The once nouveau philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy is not only the curator of “Les Aventures de la vérité: Peinture et philosophie: un récit” (The Adventures of Truth: Painting and Philosophy: A Narrative) but also one of its artists, of a sort. Although you won’t find his name on the checklist, perhaps it should be there, thanks to a series of videos for which he asked artists, not all of them represented by works in the exhibition, to read passages of philosophy. In one of the diary excerpts that constitute Lévy’s main catalogue text, he relates how Jeff Koons declined to read the extract from Kant that Lévy had selected for him. The reason? It came from a book called The Critique of the Faculty of Judgment—and, as one of the artist’s assistants explained, “Mr. Koons does not believe in judgment.”

Making one’s way through the congested hodgepodge of more than 150 works that forms Lévy’s visual account of truth’s vicissitudes, it is hard not to wonder whether he himself is not as antagonistic to judgment as Koons claims to be. Walk through any of the seven “sequences” into which Lévy has divided the exhibition, and you’re likely to be flummoxed by a concatenation of works that have nothing in common in terms of style, technique, sensibility, or even, often enough, subject matter—let alone quality, the very matter of aesthetic judgment; the differences among them seem to offer no stimulus for significant distinction. To hang a canvas by Gérard Garouste next to a Paul Klee is simply criminal. It’s like stumbling into the lumber room of some provincial museum,where forgotten masterpieces hang chockablock with the deluxe castoffs of local notables. What has Pierre Tal Coat’s gestural painting of a schematic leaping figure, Le Saut, 1955–56, to do with a suite of thirty-four shadowy photographs by Mike Kelley, most of them hung too high to make out (The Poetry of form: part of an ongoing attempt to develop an auteur theory of naming, 1985–96), or the dark glamour of Andy Warhol’s massive silkscreen Diamond Dust Shoes, 1980? In this case, the clue turns out to be given by the subject of a few of the works in the same section; for instance, a rather campy sixteenth-century painting, attributed to the Belgian Mannerist Michiel Coxcie, or the more sober 1604 engraving by Jan Saenredam after a painting by Cornelis van Haarlem, both depicting Plato’s cave. Here is where Lévy’s story begins, with the philosopher’s banishment of the imagemaker from any access to truth: Artists were therefore, he says, “forced to work not with Being but with its shadow or reflection.”

In subsequent episodes, Lévy presents artists as having reestablished their claim on truth through the legend of Veronica’s veil, thereby asserting that “an image may be holy after all.” From here on, the claims and counterclaims of art and philosophy mount until finally, he optimistically affirms, a “grand alliance” between philosophy and art becomes possible: “Artists help philosophers think, while philosophers stimulate artists’ hands and deepen their reflections.” But the pretense to a narrative with some basis in the histories of philosophy and art is belied by the drearily postmodernist simultaneity of times and places that Lévy has conjured, and the grand alliance is in scant evidence. The philosopher-pundit shows little sensitivity to art, and speaking of shadows and reflections, whatever led him to install the ravishing Mondrian Composition 2 with Red, 1926, beneath a stained-glass work by Miró—part of the decor of the Fondation Maeght, not of the exhibition—so that the Miró casts on the Mondrian a bluish-violet reflection that utterly douses what Lévy himself calls the painting’s “bright light, as if heated to white hot”? Making the age-old mistake of using artworks as just so many illustrations of one’s own thought, ciphers of meaning, he seems hardly to have bothered to look.

—Barry Schwabsky