On October 31, 1517, approximately 60 years after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses for debate on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany – or so the story goes. What is certain is that his followers soon distributed copies of Luther’s theses to printers, and within a remarkably short time, his views were known all over Europe. The Reformation was under way.

It is no surprise that Luther’s followers used the latest technology for the widespread dissemination of their propaganda. Pope Nicholas V had employed the printing press almost immediately. The earliest dated specimens from Gutenberg’s machine are the 1454 “Letters of Indulgence,” and for decades, in response to recurring plagues, the Roman Catholic Church had been printing block-book editions of “Ars Moriendi” (books for the dying), which encouraged people to will their estates to the church.

The art of propaganda and designers’ subversive desires is the subject of “The Design of Dissent,” an engaging though ham-fisted show of approximately 100 works of graphic design from the 1960s to the present at the School of Visual Arts. Curated by SVA faculty, illustrators, and graphic designers Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic, the show includes works from the United States and abroad and celebrates the launch of the publication “The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics” (Rockport Press, 239 pages, $50), with a foreword by playwright Tony Kushner.

The exhibition is mostly posters, but also includes buttons, T-shirts, postcards, periodicals, books, a tie tack, and ammunition casings turned into pens. Though it features a few wonderful and powerful designs and delivers clever and cheeky sound bites and slogans, “The Design of Dissent” presents us with work that feels driven primarily not by good design but by social and political causes. It reminded me of a conversation I had with the late graphic designer Paul Rand. When I asked him why he had quit teaching graphic design at Yale University, Rand told me that he resigned because the faculty was not teaching “design issues … form, color, line, rhythm – the issues of art. They were teaching social causes. They were telling their students to make a poster about AIDS or women’s rights.”

Most of the works selected for the show and the book (which is divided into 12 contemporary hot-button chapters such as Religion, Equality, Corporate World, United States Presidential Election, Iraq War, Palestine and Israel) feel as if they were chosen not because of quality but because of subject – and specifically because of the designers’ political views about the subjects. The exhibition is a little one-sided, and it draws heavily from the last decade. You will find no pro-Bush, pro-war, pro-carnivore, anti-choice designs in either the book or the show.

Granted, an exhibition about dissent will tend to be swayed toward the views of those not in power. Yet no matter what your political or religious views, it is difficult to come away from “Design of Dissent” without feeling, among the large section of anti-Bush ephemera (some of it sophomoric, some of it classic),that you are being preached to. The curators appear to have an agenda that has little to do with good design and much to do with asserting their own social and political causes.

Worse, many of the designs rely too heavily on the shock factor, or they become cheap shots. Many others are contrived or too reductive to be taken seriously. Some of the works assault you with graphically violent images and scare tactics (raw meat, dead or maimed humans or animals, guns, blood) or images almost guaranteed to garner an emotional response (gags, prison bars, children, cemeteries, flag draped coffins, swastikas, Nazis). The designs employ the very tactics against which they supposedly preach – violence is used to denounce violence.

Typical of the low level of intelligence and lack of dialogue are John Yates’s poster “American Bible Belt” (1995), which depicts a pudgy cop’s belly and gun belt; Adrienne Burk’s poster “The Moron Terror” (2004), of Bush in his flight gear; Agnieszka Dellfina and Thomas Dellert-Dellacroix’s anti-United Nations poster “Your Death-Our Business!”; the poster “We Don’t Need Another Hiro” (2003), of the slogan plastered on top of an image of a nuclear explosion; and Dennis Edge’s leaflet “First Killing/Oil Spill” (2004), which has the saying: “The Bush Plan for Iraq: First Killing Then Drilling” printed over a splash of oil.

A number of the works reductively equate globalization and corporations with war, death, and dictators. Joshua Berger, Niko Courtelis, Pete McCracken, and Enrique Mosqueda’s “Supersize” (2000), a spread for Idea magazine, depicts a gun made out of french fries; another of their spreads equates ketchup with blood. Many designs rely on well-known works of art, cliches, or puns and appropriated slogans, slang, song lyrics, or images from contemporary advertising and popular culture (“Happy New Fear”; “Got Oil?”; “Got Mad Cow?”; “Caution: Children at War”).

There are exceptions. Nicholas Blechman and Michael Mabry’s poster “Stop the Arrogance” (2003), of a Modernist-looking Uncle Sam/Bush figure, guns in his holsters, trampling flowers on a smog-covered globe, is both beautiful and poignant. I was particularly amused by Daniel Young’s T-shirt “Curb Your God” (2004); Dejan Krsiy’s “Arm & Hammer Logo” (2004), a redesign of the logo that reads “Art is not a mirror, it is a hammer!”; Chaz Maviyane-Davies’s poster “Coca-Colonization” (2000); Jarek Bujny’s brochure “GMO Good Food” (2004), which depicts a genetically modified lemon with hair growing out of it; and Igor Avzner’s “Make Up, Not War” advertisement for Thea Line cosmetics.

“Design of Dissent” puts important issues out there – issues ripe for great design. Yet, though eye-catching, most of the designs in “Design of Dissent” are merely clever, one-note works. Many of the designers in the show treat ideals like commodities; like most contemporary advertising, their designs hit hard and fast and low; and treat us as if we will not respond to anything better. They attempt to sell us on ideas that cannot be sold.

Until July 2 (209 E. 23rd Street, between Second and Third Avenues, 212-592-2010).