Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll have been consistent, if not ever-present, subjects in art. One needs only to think of prehistoric cave walls – on which are depicted vulvas and erect penises and figures dancing, hunting, and, flying, seemingly in hallucinogenic or transformative states – to arrive at the core of what drives us as human beings.

Yet every generation, once it hits puberty, thinks it invented loneliness, rebellion, and sex. And every generation of artists since the Renaissance – fueled by a desire to improve upon, reinvent, rebel against, or roll forward art’s wheel – thinks it has gone where no artist has before.

This is especially true of the last 50 years when, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism and, later, Pop Art and Postmodernism, came the self-centered desire to sever all meaningful connections to the art of the past. This dislocation made any recycled artistic idea (be it Surrealist, Dadaist, performancebased, political, sexual, or simply provocative) feel innovative and alive – no matter where the idea came from, or whether it had been done much better before.

Such is the driving arrogance behind both “The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984,” curated by the critic Carlo McCormick, and the exhibition’s accompanying publication, “The Downtown Book,” edited by Marvin Taylor (Princeton University Press, $29.95, 208 pages). Both make inflated claims for the importance and originality of the period and its artists,and a self-aggrandizing air of rationalization and romanticization hovers throughout the project. Mediocre art made by rebels without a cause is justified by the revisionist academy of Postmodernism – an academy built on the foundation of the very same art.

Still, their art-world-be-damned, usagainst-the-world qualities do give the “Downtown” exhibition and book an edginess and energy.The two-venue exhibition is a sprawling, noisy, overlapping collage of video performances, piped-in music from the period, pictures, sculptures, photography, text, and archival works from the Fales Library. But edginess and energy are not enough: It’s as if many of the artists were too busy clubbing, doing drugs, or playing in a band to learn how to sculpt or paint.

Much of the show’s work – which grew out of a breakdown of genres (music, art, dance, theater) – is politically or sexually charged, heavily text-based, and aesthetically weak. Only in the graphic design and in the music (the rise of punk and new wave happened “downtown”) does the show really purr. The music, periodicals, and record covers in “Downtown,” as well as its posters, fliers, and announcements for performances by bands such as the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, the B-52s, and Blondie can be electrifying. Much of the music ephemera is wonderfully displayed at the Fales Library and in the ancillary show of fashion and graphic design “Anarchy to Affluence: Design in New York, 1974-1984,” at the Parsons School of Design.

The time-capsule book and exhibition, which draw extensively on personal accounts, are most interesting and engaging when they tell the story of the cross-pollination among artists, musicians, performers, and writers, and among music, film, painting, and performance art. In this sense the show is much better as an archival or historical romp than as an art exhibition. Believe it or not, reading about Carolee Schneemann’s “Up to and Including Her Limits” (1976) – a documentary video in which the artist, swung naked from a rope harness, draws on the walls and floors, in “a feminist reworking of Pollock-type action painting” – is more interesting than actually plodding through the video.

Yet even as history, the “Downtown” project is revisionist history. The curators have built an exclusive Postmodern club on Dadaist high jinks, Pop Art, graffiti, and conceptual antics: Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Karen Finley, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Sue Coe, Tehching Hsieh,Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and Keith Haring were some of its most important members. We are offered a segregated, uncomplicated, Postmodern world, a view of the past in which whole groups of artists have been written out of the story.

Many of those artists were suffering in the same prostitute- and pimp-ridden, drug-infested neighborhoods as the artists in “Downtown.” They lived in the same low-rent lofts, with rats, no heat, and no hot water, as the now-canonized art stars whose rags-to-riches ascendancy “Downtown” chronicles and lionizes. A number of wonderful representational and abstract painters and sculptors were working right next door to many of those “Downtown” artists, probably even dancing next to them at CBGB’s. Yet “Downtown” brings us the mind-numbing banalities of Chuck Close, Kenny Sharf, Peter Halley, and Julian Schnabel as if these were the patron saints of painting.

That said, a number of works that have slipped through the cracks are actually appealing. Laurie Anderson’s “New York Times / China Times” (1979), a shimmering woven mat collaged out of newspapers, has a homemade warmth and delicacy. Robert Goldman (Bobby G)’s “Greed and Death” (1980), a mixed-media collage reminiscent of Joseph Cornell, comprises mirror, black metal, and drug paraphernalia; it evokes, with almost poetic richness, an operating table, a funeral shroud, and water. Ana Mendieta’s “Alma Silueta en Fuego” (1975) – a 3 1/2-minute film of a white cloth in the shape of a human, burning from the crotch outward until it is completely incinerated – has an almost aching ambiguity.

But too many of the artworks in “Downtown” are either too dense with information, too politically brow-beating, too aesthetically dreadful. Most arose out of a collective rebellion against what was believed to be the subdued, pure strictures of Minimalism and Modernism, as well as out of feminism and a Pop Art-inspired embrace of kitsch, bad taste, popular culture, graffiti, and the detritus of the street.The show demonstrates that embracing kitsch does not necessarily resurrect it from the banality of bad taste.

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll (not to mention a little politics and anarchy) are key to art, but the “Downtown” sense of itself as the well from which contemporary art has flowed is as egotistical as it is myopic. It ignores that there have always been artists who were not only edgy and innovative but also conscious of tradition – artists whose work, though it challenges culture, art, and politics, and is fueled by sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, does not merely begin and end there.

“Downtown” until April 1 (Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, 212-998-6780; Fales Library, 70 Washington Square South, 212-998-2596). “Anarchy” until April 2 (66 Fifth Avenue, between 12th and 13th Streets, 212-229-8919).