar freedoms we-men and women, white or colored, straight, gay or transgender-take for granted in a stage in American history that has fully bloomed in its political correctness.

“You have one book in your entire apartment?” It was more a statement than a question.

“Yeah. You know, I hate to read.” Furkan answered with a moderate Turkish accent, colored with some elements of a New Jersey youth culture twang. He must have picked it up from his undergraduate students.
The book sat atop his computer desk next to two undamaged Star Trek figurines. It was a thick, block-like paperback, with lightweight pages that gave it the same level of dignity and cultural import as a version of the White Pages. Hacker’s Handbook.

“The last book I read was like, six years ago. It was Lord of the Rings, translated into Turkish. I read all of the Harry Potter books, but, it was an audio book, you know, so…maybe it doesn’t count.”

I lifted Hacker’s Handbook to shoulder level. “Why are you reading this?”

He smiled boyishly, with chin slightly upturned—he suddenly appeared like a fifteen year old. Then, with the crispness of a radio commercial’s finishing line, he answered, “I am a hacker.”

“You are?” My face broke into the widest smile, a successful attempt at restraining laughter. It sounded silly and playful, coming from a grown, extensively trained engineer.

This time he did not reply, but returned a telltale smile that communicated the affirmative.

Furkan Cayci is a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware. A native of Istanbul, he emigrated from his vibrant, the-Orient-Meets-Europe hometown, home to one of the world’s oldest and most admired open markets, for an unknown college town in the Northeast Coast bordering two unknown non-college towns—Elkton, MD and Bear, DE—to earn his doctoral degree. He invested four years of his precious and irretrievable twenties in the Newark, DE campus, with a projected few more years ahead before he can leave with his Ph.D.

It is often said that if you want to know about someone in ten seconds, look at the shoes or watch that person is wearing, or rummage through that person’s garbage bin. What people do and do not consider garbage—and the particular garden variety of trash they have on a random day when they’ve freshly placed their garbage container by the curbside—will tell you a few things about them. Similarly but more intimately, the books and publications people have at home is one window of transparency to their mind, to the innards of their mortal hopes, and fears and desires. With the one lonely publication in Furkan’s apartment being Hacker’s Handbook—no worn paperbacks flimsy at the edges, no old magazines, not even travel pamphlets or booklets that accompany electronic gadgets—I felt as though the book assumed (unbeknownst to its proprietor) a dodging-ly regal status in the home, a text that was part Bible, part technical manual, part layman’s philosophy that explained the illuminating rationale behind one deliberately chosen paradigm of intellectual inquiry.

“The Harry Potter audio book is so good, I mean, the way the narrator says the story. But it’s like, nine hours total.”

I flipped to the introduction of the Handbook. While these statements are not verbatim, I recall reading something analogous to these that inspired me with the idea to write this piece: hacking has been elevated from the purely technical realm of science and engineering to that of an art…one that can be mastered. The terms “elegance”, “expression” and “think outside the box” each appeared once. The author beautifully defined hacking as using current laws, regulations and constraints (in the hardware, software, computer networking and systems universe)—playing by them, which is quite the opposite of breaking them—in creative and unconventional ways to solve problems and attain one’s goal.

Elevated…to that of an art. The next day, as I reflected on my conversation with Furkan, my thoughts kept returning to a familiar idea: the dog-eat-dog world of global commerce and marketing we live in has reached such a mature, boisterous, niche-specialized and hyperkinetic stage to the point that every commodity can be—is—called an “art.” A few years ago I read a book entitled The Art of Conversation; a month ago I stumbled upon an article entitled “The Art of Making Pruno”, i.e., homemade liquor (of questionable ethanol content) popular in the California prison system, which is made from fruit, sugar and ketchup left to ferment in a garbage bag. At the risk of sounding transparent, I have done the same thing with the title of this piece. While the “art” label is a not-so-cunning marketing device employed by advertisers and writers aiming to grab a morsel of the public’s appetite for media discourse, such labels appear to be digested without passing thought by its information-overloaded consumers. Perhaps in the future, calling anything outside the realm of the fine, visual and performing arts an “art” may become as much of a cliché as “fingernails down a blackboard”, appearing on handouts in high school creative writing classes as technical no-no’s.

Yet, returning to the idea that hacking has, in the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century, become an art form—it still begs the question: is it art? How so? And—the key question I wanted to ask and the heart of my curious interests—at what level of competency and how specifically does productive work in computer engineering become an “art”, if at all?

I later learned that Furkan had just returned from Las Vegas, where he travelled with his research group at the University—a total of some nine individuals—to attend the 2011 Def Con Conference. Def Con is the longest running and one of the world’s largest hacker conventions taking place annually in Las Vegas, where anyone from tech newbies to the Olympiad hackers congregate for several days to attend talks, play competitive hacker games, and more importantly to socialize with their kin, meet people for networking and to find work.

After nearly a week of convincing and reminding, Furkan graciously relented and made efforts to guarantee me an appointment with two scholars in his research group under the mentorship of Professor Chase Cotton and Professor Fouad Kiamilev. What follows are excerpts from the interview with Dr. Cotton, Senior Scientist and Associate Director for Cyber Security at University of Delaware’s Center for Information and Com-munications Sciences, and Rodney McGee, a native of Delaware, a doctoral student in Computer Engineering, and a fellow attendee at this year’s DEF CON conference.

Conversation with Computer Engineers

Q: Why do some people consider hacking an art?

Professor Cotton: When a new knowledge domain develops, for a long time we don’t understand it and those who get good at it, they don’t know why they’re good at it. They just get good at it. At that point we consider it an art. We say it is a black art. Nobody understands why, right? It’s the magician…

At some point all that knowledge becomes trainable. We put people in classes like we did last week [at a conference in Dover, DE] and they can learn some of those things, but some of it is still not definable, and that’s why we use the word ‘art’ in science. I as a teacher, I can’t break it down and teach a class why this particular security researcher had this “Aha!” moment to go investigate this thing that none of us had thought about. But is it art? No. It’s just like any other kind of inventive [endeavor]…but it’s like art in the artistic sense. He’s very good at what he does, he can paint well, and he does things nobody else can do because he’s far in his head.

Rodney McGee: More broadly, I guess, I think any engineer worth their weight, is essentially doing to some degree artistic kind of work. Because if you’re asking someone to design something that has already been designed, that’s not a job for a good engineer, that’s a job for a bad engineer. But, in a sense the idea of designing, creating something that works, that does a specific purpose but also works in a certain way, and design that, any good engineer is a good artist.

Actually in our group, a lot of the people here are either musicians or other stuff. In our group, we look for engineers who have these extracurriculars because they tend to be better engineers, they tend to think outside the box. You can’t just have the left without the right side of your brain. And especially when it comes to hacking, where…the point of hacking is to do something or use something in a way that it wasn’t intended, to take advantage of a particular problem with something in an imaginative way and people who think outside of the box are better hackers and better thinkers.

I think there are certain programmers and certain people who probably don’t have much of a creative aspect of the work that they do, but none of the work that they do is significant or has any lasting impact on society or systems. So there are people who do that, and it is a different kind of expression.

If you look at a lot of even early artists—early scientist artists I should say—you’ll see a lot of…[for instance] Da Vinci was a great person who both designed things, toyed around with things but also did art. I think one of the big problems with society is that we’ve divided technical people and artistic people and said they need to be separate and actually in all the experience I’ve had, the people who are best in their field are the people who tend to bridge those gaps and are interested in broad backgrounds, the people who challenge the standard way of doing things or they create their new path.

Q: Can you give examples of how hacking is like art?

PC: I’m a programmer. I write programs to do things. You can be a wonderful programmer and still never write anything anybody cares about. It [may be] something that is useful to me, but it never becomes a commercial program. Even if I give it away for free, nobody ever cares about it. Maybe it’s just the wrong program, maybe it’s not pretty, it doesn’t have sizzle.

It’s just like someone who is technically a good artist, like a painter, may never be successful because of not having an aesthetic philosophy. He can be very technically good, but it’s just a flower in the vase. [smiles]

RM: So in technology there’s a lot of leaders and followers just like there is in art. A lot of times when something new is created—even in technology—it’s not immediately said this is the right way to go. Sometimes it takes 20 years for a technology that’s invented to actually have people say yeah that’s actually the right way to do things or that is an interesting new way to look at things. That’s the same reason why programming languages are created. Theoretically you can write any program in the same language, it could never change. But programming languages are actually created because the language doesn’t express certain ideas well. And so when you’re trying to do certain kinds of things, it’s almost like it’s not the right medium, or not the right this kind of thing because it’s not the right tool for the job. So that’s why languages are created.

Q: What do you think of the popular notion held by mainstream society that computer programmers are for the most part left-brainers, people who excel in quantitative and logical aspects of intelligence but who are somewhat devoid of the creative aspect?

PC: I don’t buy that. That’s what makes a good program. It’s the human factor part of the program. It’s how people use it. Does it do something interesting nobody ever thought of—that’s the creative part. Putting it in codes still requires somebody who’s talented knowing that it is a neat program that people will like. That is the creative part.

RM: The interesting thing is that a lot of people view technical things as there being one right way of doing things. That really couldn’t be more wrong. There’s a thousand choices, and there’s certain choices which have a certain elegance and have other consequences which may even be inconsequential, but are more about the style and how you do things, and it’s really difficult to know those decisions, how you make them earlier, how they’ll impact you later. When you design something like that, there’s a lot of intuition, there’s a lot of creativity, and it’s really a flowing kind of thing where you improve, you perfect, but in a sense there is not one perfect thing. You work towards a perfection on an individual line of an idea and that idea might have certain advantages over other ideas.

Q: Which classification of hackers collectively do the most damage, or have the potential to do the most damage, to industrial and governmental networks and systems?

PC: I think we live in a world right now where the really bad guys are professional computer scientists and they are out working for large enterprises whose job is to make money by doing bad things. They were trained just like me. They have CS degrees, they know all the techniques. There are high school kids, there are people who don’t work for a living in the business who learn how to do this, but I think largely people are trained.

Q: In layman’s terms, can you explain what a ‘white hat’ hacker is?

PC: If you’re a big company you may have a question. You may go “How insecure is my company?” That’s ended up being a business. Little security companies form and they sell their services to go to a big company and under contract they will in fact try to—under very constrained conditions, with very set rules—they’ll try to break into the company that they’re hired to break into. And these class of companies are typically known as pentesters, stands for “penetration testers”. What these guys were doing last week at the camp was teaching them [graduate students] a little about that business.

Q: How has hat hacking in general and “black hat” hacking in particular (i.e. criminal or negative hacking as opposed to hacking to test and improve security systems) changed and evolved since the dawn of the Internet?

PC: This is business now. People sitting in commercial office buildings in Eastern Europe and Russia and China and in the United States basically crafting very complex programs to steal money out of ATM machines all over the world at the same time. This is not a few kids in the basement anymore.

“Because, anytime it’s [about] ‘Why do you rob banks?’ ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ Well, this is about economics. People don’t, hackers largely don’t…20 years ago they want to make a name for themselves by making stuff go down. Now, they don’t want stuff to go down, they want it to stay up because they want to make money from it. As long as there’s economic incentive, there will be bad guys.”

RM: In the beginning hacking was mainly about exploration, fun, maybe a little pride, bragging, things like that. We’re talking in the nineties. Things like the Melissa virus. They’d mess up your computer. When we entered the early 2000’s, pretty much everything is financially motivated. What’s interesting is in the last year, political or social hacking has been thrown into there…what you’re going to see is hacking as a tool for free speech and as a tool for change.”

As more and more of society becomes electronic…as infrastructure becomes more electronic, you’re going to see protests which are people hacking into things and shutting things down. I mean who cares if you barricade the building if all the business happens electronically?

The people who make up hackers are actually pretty much a direct reflection of society. Hackers come from society. So there’s a mix of people who just do things for money, exploit people, exploit companies, exploit problems. There’s people who are the good guys, they always do good stuff. And there’s the middle, the gray. And I think that’s where most people are. That’s our government. [laughs]

Q: Would you say that programmers who could be said to practice the ‘art’ of hacking are those who function at a very high level with what they can do technically? In your experience, are they for the most part high school technophile kids, professionally trained computer and electronics engineers or something else?

PC: The true stars—and this goes back to the art thing—this all revolves around intellectual curiosity. People who really excel in this excel in a very narrow area. They become experts at one tiny little thing and they become the world’s expert in this one tiny thing, and they put out information, publish things about the area, and they do that because they are curious.

In the old days, 25 years ago, I write a program and I write it improperly. I hadn’t set a variable to some value and I run the program and the program crashes. I would look at the program, figure out what the mistake is, fix it and move on. What started all this is somebody 20 years ago who went, “why does the program crash?” And investigated .“Oh, it’s because I didn’t set this variable.” All the rest of us stopped. But that person said “what did it do to the program to make the program crash?” And what they learned was that it actually overwrote some the program in a way that if they were very careful, it actually could take control of the program. And that’s what started all of this. It was something called buffer overflow. And so it’s those people who become experts at very narrow areas that are the true stars. And they come from all fields, they come from all walks of life, they’re not kids in the basement.

Q: In your experience, the best hackers have been from which countries?

RM: Long winters tend to create really good hackers. Being stuck in a room with a box. I think there something to that. Places that are really shitty, tend to make really good hackers because you want to stay inside and stay on the computer.

Q: Explain some of the competitive games played at Def Con.

RM: “Capture the Packet” is about, there’s certain [network] traffic going on—it can be anything, an IM conversation, someone on Facebook, someone watching a streaming Netflix video—and it’s about watching that traffic and analyzing it to figure out what’s really going on. So kind of, capture the packet is really they send you a lot of data and it’s about seeing the trees through the forest so to speak. The actual contest is answering questions, which you should be able to answer if you can understand the traffic going by you, like a river flowing by.

Furkan Cayci: (joining the discourse) It’s basically you’re outside of the room and your looking from the gap and there are a lot of people inside the room. And you’re trying to figure out what they are talking about. They do not know about your existence but you are trying to just figure out what people are saying. But that’s just one of the contests.

RM: Now “Capture the Flag” is about breaking into things, defending things.

FC: That is actually the ultimate.

RM: Well, there are different skill sets.

FC: Here’s the thing. In order to break into someone else’s computer, there are some services running. This can be a web service. But, the problem is, you need to be able to understand how it works, and then try to figure out the flaws in that system, try to exploit them, by reverse engineering the code or reverse engineering the system and try to find a way to get in.

Q: What are your thoughts on the future of hacking and computer and network security systems over the next 10-20 years?

PC: We’re definitely going through a transition where everything you do now is on a computer. Everything you do for your job, everything to keep your household running. Most of our parents run computers and Facebook and Google and twittering. Everything economically, your banking, all your stocks…we’re very dependent on all of that and that infrastructure, good as it is, is still kind of fragile.

It’s going to take awhile. HTTPS [Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure], the Secure, when the web first came in—maybe in the early 90’s late 80’s—when we were on the Arbinet and we started to be commercial, if you had gone to somebody like me whose job it was to build networks, we would all say “oh, no doctor will ever put anything on the web. Nobody will ever buy anything. It’s totally insecure. Well, we fixed that. HTTPS largely made it safe enough that you can bank, you can buy things from Amazon, the dcortors in the hospitals have no problem moving x-rays back and forth to the hospital. We’ve made that hurdle, now we have to go through the next refinement. It’s the next level of stuff so people don’t get their e-mail accounts stolen and they don’t get phished…it’s a stairstep.
It is clearly an arms race. The good guys put in some new mechanism that makes something a little safer and the bad guys find a way around it. It just goes back and forth and that’s always going to be true.”

In Conclusion: The Romanticism

“Computer hacker” is a glamorous, sexy and romanticized term in this day and age. Glamorous in part because it is a double edged symbol in a globalized economy and society that is increasingly dependent on secure computer networks and systems. As a class of individuals with a highly technical and esoteric skill set, on the one hand they stand as Internet-age symbols of the logical prowess and operative talent of the human mind, and on the other hand the misuse of intelligence and its costly societal ramifications. Like professional artists, as Dr. Cotton stated, the “true heroes”, the master artists among hackers are those who can do things and envision things nobody else can because they’re far in their head, because the thirst of their intellectual inquisitiveness to understand how things work has led them far ahead in expertise in one very narrow field. Is it art? Can it be called art? I’m reluctant to apply the term with any touch of seriousness—even with the tone of sardonic humor—to the making Pruno. But for all the creative capacities of computer programmers, especially those who compete at the higher tiered contests at Def Con, there may be something to this.

As the Highline glowed in the sunshine of a Fashion Week afternoon, the streets of the Meatpacking District bustled with photographers aiming massive lenses at the thinnest of models and hulking black SUVs idling near velvet-roped sidewalks. A crowd slowly gathered on the Highline in anticipation of Hally McGehean’s outdoor display of dresses made from laminated images of things like lipsticks, guns, and watches. The ginger-haired designer and her cortege of plastic and flesh soon arrived, led by Jocelyn Saldana, a beautiful young actress and spirited nightlife persona. Behind her, Rhyan Hamilton wore a McGehean creation composed of images of Lady Gaga. Known as the Monsters Ballgown, the outfit consists of a skirt and crown made entirely of Gaga photos. The final model in the retinue was the stunning Darian Darling, whose dress was made from images of strutting runway models doing exactly what she was doing at that very moment. I approached and congratulated McGehean, who wore one of her own garments. She then hurried off to review the models’ progress, merrily pulling laminated business cards off her dress and handing them to tourists who seemed rather bewildered but satisfied that they had somehow taken part in the Fashion Week revelry.

When viewing McGehean’s constructions from a design perspective, a salient contrast exists between the time that she must invest in culling and assembling photos and the rapid blur with which these images race past us in TV commercials, billboards, and web and print ads. McGehean’s work is also in line with other artists and designers who have served as conceptual bridges between Pop art and fashion, from Warhol’s own collaborations with Sarah Dalton on a dress made of prints of “FRAGILE” shipping labels to contemporary designs by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

As one reviewer of McGehean’s collection states, “In a glamorous Warholian vein, many pieces revel in their appropriation, with some dresses explicitly entitled ‘Plagiarism,’ as the images exist relatively unaltered yet decontextualized hanging from the human frame.” Given the designer’s still growing position in this Pop lineage, it was rather fitting that Darian Darling wore a McGehean dress made from laminated ostrich feather photos to a Standard party held in honor of Lady Gaga, who is perhaps Warhol’s greatest inheritor. In video footage of the event, the pop queen joyfully twirls her teal hair while Darling dances alongside her, the ivory scale-like components of her plastic dress swaying with her.

Overall, the McGehean collection is an impressive array of dresses that serves as a kind of inventory of images that currently grip the public gaze, just as the Pop art of the 1960s is a documentation of the commercial fixations of its age. Another quality is the fact that McGehean’s models wear what is essentially an assemblage of images that usually demand closer contemplation, like magazine ads and photo spreads. Each model thereby becomes a kind of exhibition on legs. At a Soho showcase of the collection, the video artist Derek Mega remarked, “McGehean took a rolling pin to fashion, turning the model into the gallery in a world of provocative and whimsical meta-art.” Such whimsy was undoubtedly in the air during McGehean’s Highline show. As the parade of plastic garments strutted past people catching the last of summer’s sun rays, the power of Pop was in evidence. The couture was crafted not from materials indiscernible to the average person but from the vibrant images that swirl around us endlessly.

Sure, the Brooklyn-based Kramer will certainly get you laughing, but it isn’t all jokes, either. Beneath the initial, shallow layer of humor, his work evokes a sense of nostalgia, and sometimes even regret. It’s funny to read, “Not that I’m complaining… But I just thought that the future was supposed to have a few more bells and whistles,” written upon an image of a man leaning upon a futuristic, utopian sphere reminiscent of the skyline at Disney World’s Epcot (Glimpse into the Future, 2011). But when the smile fades off of the viewer’s face, he might find himself actually nodding in agreement. What first comes across as a self-indulgent, self-deprecating expression of Kramer’s inner psyche might in fact hold the key to larger questions of contemporary life and the revised meaning (or lack thereof) of the American Dream.

Kramer utilizes appropriation, text, sculpture, installation, and various mixed media in creating his clever point-of-view. Postcard-perfect scenes featuring colorful, smiling faces serve as a background for Kramer’s musings on love, money, and the meaning of it all; the resulting effect is both playful and contemplative, with a wry twist. As a commentary on the drinking habits of artists (including, of course, himself), Kramer constructed a cozy wine bar in the corner of the gallery, surrounded by his works. Another highlight is After Party Painting, a large-scale scene of indulgence and excess; beside a roaring fire, a dozen sexy women, transplanted straight the imagination of the swingin’ 60s, wine and dine among a sole man who could be Hugh Hefner’s twin. Framed in futuristic silver and accented by a Flavin-esque neon light, its color and suggestion evoke the emotional agitation of German Expressionism.

Until October 2nd, “The Hangover, Too” will be at Mulherin + Pollard, an amusing take the artist’s definition of the “good” life.