'Samurai, the Watcher' (1965) by Koichi Tateishi. (Courtesy MoMA)

A painting depicting hundreds of Japanese schoolgirls on a commuter train. An exhibition at which visitors are fed curry rice and spaghetti. Performances critiquing the ubiquity of state surveillance. All were made in Japan in the 1960s.

In the post-WWII years, the phrase “Made in Japan” became a ubiquitous import description. During this time, Japanese artists used media like painting, film, architecture, performance, photography and design to consider the conflicts between tradition and new technologies and between the individual and the modern corporation. In a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” curator Doryun Chong presents some 200 pieces from that period by over 60 artists and collectives. Many of them are rare: unless you have been hanging around Japanese prefecture museums, you probably have not seen much of the work on display before. With art that is often event- or performance-based—and just as often explicitly political—the show is ultimately most pertinent not to historical Japanese issues but to contemporary ones. The strategies for provocative and playful activity on display here are ones that might be useful to any citizen today.

As the population of the capital city doubled between 1950 and 1960, the young architects who called themselves “Metabolists” dreamt up schemes to accommodate this rapid urban growth. The show’s entryway features their utopian architectural plans to solve overcrowding: an unrealized project by Kenzo Tange from 1960 proposed floating a web of new houses and shops right over Tokyo Bay.

In the first room, visitors are greeted by Tatsuo Kawaguchi’s sculpture Sphere in Eight Colors (1968), a low vitrine with a neat trick: the colors of four painted plaster globes appear to flicker between green, blue, yellow and red, thanks to cleverly placed mirrors. The red sphere in a white tank might represent the Japanese flag, a denatured nationalist symbol lost among multiple equally possible colors.

As the work from the late 1950s in the exhibition’s first galleries makes clear, postwar Tokyo initially looked not to New York’s Abstract Expressionist painting but to French Surrealism for inspiration. In “Enterprise,”(1955) one of Tatsuo Ikeda’s series of pen and ink drawings of modern Tokyo, people are funneled into dismembering machines. In other drawings, company bosses resemble grotesque monsters and business is represented as a giant zipper-mouthed whale gluttonously consuming papers. Artworks like these take a bleak and satirical look at the corporate culture and the disquieting urban landscapes of the new economic era.

Some names that will probably be familiar to New Yorkers—like Yayoi Kusama, featured here with some lovely small drawings evocative of cellular forms, and On Kawara, with a large, red oil painting, Stones Thrown (1956)—are grouped here among what are called the “reportage painters,” artists who combined anti-nuclear activism and Surrealism in pieces that responded to the nightmarish, traumatic effects of war. Meanwhile, Taro Okamoto’s tightly framed photographs of excavated earthenware objects evoke Surrealist photography of sculpture and stage a distant, quasi-anthropological relationship between the postwar artist and Japan’s past.

Two perhaps related phenomena unique to postwar Japanese art are the unusual emphasis on corporate-sponsored exhibitions and prizes and the importance of art collectives. Powerful corporations drove Japan to become the country with the world’s second-highest GDP, and companies like Shell Oil, Mainichi Shimbun (a major newspaper) and the Shirokiya department store were in turn major supporters of contemporary art. Art groups with names like Gutai, Hi Red Center, Jikken Kobo and Genshoku (“Tactile Hallucination”) all sprang up in the same era. Their spirit of teamwork and collaboration may have initially echoed the corporate culture of the new Japan, but ultimately it challenged that aggressive style of capitalism.

The 14 members of the Jikken Kobo (“Experimental Workshop”) conducted Bauhaus-like experiments with music, lighting, composition and newly developed materials—their slide shows and short advertising films featuring new consumer products have a dreamy futuristic quality that goes hand in hand with corporate capitalism’s development of the automobile. The Yomiuri newspaper sponsored an exhibition (the Yomiuri Independent) that epitomized the “anti-art” aesthetic of the 1950s and early ’60s—at least until 1963, when the show was forced to announce that it would no longer accept works that involved loud, unpleasant sounds, bad smells or decomposition, or were dangerous or potentially toxic.

Gutai fans may be disappointed to find that there are no major works from that movement in the MoMA show—they will have to wait for the Guggenheim Museum’s Gutai exhibition in February. But one of Shigeko Kubota’s untitled drawings from 1958 gives you a sampling of his smeary style. And while the show would have benefited from the inclusion of Atsuko Tanaka’s terrific lightbulb-strung Electric Dress of 1956, there is a solid showing of her colorful crayon drawings that resemble electrical circuitry.

'Baton Twirler (1967)' by Daido Moriyama. (Courtesy MoMA)

Yoko Ono’s books and Ms. Kubota’s letters hint at the influence of Fluxus artist George Maciunas; New Yorkers who visited Tokyo’s avant-garde scene also included John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Far and away the highlight of the MoMA show is the section dedicated to Hi Red Center, a Fluxus-esque collective whose style of cool political critique in the early 1960s involved numerous performances in public spaces. Let’s Participate in the HRC Campaign to Promote Cleanup and Orderliness of the Metropolitan Area! (1964) involved the group’s three artists, Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jiro Takamatsu, using brooms, sandpaper, toothpicks, rubbing alcohol and cotton balls to scrub Toyko’s streets as a parody of the government’s efforts to modernize the city in advance of the Olympic Games.

In 1963 Mr. Akasegawa started printing and distributing fake 1,000 yen bills as art; “a problem to capitalist realism,” he later called his counterfeiting. His currency was confiscated by the police, and Mr. Akasegawa was embroiled in a court case over art and state control of money for the next seven years. Mr. Nakawshi took his Compact Object (1962), a polyester egg embedded with bits of bone, hair and eggshells, to the Tokyo subways as a performance: licking it as he commuted was an act of provocation aimed at the newly formed identity of a homogenous and stable Japanese worker.

'Arm' (1953) by Tatsuo Ikeda. (Courtesy MoMA)

There were other high jinks. Hi Red Center designed morbidly luxe nuclear fallout shelters for Yoko Ono and other performance attendees. In 1964, the group’s Hi Red Center’s Great Panorama Exhibition consisted of the closure of their gallery for the entire exhibition period. This work is documented in black-and-white photographs, and Maciunas’s poster of the group’s antics dot the map of Tokyo with over two dozen activities. The group’s political and satirical tricks seem relevant to much art being made today; New York could use a show devoted solely to its radical antics.

The show’s final room, which includes both photography and graphic design, has posters promoting Tatsumi Hijikata’s early Butoh dances, as well as a wall of photos including Shomei Tomatsu’s famous image of a Nagasaki woman scarred by the atomic bomb. All of this material feeds into the show’s performance series, which will include a newly commissioned “history musical” by contemporary artist Ei Arakawa (Feb. 5 to 7), and a film series curated by noted Japanese film scholar Go Hirasawa, which serves as a retrospective of the Art Theater Guild (1960-84), an avant-garde Japanese film company. American audiences may find this facet of the exhibition revelatory: most of the films in the series are extremely rare. Look out in particular for films by Koji Wakamatsu, appearances by Nobuhiko Obayashi and Susumu Hani, and be sure to be there on January 28, when Donald Richie and Shuji Terayama’s films will be screened.

“Tokyo 1955-1970” is worth seeing if you are interested in Japanese history and culture, or postwar art in general—or if you are just interested in how a devastated city remade itself into a global economic capital. If the show has a flaw, it is that the best work from this period is not the sculpture and painting on view, but an ephemeral attitude of resistance and collective activity that can only ever be footnoted by physical objects.

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Freckles, cigarettes and sometimes even whole human beings could be made to disappear from prints with a touch of lead pencil to negative, as shown in Robert Johnson’s how-to book on photographic retouching from 1930. And figures could just as mysteriously appear, as in Matthew Brady’s 1865 photo Sherman and His Generals, in which an officer late for a group shot was simply—presto!—montaged in. In the 19th century, it took just a few dabs of India ink to transform day into night. Technicians used whatever means were at hand to improve on reality, just as today’s photo editors and iPhoners wield Photoshop or Instagram to correct details or enliven dull shots.

The most technically complex examples in the show come from art photography: Oscar Gustave Rejlander made artful compositions by printing parts of some 30 different negatives on a single sheet to create one seamless image. And all the grim and goofy posing (clutched bibles, grief-stricken slumping) done by models in Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away (1858) was for the purpose of enacting a deathbed scene—an especially elaborate example of photography rivaling the dominant medium of the day, painting. To make his famous photo Leap Into the Void (1960), the conceptual artist Yves Klein combined two photographs—one that shows him diving from a rooftop onto a canvas tarp held by men below, and another that shows the same location, a cobblestone street, without any action taking place. Combining the two resulted in a classic image of artistic recklessness and bravado: Klein appears to leap into thin air.

Other manipulations were made in the name of science: John Lovell’s Composite of Class of ’87 and Composite of Harvard “Annex” are blurry multiple-exposure portraits of the college’s entire male and female graduating classes overlaid one on top of the other. The experiment resulted in a soft-lipped, surprisingly handsome man and a stern but pretty woman. These two proto-preppies are the social flip side to French photographer Francis Galton’s composite portraits of Parisian criminals from 1877, images that overlay negatives in an attempt to divine “features common among men convicted of crimes of violence.” In Galton’s experiment, seven negatives combine to produce a rakishly attractive unshaven convict.

A section on photographic trickery in politics stands out, especially examples from Stalin’s Russia, where people vanished from official imagery as soon as they fell out of political favor. A photo of the 15th Regional Party Conference of Leningrad in textbooks printed between 1926 and 1949 shows five men, then four, then three, until the conference dwindles to a duo. The others were, quite literally, erased from history.

Just as we have them on the Internet today, the 19th century had its photographic memes—winged elephants, decapitation and double, triple and quintuple exposures. We now associate photography with immediacy, but in the medium’s first years, snap and shoot didn’t yet exist— French propaganda photographs from 1871 restaged famous news events like executions and massacres to imbue them with extra vividness.

The unexpected star of the Met’s show is Weegee’s Times Square, New York (1952–59), which the photographer described as “Under 10 feet of water on a sunny afternoon.” Through the magic of double exposure it shows a bustling Times Square seemingly full of commuters trudging through flooded streets. Seeing it this month might evoke news photographs of Avenue C, or Chelsea, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Nearby, at the Jewish Museum, “Sharon Lockhart|Noa Eshkol” stages an encounter between artists several generations apart. Ms. Eshkol (1924-2007), the daughter of Israel’s third prime minister, was a visual artist and choreographer who viewed dance as a utopian social project. Ms. Lockhart, a Los Angeles-based artist, first saw Ms. Eshkol’s work four years ago, and was inspired to create a project in response to it.

Her video homage, Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets (2011), is an immersive looped installation that presents a selection of Ms. Eshkol’s dances. The performers—grave, middle-aged women and one man, wearing black leotards—slowly gesticulate and sway in unison to a metronomic beat. They move among nine colorful textile works, the “wall carpets” of the video’s title. These patchwork panels of Ms. Eshkol’s are also on display; big painting-like compositions made from stitched-together scraps of cloth, they carry vaguely Old Testament titles like Creeper on a Tree and Elijah’s Throne, and look like something highly skilled hippie parents might make for a newborn.

Ms. Eshkol, whose dancers lived in a utopian, kibbutz-like world of shared work duties and group dance classes, is best known outside of Israel for developing a written system to capture and articulate the most minute physical gestures. “I dared to have the nerve to create a language,” she once said grandiosely of the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation system. Examples of her opaque notations, on display in a vitrine, look like orchestra sheet music with body parts taking the place of instruments. Each limb is scored separately, with a series of cryptic arrows and numbers meant to stand for directions of movement and counted beats.

Ms. Lockhart’s photographs of the rickety and weathered globe-like structures that Ms. Eshkol used to teach bodily movement to dance students express a sort of awe in and bewilderment at the world Ms. Eshkol reveals. Her treatment of Ms. Eshkol’s work remains somewhat straight-faced and anthropological, but her pleasure in its eccentricity is almost tangible. The show does not explain Ms. Eshkol’s various systems as much as it celebrates and even fetishizes their enigmatic qualities.

Previous subjects of Ms. Lockhart’s films have included a girls basketball team in Tokyo, a shipyard in rural Maine and a Brazilian tribe. She seems drawn to slightly outside-the-mainstream communities, like that of Ms. Eshkol’s dancers. She excels at revealing oddball modernist projects, and you get the sense that if such obscure projects had never existed, she would be compelled to invent them. In this way, her work is like that of contemporary artist Richard Hawkins’s collages drawing on the history of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance. Though the show’s emphasis on aging dancers and dusty movement models makes you feel that all of the most fascinating artistic enterprises might be a thing of the past, it ultimately resists such nostalgia by presenting archival scholarship as new art. The results, like the faked photography at the Met, are an unsettling blend of the documentary and the fantastical.

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At the Brooklyn Museum, Mickalene Thomas has not only upped the ante on Courbet by giving the title Origin of the Universe to her take on his painting—a black-power, pop-palette Venus vajazzled with rhinestones—but she has also given that title to her exhibition.

Ms. Thomas’s massive, French-Impressionist-inspired, rhinestone-embellished paintings of black female nudes are gaudy fun, yes, but they are also enormously ambitious. Her other great subject is her mother, a woman who obviously relishes vamping for the camera (“I always liked Pam Grier,” she confesses in a video portrait). Ms. Thomas has found her voice as an artist in addressing and overcoming origins both artistic (French painting) and familial (her mother). Her paintings may be kitschy, but they are also, as she titles several of them, “très belle,” and display a tremendous awareness of how personal the history of painting can be, or at least seem, for an artist. Four wood-panel and print fabric installations resembling sets for a 1970s sitcom, a colorful wall of miniature collages and a video (Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman from 2012, a biography of Thomas’s mother) round out the display.

At the New Museum, where her mid-career retrospective “Cosmos” just went on view, German artist Rosemarie Trockel reminds us that Courbet’s The Origin of the World was once owned by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Her take on Origin—a framed digital print titled Replace Me (2011), in which an image of a fuzzy black tarantula is superimposed on the Courbet nude’s pubes—deals in uncanny associations between people and things.

Ms. Trockel gives us an artist-curated taste of marginal works from the 19th century and earlier, as well as pieces by so-called outsider artists. Her show is full of wünderkammer-like assortments of natural objects (a 27.5-pound lobster, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka’s famous glass sculptures of flowers and sea creatures, cabinets of dried seedpods and a veritable aviary of 18th- and 19th-century bird watercolors) and oddball artworks (Günter Weseler’s animatronic wall barnacle gently expands, contracts and titters; creepy plaster dolls by Martin Bartlett pirouette in vitrines abutting wonderfully abject sculptures of birds by James Castle). The exhibition’s walls are painted a solemn green-grey; the lighting is dim. Ms. Trockel has placed her own artworks—wool-weft monochromes that hang on the wall like paintings, as well as photographs, sculptures and a library of artists’ books—in the context of these curiosities. In the catalog, her projects are classified according to the eccentric phyla “botany, textiles, zoology, ceramics, ‘odd objects,’ books.” Ms. Trockel’s diverse body of work, like the elephant of the proverb, feels different depending on what part of it you grasp first, and to have so much of her in one place creates a fuller impression of her significance than any viewer (especially one in New York, where she is seldom shown) is likely to have previously had.

The museum also recently remembered its mission of giving underappreciated artists their due. Right now, in the lobby, you can see Judith Bernstein’s long-overdue first solo museum show, “Judith Bernstein: HARD.” It, too, has a riff on Courbet’s painting (thanks go to the museum’s communications director Gabriel Einsohn for pointing this out to me): the painting Birth of the Universe #4, a neon pink and orange intergalactic battle in which beings with flaming penises for eyes and vaginal-mouthed gullets full of cosmoses smolder in space. Ms. Bernstein, now 70 years old, is best known for the enormous gestural “Screw” paintings she has been making since the mid-’60s. They equate erections with flat-head screws and send off everything from phallocentric minimalism to macho (“jackoff,” as one work puts it) U.S. foreign policy. The works were censored from exhibitions in the 1970s, when Ms. Bernstein was active in the feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls and a founder of the alternative space A.I.R Gallery. Her monumental, 45-foot-long Signature Piece, installed against the glass of the New Museum’s lobby, reminds us that just getting your name out there as an artist can sometimes be a gesture of activism and defiance.

There is no Origin of the World in the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum dedicated to feminist art and conceptual art curator Lucy Lippard, unless you count the fact that Ms. Lippard’s work has been the origin of many art worlds. The show focuses on Ms. Lippard’s iconic 1972 book Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, but it also makes a case for the expanded role of women in the arts. The display of 177 objects in two small galleries examines the time span of Ms. Lippard’s book year by year, and what emerges is not so much an investigation, as the curators claim, of the way “the object dematerializes” in that period, but rather of how a new art form demanded a new kind of curator.

Conceptual art required conceptual curating. Ms. Lippard’s 1969 exhibition “955,000”took its name from the population of Vancouver; when the show traveled to Buenos Aires, its name changed to “2,972,543.” For another exhibition, 1970’s “Groups,” she asked artists to take five photographs of the same people dressed in the same clothing each day. As artists like Lawrence Weiner executed these instructions, they helped define a new role for the exhibition organizer: to initiate a project, disseminate a set of rules to a select group of participants and appoint artists as its executors. The roles could also be reversed, with artists like Sol LeWitt providing instructions for Ms. Lippard to follow. Her projects didn’t just engage with new art—they used new forms to do so, and were creative in their own right.

Ephemera comprises much of the show, and it’s crammed into every nook of the galleries: there is the exhibition announcement for Ms. Lippard’s legendary 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction,” which included organic, tactile work by Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and others as the feminist counterpoint to minimalism; an issue of Aspen Magazine devoted to minimalism; and documentation of Richard Serra’s famous molten iron piece Splashing (1968). All of this can get a bit dry; if you are the kind of person who reads the acknowledgements sections in books and watches movie credits in their entirety, this is the show for you.

But Lee Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) provides some particularly good reading. Her premise was, “Call or write people for the specific purpose of inviting them to your loft for a dialogue,” and on gridded graph paper, she recorded her calls and the ensuing conversations: “May 14 1969 Call Poonsie (Larry Poons). He answers phone, we made a date for May 21.” “Call Johns at Castelli. David White at Castelli says he is busy.” “Dan Graham and I have an important dialogue.” There’s little record about what these dialogues were about (many seem to be about astrological signs and to have taken place while the participants were high), but the gossipy minutiae are scintillating: Robert Morris does it, Walter de Maria never returns Lozano’s call, Marcia Tucker stays in the loft talking for three hours.

The show, organized by Catherine Morris, the curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator based in Montreal, is thankfully scant on biographical information. Ms. Lippard, who is now in her 70s, has curated more than 50 exhibitions but never worked as a museum curator or had a gallery; her column on art was to be found in The Village Voice, not Artforum, and she never earned a Ph.D., though she’s accumulated eight honorary degrees. She co-founded Printed Matter, among other alternative spaces, and infused her curatorial practice with activism—she was involved in anti-war and art workers’ rights movements and was a champion of women artists. Her curatorial presence helped to define an era.

With women’s issues, and women’s votes, one of the focal points of this year’s presidential election, it is heartening to see women’s work—curatorial and artistic—take center stage in our city. With Sharon Lockhart’s show newly opened at the Jewish Museum, and Martha Rosler, another mid-career activist artist, literally taking center stage at the Museum of Modern Art in November when one of her “garage sale” pieces occupies the atrium, the trend continues. Let’s hope that galleries, whose rosters still feature disproportionate numbers of male artists, start to catch up.

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When Picasso purged color from his work, he did so to emphasize the formal autonomy of the picture plane and focus on problems of form. The show starts with a 1904 painting of a woman, from the artist’s so-called Blue Period, but moves swiftly into the most radical of Picasso’s styles, his 1909-1914 cubism, rendered in the sepia tones of faded newspapers. The show leaves you wanting more of the collages, like Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (1912), but there is a gallery of five great, rare sculptures, including the volumetric, monochrome Woman’s Head (Fernande) (1909), with her Klingon-looking forehead.

Ms. Giménez has a light touch with the linear Picasso of the 1930s: two languid paintings of sleeping figures—Sleeping Woman (1931) and Sleeping Nude (1932)—contrast with the spiky forms of The Kiss (1930). The show gives us the full spectrum of Picasso’s women (Olga, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, moon-faced Marie-Thérèse) rendered in lush grisaille: pneumatic breasts and buttocks modeled in monochrome like so many dirty postcards from the 19^th century. Elsewhere there are rarely-seen gems, such as the sculpture Head (1928) (made from interlocking brass shapes on a delicate iron tripod) and several sheet metal sculptures that read as freestanding paintings and are paper-doll-like in their delicacy.

Heat rises in this show—its fiery core is the late work, at the top of the rotunda. Still Life with Blood Sausage (May 10, 1941) depicts Picasso’s wartime fantasies of food from his native Spain; it’s shown alongside studies for Guernica. The Women of Algiers (Version L) (1955) is Picasso cheekily rendering the 19th century’s greatest colorist, Eugene Delacroix, in black and white. And The Maids of Honor, in which he drains the color from Velázquez’s Las Meniñas, is a knockout, from the Infanta’s tiered cake of a dress to the playing card Jack standing in for Velázquez.

PICKING UP chronologically where the Guggenheim show leaves off is the Whitney Museum’s “mid-career” retrospective of Wade Guyton, who was born in Hammond, Ind., in 1972, the year before Picasso died. Mr. Guyton’s paintings are studies in the beautiful seams, glitches and errors that result from jamming linen through inkjet printers—it is the drips, smears and striations accidentally produced by modern technology that render his chalkily-colored abstractions seductive. The Ab-Ex-sized canvas Untitled (2006), which dominates one wall of the show, is made up of pretty, saturated red horizontal stripes that thin out as the Epson Ultrachrome printer on which it was made ran out of ink.

As the pedagogical apparatus around it makes clear, with its talk of “our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common technologies,” this is an exhibition about the ways in which a whole generation of viewers thinks about materials. In Mr. Guyton’s work are sights that will be familiar to many—the slight grit that we associate with a reproduction, the mechanical mishaps inherent to the analog output of digital files. Anyone who has experienced desktop printer mishaps, problems caused by the constraints of printer paper size, file corruptions or depleting ink cartridges will be able to relate to Mr. Guyton’s process. Like a post-Pictures Generation Frank Stella, he makes gorgeous, adamantly banal paintings using average office technology: desktop computers, Epson printers, flatbed scanners. His works, which embrace accident and technological failure, suggest something of the wobbly, ersatz materiality of a Blinky Palermo. Mostly, with their black “X”s on white ground, they look like what might happen if someone tried to print out full-scale Christopher Wool paintings or enlarge Russian Constructivist abstractions using an inkjet printer.

The wall text focuses on process to an almost comical extent, as if you might indeed go home and try to make your own Guytons: “He began with rectangles of 50 percent black, which he converted to bitmapped files,” one reads. “Because his medium-size printer can accommodate materials only up to 44 inches wide, Guyton generally folds the canvases in half and prints each side separately,” another informs. “Relying on an optical sensor that determines where to begin dispensing ink, the machine draws in the canvas unevenly and often gets jammed by the thick linen, which Guyton has to yank to continue printing,” yet another tells us. Convert bitmapped file, fold, print, yank. Got it. Such instructions make apparent that despite the pleasure the show takes in supposed accidents and mishaps, this work is not about subverting any given system, technological or social, but is instead, it would appear, about following directions.

The show’s title, “OS,” is short for “Operating System,” as in a computer or mobile device, and the open layout, established by curator Scott Rothkopf in collaboration with the artist, is terrific: the staggered arrangement of the walls mimics the layers of a computer’s windows. The paintings suggest the way images jitter and pixelate on a laptop screen. The show has its thrilling moments: one portion is taken up by nine large glass-topped vitrines, seven containing pages from art history books, two left enigmatically empty; 18 mirrored stainless steel sculptures of the letter “U” in a variety of sizes form the centerpiece of the show’s main area; a wood rod printed with inkjet stripes (an untitled work from 2009) leans in a corner, in the manner of works by the late sculptor André Cadere.

But questions remain: Why is it significant that the five colorful Marcel Breuer chairs in the piece Untitled Action Sculpture (Five Enron Chairs), 2007, were taken from the Enron offices? A museum exhibition can be an opportunity to show an artist’s B sides, or bring out the subtext of a body of work—the kinds of things the tight focus of gallery exhibitions and group shows doesn’t tend to accommodate. But here, what Mr. Guyton means to say about Enron is tough to suss out. The inclusion of an early work, The Devil’s Hole from 1999—two small photographs of red-lit spelunkers in a cave—is also opaque. The presence of these awkward pieces only makes one feel relief at the fact that Mr. Guyton has stopped using original subject matter. Critics like The Brooklyn Rail’s John Yau have called out Mr. Guyton for a lack of “curiosity of any sort” as an artist, and therefore such moments of engagement with the world are worth some explanation. (Potentially a better use for wall text than those how-tos.) Mainly, though, Mr. Guyton’s early, Erased de Kooning moments revolve around eminently legible encounters with modernism: one evening in 2001, he found a Breuer chair on the street in the East Village, and wrestled its steel armature into a sculpture; the resulting Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair), (2001) also on display at the Whitney, indicates a face-off with high modernism that is easily resolved by the piece’s installation in the Whitney’s Brutalist Breuer building.

But it is fitting for a young artist that the exhibition looks forward, rather than backward. Instead of dwelling on juvenilia, “OS” gives us two monumental new works. Untitled (2011) consists of twin canvases that mirror the Whitney’s grey concrete walls. The red and puce striped friezes of Untitled (2012) have a museum-scale ambition that tests the pretty, gallery-friendly formalism of his work. That much of what is included here is borrowed from the collection of the artist, rather than from an institution or collector, gives the show a present-tense feel.

If Picasso’s and Andy Warhol’s most biting work was often about something—the Spanish Civil War, car crashes, presidential assassinations, sex, America’s most-wanted criminals—Mr. Guyton’s relatively hermetic body of work evinces no desire to sully art with the stuff of life. Mr. Guyton’s true subject may be the museum itself, and the process of making images. Some might say this is art about nothing; others will point out that the medium is the message.

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The faults of “Regarding Warhol” are not only formidable, they are surprising, given the Met’s recent vaunted postwar exhibitions like “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” in 2005 and “Jasper Johns: Gray,” in 2008. The most egregious of its errors is that it spreads itself too thin to register an actual curatorial premise: 60 international artists spanning half a century would be a mere gloss on any topic. Warhol’s influence could have been better examined through a modest and subtle exhibition that took on only one decade and location—1980s N.Y., 1960s Düsseldorf and 1970s L.A. come to mind. But the Met show is structured according to baggy, catchall categories—“Daily News,” “Portraiture,” “Queer Studies,” “Consuming Images,” “No Boundaries”—within which works by dozens of artists are paired with Warhol’s, willy-nilly.

And bizarrely: to state, as one wall label does, that Gerhard Richter’s 1964 Cow (Kuh) “anticipates Warhol’s own Cow Wallpaper from two years later” misrepresents the historical relationship between Düsseldorf’s Capitalist Realism and New York Pop. There is much of this kind of visual rhyming: Cory Arcangel’s more recent video pieces (in which early Nintendo Super Mario clouds float by) are paired with Warhol’s metallic polyester Silver Clouds of 1966, Polly Apfelbaum’s floral floor installation with Warhol’s flower paintings. There is a predominance of blondes and people in blond wigs (in the section on portraits, Karen Kilimnik’s painting of Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette is juxtaposed with Elizabeth Peyton’s 1995 painting of Kurt Cobain, Blue Kurt, and an untitled photograph by Cindy Sherman). The effect is glib. More attention to strategies of representation and less to facile connections based on subject matter would have served the Met well.

A number of artworks here are chestnuts trotted out of the Contemporary Curating 101 storage bin, including Bruce Nauman’s Eat Death (1973), Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) and Allan McCollum’s Ten Plaster Surrogates (1982-1990). There should be a two-year moratorium on including any of these in any exhibition. The selection of the most recent artworks is inexplicably bad. Naming Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin and Kalup Linzy as the designated young inheritors of Warhol seems like the kind of selection only someone who knows next to nothing about contemporary practice could possibly come up with. Off the top of my head, Josh Smith, Alex Israel, Ryan McGinley, Wade Guyton, K8 Hardy, the Bernadette Corporation (see more on that below), Cheyney Thompson or Cleopatra gallery’s CKTV Karaoke project might have worked better.

Still, the show has its merits, and great-looking art speaks for itself: when the Met fails, it fails grandly, with impeccable loans. Perhaps fittingly, the New York this show most closely resembles is the gallery at Christie’s during an auction preview: 45 major Warhols, including the fetching Nine Jackies (1964), the early, scribbly Icebox (1961), an iconic silver Marlon and the great Big Campbell’s Soup Can, 19¢ (Beef Noodle) (1962); eight great works by Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, including Polke’s early Plastik-Wannen; and major pieces by Jeff Koons, Alex Katz, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool. Showing work this fine is a veritable public service, and anyone who tells you not to see the show based on the poor curation alone just isn’t moved by good modern art.

The first piece you see after you exit the exhibition is Warhol’s colorful Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963; jointly owned by the Met and the Whitney museum, it points to where things are going. With its upcoming annexation of the Whitney’s Breuer Building (when that museum moves to its new downtown Renzo Piano digs), the Met is taking on a period of art—the art of today—that is generally regarded as the territory of other institutions, like the Whitney and MoMA/PS1. This show indicates an insouciance toward stepping on toes. “Regarding Warhol” doesn’t pretend to be smart, tight or linear: lacking a conventional through line, it gives us a scattershot accumulation of familiar names and big-ticket artworks. A show like this one shakes things up, both intentionally and unintentionally: it reveals our own assumptions about familiar art-historical and institutional party lines and demands that we come to our own conclusions about the mess of influences, accidents and critical elisions that make up contemporary art. Museums like the Louvre—with its recent successful collaborations with William Kentridge and Cy Twombly—might provide a better model, but whatever happens next, the genie is out of the bottle.

Downtown, at Artists Space, “Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years,” is a better, if more modest, demonstration of Warhol’s resonance in the contemporary art world. Here is the story of an art collective told through 19 low-budget flow charts of the sort that might narrate the history of women’s suffrage in a high school hallway (it’s an artwork: Bernadette Corp 1993-2011, 2012). The timeline’s text reads as though written on Adderall. Mass-produced tchotchkes like mugs and scarves are displayed in vitrines. All this was produced and curated by the three artists who make up the collective called the Bernadette Corporation, and whether or not you enjoy the effect will depend largely on whether you see their project as an obscure and brilliant reflection on the constructed nature of fame, or find these people silly, willfully hermetic and mind-bogglingly self-important.

The show opens in the 1990s, in a setting you may remember—the East Village bar Flamingo East—populated by a cast of supporting characters you may recognize, like downtown starlet Chloë Sevigny and the artists Mariko Mori, Pruitt + Early, Rita Ackermann and Charles LaBelle. Two of the protagonists have improbable names (Bernadette Van-Huy, Antek Walczak), the third the more pedestrian sounding John Kelsey. From this crew springs a manifesto of sorts. The name Bernadette Corporation drifts into use, apparently as the title of a fashion line, documented in this show by a flat-screen monitor displaying the BC Fashion Images Digital Archive (2012), and a dozen mannequins sporting outfits made up of gold-leafed leather, big hoop earrings, repurposed Adidas sportswear, Gothic script initials acid-etched on fur pelts, and lots and lots of eye shadow. The mannequins wearing these recreated Purple Magazine-style ensembles give the show the feeling of being inhabited by spunky art students, even when it’s empty.

Things get weird in 2002, when the fashion line inexplicably morphs into Reena Spaulings, a Gossip Girl-meets-Semiotext(e) novel. Mr. Kelsey then adapts the name of that novel’s protagonist as the name of a commercial gallery, and, at Reena Spaulings Fine Art (which still very much exists, down on East Broadway), goes on to foster the careers of actual artists, including Seth Price and Josh Smith. “Everybody was Fucking Everybody,” the timeline helpfully informs. A period follows that seems to center on Berlin, where the group makes cheap movies (and possibly writes a screenplay called Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte, although it’s not entirely clear), and around 2009 they reorient to New York to create an epic poem illustrated with what look like replicas of 1990s CK One fashion ads, and apparently written by the actor Jim Fletcher and the artist Jutta Koether, although, again, none of this is entirely clear.

Nor does it need to be. The last work in the show is magnificently displayed in a freestanding pavilion reminiscent of the jewelry display hut in the Isabel Marant boutique: inside, Media Hot & Cold (2010), 10 books consisting of the Amazon consumer reviews of works like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Koran are sold as publish-on-demand hardcovers (“total bullshit,” “this guy is a hack,” “Matt rated it ***” some of the text reads). And it is this kind of third-hand information and gossip that is the actual content of the Bernadette Corporation’s art.

In truth, the work on display in “2000 Wasted Years” is more in line with literature than visual art. “Real” galleries blur with fictional ones, “real” artists with characters in novels and people struggling to be taken as real artists. The Bernadette Corporation’s narrative exists on a historical spectrum with Lost Illusions, Balzac’s novel of callow youth and urban artistic ambition, Michèle Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses and Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls., with some Laurence Sterne and some grad-school theory thrown in. The implications are reminiscent of the philosopher David Lewis’s 1978 essay on the difference between the falseness of the claims “Nixon wears a silk top hat” and “Sherlock Holmes wears a silk top hat.” Seen through this lens, the show is equal parts smart, funny and pathetic.

It is also symptomatic: right now, in Chelsea, you can visit Thomas Hirschhorn’s pictorial-career-chronology-as-artwork at the Dia Foundation and Mark Flood’s video satirizing an art-world reality show, at Zach Feuer gallery, and both become fodder for the Facebook timelines of wandering gallery-goers. This is the most striking way in which the Bernadette Corporation takes a page from Warhol’s playbook: they instigate new ways in which we might think about the manufacture of fame, and fame’s afterlife. In the case of both the Bernadette Corporation exhibition and the Met’s big group show, the real Warholian gesture is in the curating, which in both instances reads as self-promotion. Sadly, both endeavors lack what may be Andy’s most lasting legacy in both art and life—his pitch-perfect cool irony—and maybe, unlike everything else he did, that really is inimitable.

editorial@observer.com