"Regarding Warhol" at the Metropolitan Museum Librado Romero/The New York Times From left, Julian Schnabel's "Barbara Walters," Andy Warhol's "Red Jackie," Francesco Vezzoli's "Liza Minnelli" and Jeff Koons's "Michael Jackson & Bubbles" in "Regarding Warhol" at the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has rushed in where museums more experienced in the new and the now might have feared to tread. It is highlighting its growing commitment to contemporary art with an examination of the immense, amorphous influence of one of the most important artists of the 20th century: Andy Warhol, the visionary Pop Art painter, innovative filmmaker, trenchant social observer, image thief, deadpan quotation machine, boho magazine publisher and forthright gay artist about town. This effort is not an encouraging sight, but then the Met has a long way to go where contemporary art is concerned. In the quarter-century since his death at 58 in 1987 Warhol has become both big business - a staple of the current auction madness - and big art history, with scores of exhibitions devoted to individual aspects of his complex achievement. But the Met claims that "Regarding Warhol: Fifty Years, Sixty Artists" is the first effort to tackle the whole megillah. With nearly 50 works by Warhol and around 100 by the other 59 artists, this show (which is in previews for members through Sunday and opens to nonmembers on Tuesday) may be a hit with the public, but it should have been much more challenging and original. That it can seem that just about any artist from the last three decades could have been included testifies either to Warhol's influence or the show's shapelessness. Whether because it starts from an impossibly unwieldy concept, or is simply poorly executed, the exhibition is generally an enthusiastic muddle, intermittently clarified by unexpected works and enlightening juxtapositions but blighted by a crowded, discordant installation that allows few artists except Warhol to shine. Weirdly, a show devoted to the artist who said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes mostly dials it back to about 15 seconds for his fellow travelers. Rife with failures of nerve and imagination, it seems like a return to an older, great-man, über-artist version of art history, crediting Warhol with everything from photo-based art to reality TV and even the contemporary interest in death. Tellingly, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose use of existing imagery was essential to Warhol's, go unmentioned in the show's wall texts. Warhol deserves a lot of credit. He cut to the chase when it came to making an American art about American life in the mid-20th century. He eliminated a long-accepted filter between his various art forms and reality, letting the nation's tarnished soul shine through in all its cheap, materialistic, radiant, often violent, implicitly erotic glory. He trained his movie camera on real people doing nothing but staring back at the lens, sleeping, eating or kissing; on unscripted actors and nonactors making things up as they went along; on the emblematic Empire State Building, which he filmed with a stationary camera for some seven hours one night. In painting he skimmed images from newspapers, enlarged them onto silk-screens and slapped them onto canvas, before or after adding splashes of off-register color. He was aided by a preternatural instinct for motifs of ever-growing resonance: portraits of Marilyn, Jackie, Liz and Mao, pictures of Coke bottles and soup cans, car crashes, race riots and electric chairs. His two-tier process separated color from image, a radical move that made thinness a beautiful thing in itself, a perfect visual metaphor for the fragile, transitory nature of life and the basis for an indelible Warhol brand. Organized largely according to subject matter, this show plays down that physical process and stints on Warhol's influence on abstract painting. Its main interest is Pop art and its postmodern derivatives, and it mixes in older artists whose work developed almost in parallel with if not in advance of Warhol's - Alex Katz, Richard Artschwager, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke - without sorting out who did what when. Don't get me wrong, this show provides a perfectly O.K. time. There's plenty to look at and think about, as well as little landmarks, like the phrase "Queer Studies" as a section title, surely a first for this august institution. Among the visual high points is Jean-Michel Basquiat's Neo-Expressionist painting of an immense scarified head in the fourth of 12 galleries. A marked departure from the show's prevailing cool, it looks great; clearly African-American and seemingly about to explode, the head both rails against and is startlingly illuminated by its neighbor, Warhol's "Orange Disaster #5," with its repeating electric chairs. Across the way Cady Noland's cutout of Lee Harvey Oswald crumpling from Jack Ruby's bullets enlarges upon Warhol's silvery double image of a car crash. "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" runs through Dec. 31 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum .org.