Few venues embody the free-for-all that is today’s art world as fully as the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. An old school building located in industrial Long Island City, P.S.1 is an institution dedicated to the anti-institutional. Providing ample space to the jumble of current artistic practice, the art center still hearkens back to its original function. This is part of P.S.1’s appeal: one can’t help but experience a nostalgic disassociation in encountering, say, an inflatable Tyrannosaurus in a gallery vaguely reminiscent of one’s fifth-grade math class. P.S.1 milks the underlying impulse of public education, albeit subliminally, by advocating any and all brands of artistic endeavor. That the work on view rarely transcends the diverting (or the annoying) doesn’t make the best case for democratic principles, however. A friend suggested that P.S.1 would better serve the culture at large if it were turned back into a school. My son recently spent an afternoon there and thought the place, with its sinister stairwells and finches in the gallery, a blast. Which goes to prove, I suppose, that much of what passes for art nowadays is best appreciated by a five-year-old child.

In this context, the austere sculpture of Ronald Bladen (1918–1988) looks as if it were that of an old master. The exhibition “Ronald Bladen: Selected Works”—on view at P.S.1 until May 30—alludes to the minimalist’s oeuvre without giving it shape. We are left to intuit a sensibility responsible for objects as