THERE are plenty of people rooting for this latest Whitney Biennial, hoping it recalibrates the image of the art world as something other than youth-besotted and money-obsessed. It's a start, just barely. I imagine it will provoke much head scratching by uninitiated visitors. This typically huge exhibition is very much an insider's affair, a hermetic take on what has been making waves. It will seem old hat to aficionados and inscrutable to many others.

Maybe it's impossible, or impossible for the Whitney, to do a show today that doesn't seem beholden to fashion and, for art world types, familiar. Francesco Vezzoli's movie-star-studded version of a trailer for Gore Vidal's "Caligula" was a one-note gag when it was screened at the Venice Biennale; it's a tired joke the second time around.

A biennial can have many purposes. This one is partly about preaching to the converted. It is packaged -- branded might be the better word -- as a show long on collaboration and open-endedness: several shows under one roof. But it has other goals, too. You wouldn't say bliss is one of them. Not much in it leaps out as simply beautiful, with a few exceptions. Paul Chan's digital animation orchestrates images of shadowy objects like cellphones and bicycles, floating upward, Wizard of Oz-like, while bodies tumble down, the work cast as if it were light from a tall window slanting onto the floor of a dark room.

And Pierre Huyghe's film, shot in Antarctica and Central Park, is really gorgeous: crosscut between day and night, fiction and reality, it encapsulates the show's operative -- but ultimately airy -- metaphor about the slippery state of art now. ("Day for Night" is the biennial's first-ever title, after the François Truffaut film.)

If the exhibition is short on easy pleasures, of course nobody said art had to be easy. The organizers are Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne. European-born, they've brought in many foreigners (the traditional Americanness of the show long ago ceased to have meaning), and they recognize, which Americans are often reluctant to do, that the flow of influence has been going both ways across the Atlantic for a while. The impact of Europeans like Martin Kippenberger and Thomas Schütte on a young sculptor in the biennial like Matthew Monahan, from Los Angeles, is obvious. A bohemian favorite like the German-born Jutta Koether, who's also here, looms big for many art kids now, which is the reason she is included, although I must say it's hard to see why from her work in the show.

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A contingent of other bohemians and gypsies (Kenneth Anger, Taylor Mead, Michael Snow, Sturtevant, Dorothy Iannone, Ira Cohen, the late Ed Paschke) receive their due. Mr. Anger, the occultist filmmaker and dishy "Hollywood Babylon" author, gets a virtual mini-retrospective with a screening of his hallucinatory Mickey Mouse short. A pair of Mr. Cohen's trippy light-box photographs, like several of Mr. Mead's cartoony drawings, are slight, but they should at least alert people to these visionary, underground personalities.

The last biennial was ingratiating, an upbeat truce brokered by a troika of curators, including Ms. Iles, which aimed at a broad public, as most biennials do. It was colorful, pleasing, not particularly taxing on the eye or brain, but clever and full of nifty, crafty objects, with enough oddball inclusions, crusty old-timers and resuscitated reputations to satisfy mild skeptics.

In retrospect that show dovetailed with a gathering tsunami of newly rich, clueless collectors infatuated with bright, neatly made, vision-free art, some of it groovily retro-chic (lots of outwardly snappy, vaguely melancholic 60's-style psychedelia with dystopian vibes; "collectives" became a buzzword again).

During the intervening months, virtuosic ditties by 20-somethings came to look more and more familiar and strategically inappropriate, including to savvy money types who run the art business and know the pitfalls of bad marketing. Among other things, the art world, or a conspicuous part of it, seemed tactlessly out of touch with a larger world going to hell. Then last year came "Greater New York," P.S. 1's nearly pedophilic riff on a biennial, to which the current Whitney effort seems an unspoken response.

Collectives are a big selling point to counter perceptions of rampant materialism and star-driven commerce. From the pseudonymous Reena Spaulings, the collective and downtown gallery, which now has something of the celebrity and success it ostensibly critiques, there is a shop awning, the cheap kind slapped above all those fly-by-night phone stores and costume-jewelry shops along Canal Street, partly obliterating the letters of a Whitney donor's name emblazoned above the fourth-floor elevators.

The artists Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija have revived Mr. di Suvero's 1960's "Peace Tower": they've commissioned colleagues, who in turn invited friends, to devise two-foot-square panels, minimanifestos or whatever the artists wanted, which hang on and around what resembles a giant Tinkertoy construction rising from the Whitney's courtyard beside the museum entrance.

"Down by Law," yet another group show within the biennial, with a stress on identity politics, is organized by the fashionable Wrong Gallery, whose principals include Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick.

Conservatives -- also citing Richard Serra's "Stop Bush" poster, antiwar programming from Deep Dish Television Network and three videos by the group Critical Art Ensemble, including one about the tribulations of its own Steven Kurtz, a Buffalo artist indicted by a federal grand jury for obtaining biological materials -- will no doubt dismiss the whole exhibition as another political show like the 1993 biennial.

But this show's not like that one, which went out of its way to thumb its nose at many people. "Down by Law" is a disappointment because it's bland. And "The Peace Tower" is old-school civic protest, almost quaint -- a genuine, albeit predictable response to what's going on in the world that makes no claims to being anything other than what it is. And why shouldn't artists get together to say something about war and peace, in the midst of war, if there is an opportunity like the biennial?

"The Peace Tower" is ad hoc. The whole ethos of the show is provisional, messy, half-baked, cantankerous, insular -- radical qualities art used to have when it could still call itself radical and wasn't like a barnacle clinging to the cruise ship of pop culture.

That was back in the 1970's. Urs Fischer, taking off from what Gordon Matta-Clark did then, chops huge, irregular holes in a couple of the show's walls; like Mr. Serra in the old days, tossing hot lead, he also drips wax from candles perched on rotating tree branches (the effect is mildly meditative) to make rings on the floor. Lucas DeGiulio, from San Francisco, scavenges homely bits of twigs, bottle glass and old cans to make assemblages that summon up memories of Robert Smithson, Paul Thek and Bruce Conner.

The 1970's was the last time you might say there was a true downtown scene as opposed to an uptown scene, and money wasn't so prevalent. Today, when there are all sorts of constituencies and markets for all sorts of art, which all belong to the larger commercial world, art now is close to the fashion industry -- at the cost of modernism's traditional outsider role. Artists don't have the luxury of placing themselves in opposition to a clear status quo. It is the crisis of new art.

In reaction, you get characters like Anthony Burdin, recouping 70's recording technologies and making himself into a West Coast vagabond version of the late Swiss shaman Dieter Roth: Mr. Burdin reputedly lives in a beat-up 1973 Chevy Nova and shoots shaky videos of himself, singing and drumming over classic rock tracks, driving around, crawling through skanky drain pipes (shades of Matthew Barney). He is like the wandering minstrel of slackerdom, a newfangled art star, declining to be seen (thereby enhancing his aura); and his installation here -- an old wood shack, the springs of a mattress, a spindly drawing and a video of his exertions -- is at once ridiculous and mesmerizing.

Gedi Sibony, another player on the scene, contrives a room-size environment out of carpet scraps, planks, masking tape and whispering bits of blue paint, positioned just so. He riffs on Richard Tuttle. Mr. Sibony hadn't clicked for me before, but the work here has a kind of grace.

I am also taken by Cameron Jamie, reared in Los Angeles, now living in Paris, whose subjects are mostly weird folk rituals. His film in the biennial (he shot it in 2002-3) documents a gang of marauders dressed in horned Wookiee-like outfits, donning bells made of soldered old Army helmets, flanked by St. Nick. Apparently it's a Christmas tradition in rural Austria. The shaggy creatures assault partygoers and menace children. With a pounding soundtrack by the Melvins, the film squares the expressionist legacy of senior troublemakers like Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley with earlier avant-garde documentarians, from the late 60's and 70's, like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono.

Much else here summons up thoughts of that same era. Seventies photography, for example, in Amy Blakemore's fuzzy pictures of suburbia; 70's experimental cinema, in Rodney Graham's hypnotic, rather sculptural room in which he shows a film of a spinning chandelier (shot in sumptuous 35-millimeter).

And 70's music. I can hardly count the artists who are musicians or whose works are collaborations with musicians. Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke, Daniel Johnston, T. Kelly Mason, Spencer Sweeney, Steven Parrino. Parrino died last year. His enameled black-and-white paintings -- like works by Malevich, if Malevich had come from the East Village -- are uncompromising, and they were underrated when vacuous decoration came into vogue recently. I'm glad they have a spot here.

As for Mr. Johnston's cartoonish drawings, only a handful are on view, and they don't quite live up to their hype, but he's an original, and there's more to him than the biennial can show. It's also good that Paschke, who died in 2004, has his day. Extending the heritage of Chicago eccentrics, his funky paintings establish their own definition of beautiful.

The biennial, as I said, is otherwise not long on beauty. But a few more works deserve singling out. Florian Maier-Aichen's Technicolor vistas of Los Angeles, digitally cooked up to suggest romantic landscape paintings, were over the top in his recent show at 303 Gallery in Chelsea. But the ones here are not.

Angela Strassheim stages painstaking portraits of her evangelical family. She photographed her dead grandmother in her casket and her brother-in-law combing his son's hair before a mirror. They're surreal pictures, candy colored and strangely loving.

And I'm willing to give Hanna Liden's photographs of purported pagan rituals in Scandinavian forests the benefit of the doubt, although formally speaking they're not particularly novel.

Finally, nods to a few veterans: Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Laurent P. Berger and Tony Oursler, working with the band Japanther, devised a live puppet opera, "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30." It went on tour. Here it is reconfigured (Mr. Oursler seems the major player, along with Dan Graham) as a blissed-out, abstract video.

Robert Gober's grainy black-and-white photographs from a trip to Jones Beach in the 1970's are sun-bleached and haunted. He has restaged a few of them, inserting odd bits and pieces, including a newspaper clipping about a man murdered because he was believed to be gay. The works are tender, but also like the evidence of some mysterious, horrible crime.

Lastly, Troy Brauntuch, a painter of the 80's, gets a fresh look. His Conté-crayon drawings of shirts stacked on store shelves and of his girlfriend's coat on a chair are dark, delicate and hard to read in black-blues and white-grays. The obvious connection is to Gerhard Richter's photo-based paintings, but Mr. Brauntuch's works come from his own memory bank. In the context of this biennial, they are exquisite and grave.

More to Explore

"Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night" runs through May 28 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street. Events this weekend in conjunction with the biennial include a discussion tomorrow night at 6 with curators and artists represented in the display; fee: $8 (members, students and 62+, $6); registration, (212) 570-7715. In addition, the first in a series of film and video screenings begins tomorrow at 2 p.m. with "Meditation on Violence" (1948), directed by Maya Deren, and "Sufferers' Version" (2004), directed by Mathias Poledna. Film screenings are included in museum admission: $15, students and 62+, $10.

The museum is open Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 1 to 9 p.m. (6 to 9 p.m. pay-what-you-wish); and Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Film schedule and other information: (800) 944-8639 or

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