Of the many things to be said about the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, which opened on the campus of Ohio State University on November 17, the first concerns its emblematic status. For the Wexner Center, designed by Peter Eisenman and built at a cost of forty-three million dollars, is no ordinary campus facility intended to bring a little leisure-time culture to the academy and its community. The Center’s ambitions are a good deal larger than that. So are its pretensions, and foremost among them is that this mega-center for the arts somehow “challenges” what its director, Robert Stearns, calls “conventional thinking.”

In uttering this now hoary cliché on such an august occasion, Mr. Stearns would seem, at first glance, to be blissfully ignorant of the degree to which all such talk about challenges to conventional thinking has become the very mark of conventional wisdom in the arts. Mr. Eisenman would seem to be similarly oblivious—both in the building he has designed for the Wexner Center and in the elaborate intellectual apologia he has adumbrated in its defense. But as neither of these extremely well-informed professionals is likely to be the least bit ignorant about such matters—Mr. Eisenman has shown himself to be particularly shrewd at calculating his exact relation to the taste of his time, and Mr. Stearns comes to Columbus from, among other venues, the Kitchen Center in S0H0 and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis—we are therefore obliged to decode (or should one say