NEW AND OLD.

"Out of Time," the third annual reinstallation of the rehoused Museum of Modern Art's capacious contemporary galleries, is a mixed bag of works from the past four decades, with a trenchant and, considering MOMA's history, somewhat melancholy theme. Here is a museum, the museum of the twentieth century, whose founding idea was a time line: the march of modernization. That story disintegrated in the nineteen-sixties, when minimalism rejected the framed and pedestalled suggestiveness of historical painting and sculpture in favor of the droning presence of taciturn objects and arrangements. (The epoch called "contemporary" grows longer year by year, as the era that minimalism instituted bids to be eternal.) Since then, a great deal of ambitious art has espoused, or, at least, countenanced boredom--the forced consciousness of passing time.

The exhibition starts with a projected segment of Andy Warhol's baleful film masterpiece "Empire" (1964), an eight-hour static view of the Empire State Building, and climaxes with Gerhard Richter's great, sepulchral suite of fifteen paintings about the lives and, mostly, the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, "October 18, 1977" (1988). In the middle comes "Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off" (2000), by the British artist Martin Creed: an empty room in which light and darkness alternate at five-second intervals. Everything in the show--paintings and drawings, groups of photographs, sculptural and video installations, and ad-hoc oddities--can be taken, if sometimes tortuously, to illustrate a possible meaning of the phrase "out of time": time regarded with detachment, as sheer phenomenon; or employed, as a kind of material. Another sense occurs to me: "too late"--game over, pencils down. The show crystallizes a recurrent suspicion that, at present, high culture inhabits an interminable aftermath of lost or broken purposes. The poetic tone of today's most vital art tilts toward elegy.

The show's young curators, Joachim Pissarro, of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Eva Respini, of the Department of Photography, have grouped works by formal or notional affinity rather than by chronology. Some juxtapositions are inspired. "Empire" is flanked by Philip-Lorca diCorcia's "Head #10" (2000), a starkly flash-lit color photograph of a sullen teen-ager in a Yankees cap, set in inky darkness. Building and boy, both monumentally composed, convey rhyming ratios of obduracy and, what with the inevitable thoughts of September 11th, vulnerability. (Time may not be on our side.) A room given over to dry exercises in time-based execution, such as a large, dense drawing that was frantically made by William Anastasi in one hour, and thirty photographs of a swatch of roiling river taken by Dieter Appelt in as many minutes, opens onto Pipilotti Rist's "Ever Is Over All" (1997). In this intoxicating video installation, with a gentle rock score, panning shots of flowers accompany the sight of a young woman, in a blue summer dress and ruby pumps, traipsing down a city street, now and then merrily smashing car windows with a long-stemmed flower. A police officer slowly approaches. It is a policewoman, who, coming abreast, smiles benevolently and walks on. Anarchy has never been so honey-sweet.

Rist, a Swiss artist born in 1962, is important for having conjoined the astringent disciplines of performance art with the industrialized fun of music video. I remember thinking, when I first saw "Ever Is Over All," that it heralded a dawning era of rococo pleasures, which would blur boundaries between art and entertainment in no end of surprising ways. As often happens in such cases, very little that has been produced since, even by Rist, has rivalled it for crazy joy. First thought, best thought? Perhaps, but it may be in the nature of hybrid art forms, like their botanical kin, to prove as sterile as they may be extraordinary. The same fate afflicted another superb video installation in the show: "Stasi City" (1997), by the British twins Jane and Louise Wilson, a devastating projection, onto four walls, of documentary and dream sequences made in the former headquarters of the East German secret police. Immersing us in beautifully managed redolences of a dreadful past, the piece both demonstrates the abundant creative resources of its medium and exhausts them. Subsequent work by the Wilsons, though impressively adept, has paled for want of ...