Do it yourself; biennial follies at the Whitney.

Lawrence R. Rinder, the chief curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum, introduces the busy but extraordinarily bland Whitney Biennial by invoking the events of September 11th. "There is a profound sense of being at the most portentous crossroad in history," he writes in the show's catalogue. Artists are a "profound resource for a society that has both been robbed of a potent symbol and is casting about for new images and metaphors." Rinder says that an important criterion for his selection of the Biennial's artists was a "powerful sense of conviction." And yet the show, in my view, conveys neither sense nor conviction, let alone power. A reason for the shortfall lurks in another introductory remark by Rinder: "Perhaps beauty and irony are luxuries of peacetime, something to cherish as much as unrestricted travel and life without gas masks." If this assessment of our embattled state seems exaggerated (gas masks?), it may be because grave times are never grave enough for someone who is in the grip of the sort of moral excitement that feeds on scares and abnegations. War or no war, Rinder has a predilection for drab, timid stuff.

The Biennial displays works by a hundred and thirteen artists and collaborative teams on four floors of the museum and, as an unprecedented bonus, in Central Park -- where a sculptor named Roxy Paine has expended a great deal of effort to give passersby a mild frisson by erecting a fifty-foot stainless-steel elm tree. As usual, most of the artists are based in New York or California, though Rinder reports that he and his assisting curators scouted in "forty-three cities and towns in twenty-seven states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico." What did he learn out there? He reports that he discovered many young artists who were aware of "the need to perform some greater role than mere decoration or ironic critique," and he adds that they were "looking for ways to sustain creative practices without concern for the art market or art-world accolades. Their most important concerns seemed to be cheap rent, communities of like-minded individuals, and opportunities to show in their own localities." As it turns out, strained sincerity and negligible ambition dominate the show. So does formlessness. The old avant-garde enterprise of blurring boundaries among the arts and whatever is fashionably thought to be life operates with pitiless efficiency, producing a perfect fog of middling effects.

Youth-intensive, the new Biennial makes only a few nods to veteran artists, of whom the most prominent is Vija Celmins, represented by two small paintings of spiderwebs. Apart from these works and a few others, including inventive, subtle sculptures by Rachel Harrison and Evan Holloway, serious painting and sculpture are scarce. Such activities figure only residually in insouciantly trashy installations that celebrate the do-it-yourself, art-kid scenes that proliferate throughout the land. Two San Francisco artists, Margaret Kilgallen (who died last year, of cancer) and Chris Johanson, take the prize for forced high spirits. Each of them consumes immense amounts of space with wacky wall-painting, ramshackle carpentry, and cutesy text. (Imagine prom decorations by a high school's geek coterie.) Elsewhere, there is a heavy atmosphere of art-school labs in which the latest digital tools are put to work on arbitrary tasks.

Once past the ticket taker, the first work you encounter is a computer that stands ready to download animations of tap dancers (a male, a female) onto your Palm Pilot, presuming you have one. Audio works, big-scale photographs, installations about architecture and films, and video projections are everywhere. To view it all takes at least a day. "Vita brevis, video longa," grumped a friend of mine.

There are pleasures, if one goes with the flow of ...