"Swept Away," at Museum of Arts and Design Swept Away "Correlation Drawing/Drawing Correlations: A Five Borough Reconnaissance Soil Survey," by Margaret Boozer, at the Museum of Arts and Design. From the department of unsolicited advice for aspiring artists: avoid dust, dirt, ashes, soot, smoke, sand, mud and lint, especially if you want to make a statement about life, death, history and the ephemerality of it all. The dangers are well illustrated by "Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design," at the Museum of Arts and Design. The problem is that these kinds of materials are loaded with symbolic baggage before you do anything with them. Blood, straw and broken glass are similarly problematic. They are like hammy method actors drawing too much attention to themselves. Imagine Sean Penn in a mumblecore movie. In this 25-artist show almost every work is based on a simple-minded concept. In a series of 13 photographs, Andy Goldsworthy has documented the fate of a ball of sand of about two feet in diameter that he made on a beach near the ocean. As the sequence progresses, the ball falls apart, revealing animal bones within. Finally the incoming tide dissolves the sand, leaving just the bones. The moral of the story is too obvious to mention. Several other artists invoke death while adding social and cultural themes. For a project in São Paulo, Brazil, Alexandre Orion ventured into a tunnel and scraped away car exhaust soot to create thousands of images of skulls. A video shows him creating his guerrilla mural and tunnel workers washing it away and, in effect, censoring Mr. Orion's pro-ecology statement. He has also made nondescript, Pop-style paintings of skulls using tunnel soot as pigment that are presented here. For a funerary display on glass shelves called "Ashes to Ashes," Antonio Riello created clear goblets of blown glass in various fanciful forms, partly filled each with the ashes of a famous book that he had burned and applied a label identifying the cremated tome. The volumes include "Leaves of Grass," "Heart of Darkness" and more than a dozen others. E-book lovers may gloat. In an installation by James Croak, a life-size man in an overcoat and a barking dog, both made of dirt, stand on a dirt floor in an office equipped with a real modern desk and clocks on the wall telling time in different cities. In time, we all will return to dirt, of course. Science tells us that house dust is largely composed of particles of dried skin shed by humans. Paul Hazelton's "Death Duster" is cartoonishly illustrative. It consists of a delicate, life-size human skull made of household dust fitted over the business end of a synthetic feather duster. Julie Parker's "Ritual Accumulations" is less macabre but similarly trades on the epidermal association. It is a checkered quilt, mostly in shades of gray, made of squares cut from swatches of drier lint. Margaret Boozer goes geological. She collects and catalogs soil samples. Here, "Correlation Drawing/Drawing Correlations: A Five Borough Reconnaissance Soil Survey" displays hundreds of samples from New York City in the compartments of a large grid of little plexiglass boxes on the floor. It is very dry. Elvira Wersche has a collection of colored sands from holy and historic sites around the world, given her by friends and followers, that she uses to create geometric sand paintings on floors. Here a vaguely Islamic design in multiple hues covers a rectangle of about 15 feet by 30 feet. A video shows women ceremonially walking across another design she made elsewhere, dragging scarves to erase the composition. This would be more poignant if Ms. Wersche's compositions were more beautiful than generic. One instance where concept, process and visual interest are well matched is a surprisingly naturalistic, all-gray bouquet of flowers in a vase set into a niche, by Phoebe Cummings. Made of unfired clay, it is supposed to dry slowly and deteriorate over the course of the exhibition, and it is fittingly sad to contemplate the loss of such tender craftsmanship. It is all the better if you don't think of it in more grandiose terms. The show's most conceptually intriguing piece is a rusted steel cabinet whose drawers open to reveal rusted tins of various shapes and sizes, by Stephen Livingstone. On the bottom of each container, Mr. Livingstone has painted the image of a moth, using ashes in different shades of gray for pigment. Titled "Dust and Shadows: Sixty-Four Extinctions," it refers to a 19th-century British moth collector and Oxford University professor who kept his thousands of specimens in biscuit tins. When curators at the Oxford University Museum opened them years later, they found nothing but powdered remains. For Jim Denevan, using sand is more pragmatic than symbolic. It would be hard to make drawings as big as his anywhere other than beach areas left open at low tide. An aerial video shows a lacey composition of large and small circles extending for hundreds of yards, with seemingly ant-size people strolling around on it. Inscribed on the earth's surface as if by extraterrestrials, it has a lightly cosmic vibe. In his catalog essay, David McFadden, the exhibition's organizer and the museum's chief curator, cites various historical precedents for using dust, dirt and sand, including the dust preserved by Marcel Duchamp on his "Large Glass," Robert Smithson's dirt-and-rock "Spiral Jetty" and traditional Tibetan sand painting. Perhaps a more imaginative exhibition would make a better case for continuing to use these materials. But in light of the gimmickry and heavy-handed symbolism prevailing here, a moratorium on using these and other end products of entropy in art would be worth considering. "Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design" runs through Aug. 12 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle; (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org.