Perhaps the work that best summed up the aims of “Traffic,” an exhibition dedicated to the art of the ’90s, was the fireplace Xavier Veilhan installed directly across from the entrance to the main room of the museum. Primarily, this work represented an attempt to blur the line between the “sacred” space of the museum and the “traffic” of the everyday. But the work also embodied what curator Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational esthetics”: the “art” was as much the viewers sitting around the fire that burned inside this black metal structure as the object itself.

Of the pieces presented here, some