Adam Dant at Adam Baumgold - New York - exhibition of the artist's work

Overt displays of intelligence are considered just dandy in the art world so long as they are opaque enough to lend themselves to afflatus and jargoneering. Wit, though, is suspect. Duchamp's wit is admired, but it's the "naughty" verbal wit of a late 19th-century intellectual (LHOOQ! Fresh Widow!! Please!!!). Visual wit is another matter. The great Saul Steinberg is seldom seen as a mainstream figure. Miro and Calder are frequently described as "witty," and one can see why, but neither makes me smile, let alone laugh. Certain of the pieces in the "Bureau for the Investigation of the Subliminal Image," by the British artist Adam Dant, a series of drawings recently on view at Adam Baumgold, make me do both. Does this mean Dant is not a "serious" artist?

Dant, a 35-year-old Londoner, first came to attention with Donald Parsnip's Daily Journal, a quirky, learned art-world pamphlet which he started putting out in 1995, and which appeared for four years. He has since been focusing on what one might call "mockuments." These have included floor plans of the Louvre, London's National Gallery and Tate Britain, surrounded by flowcharts leading from cartoon to cartoon to create a kind of psycho-history. Dant's own phrase "The Museum as a Subconscious Realm" could be the title of a chapter by that great Delvaux fan, J.G. Ballard, which is just the kind of interconnected allusiveness that Dant is after.

The Anecdotal Plan of Tate Britain, a drawing of 2001, for instance, is executed in brown sepia ink, which gives it an antiqued-up air. It looks a bit like a treasure map drawn by an obsessive schoolkid, and the same sort of effort has been expended on the text that sources each cartoon. Caption 7 runs: EDWIN FAGG spreads Turner water-colours out to dry on gallery floor whilst others receive a good wringing out. Number 19 goes: "Holman Hunt's daughter makes a loud protest in the gallery against work on show by Picasso & Matisse." Or 48: "Art Vandals' upset EMIN's 'my bed' exhibit." The attack on Carl Andre's brick piece goes unmentioned, possibly as being too well known for this scholastic enterprise.

The guts of the Baumgold show was devoted to a more abstrusely Borgesian conceit, the "Bureau for the Investigation of the Subliminal Image," which focuses on, for instance, the faces we see in the fire, in clouds, on rock surfaces and the like, and the use that artists may--well, just conceivably--have made of them. Included were the jackets of nonexistent books--Encyclopedia Subliminalia A-H, "The Hidden Image," and so forth--and some glorious drawings. And, yes, the apparition of Mona Lisa on a pitted wall made me laugh out loud. So is Adam Dant a "serious" artist? I'll go with Marcel Duchamp on this. It's art if he says it is. So what if it's amusing, too?

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