What was happening in art in New York this spring? Downtown, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University offered “Precious,” a show of whimsical, off-color, and overwhelmingly bejeweled paintings, sculptures, and in-between objects. “Precious” was about kitsch and trash; it was supposed to be a big transcendent joke at the expense of the banality of modern visual culture. But haven’t the artists noticed it’s been years since anyone with even half a brain laughed at or just thought about flocked wallpaper and Last Suppers painted on velvet? I knew my grandmother’s taste was terrible when I was five years old; nowadays I pass her neo-Venetian coffeetable with its top of fake stones embedded in lucite without a snort. It could have starred in “Precious.” Comedians know subjects have to change with the times. Why not artists?

Nothing in the “Precious” show got a rise. Beneath the tinsel and cosmetic-bright color the new kitsch hid a cold heart: this was cool kitsch. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s flocked, green- and purple-toned backside of a black male nude couldn’t even be called deadpan—the image died before conception. Much was made by Grace Glueck in a New York Timesreview of the religious motifs in this show: all the saints and reliquaries and icons and shrines. I don’t know whether the artists who’ve adopted religious themes take their religion seriously or not; I expect some do and some don’t. But this isn’t really the issue, since none of them can convey