Two new events on the Upper East Side inspire the question of whether fine art and interior design are natural allies or mortal enemies.

One of these events is the 35th annual Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club Decorator Show House, which opened last week. Each year, around the time when the tulips bloom in the meridians of Park Avenue, an elegant but uninhabited townhouse is cashiered to serve as the theater for sundry acts of fleeting fabulousness. This year’s venue is a six-story townhouse at 14 E. 82nd St., each of whose 19 interior spaces has been assigned to a different design firm that has totally transformed it for an entire month.

To enter the deceptively august beaux arts building is to be immediately barraged with a sustained saturation of visual effects, from surfboards and silvered walls to Mod bucket chairs and operatic candelabra. Every inch of every room and passageway has been charged, and sometimes overcharged, with visual energy.

As it happens, almost directly across the street is another townhouse, newly inhabited by the Adelson Galleries, which has capitalized on that proximity by mounting an exhibition provocatively called “Art Is Décor.” But is it? And is the contrary true: Is décor art?

As to the latter proposition, on the basis of the evidence presented at the Kips Bay Show House, it seems that interior design is undeniably an art. Not because each of the 19 spaces is an artistic success, but because, like any painting or act of architecture, each can be judged according to the presence or absence of visual power and charm. A designed room is to a piece of installation art as a chair is to an abstract sculpture: The added element of utility cannot enhance its formal merit, but it doesn’t vitiate it either.

In the Western world in general, and on 82nd Street in specific, all designers owe a profound debt to 18th-century France. The long reign of Louis XV saw a fundamental shift in the philosophy of interior décor. Before that, there was the room and there were the objects in the room. Considerable artistic intelligence, surely, was employed to adorn the walls with frescoes and stuccoes, and to adorn the furnishings as well. But between the mobile and the immobile, between the building and its contents, there was a fundamental severance. It was the Louis Quinze taste that forged these two estranged entities into an indissoluble union.

As a result, the crucial criterion for judging the entries in this year’s Kips Bay Show House is whether they succeed in creating a totalized environment, in abolishing that sense of arbitrariness and disconnection between inhabitable space and what it contains.

Two entries stood out in this regard. The first, a living room situated at the front of the building on the second floor, was designed by Eve Robinson Associates. In keeping with this firm’s luxuriously cool modernism and pallorous minimalism, a Jules Leleu-inspired settee and Kurt Olson armchairs have been set around an empty center that creates a welcome sense of openness. One of the few color accents — the gleaming green of the fireplace — is picked up in the interior of the ceiling lamp. Otherwise a beige calm reins across the room, in the modular carpeting no less than in the walls, splendidly covered by a process known as intonaco di vetro. On the walls is an unusually fine biomorphic abstract painting by Ross Bleckner.

Another delightful installation, a bedroom that occupies the same space on the fourth floor, is by Jamie Drake of Drake Design Associates. Here the dominant theme is once again a color or hue: the bubble gum pink of the walls, the bed, and many of the furnishings, assisted by a lavender shade of orchid and mauve carpeting. Old World touches include a fanciful 19th-century mirror and a huge inlaid Russian writing table, as well as a walk-in closet, also pink, filled with hundreds of pairs of shoes. This entry, too, includes a worthy biomorphic abstraction, by the painter David Mann.

For the most part, it is a different kind of painting that predominates in the Adelson Galleries, across the street at 19 East 82nd St. The first floor contains modern and contemporary images, including works by two of the Wyeths, by the abstract artist Jack Tworkov, and by Andrew Stevovich, a less well-known artist whose specialty is cool and precisely limned images of women. The second floor is more imposing, with some fine works by Cassatt, Degas, and Renoir, to name but a few. In a statement accompanying the exhibition, the owner of the gallery, Warren Adelson, asserts that: “Great collectors and great interior designers have never succumbed to the intellectual tantrum of art vs. décor. In this new millennium, a sense of balance has begun to return.” As an example of such balance, he invokes the Sistine Chapel, “the ultimate unification of art as a spiritual experience and art as decoration.”

In defense of Mr. Adelson’s contention, I will allow that paintings can enhance and underscore the general thematic and chromatic tone of an interior, as the Ross Bleckner abstraction does so effectively in Ms. Robinson’s interior. And I know at least one Park Avenue apartment that was disconsolately drab until the owner purchased — mainly as an investment — some decent Dutch and French Old Masters. Suddenly, thanks to the quality of the art, the place became elegant and full of charm.

But I would submit that the better the work of art, the less effective it is as décor. Almost by definition, décor is subservient, or at the very least is not superior, to its context. But a work of art that truly functions as art is a querulous and rebellious entity that does not play well with anything else in the room. In its demand to be seen as something sovereign and alone, a truly great painting subverts any context into which you inject it. It leaps out of any frame and it burns itself out of any room.

Kips Bay until May 22 (14 E. 82nd St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-755-5733);

Adelson until May 31 (19 E. 82nd St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-439-6800).