Two New York exhibitions loosely hang on the subject of Hurricane Katrina: the Metropolitan Museum’s “Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge” and “The Big Easy in The Big Apple: Two Centuries of Art in Louisiana From the Battle of New Orleans to Katrina,” on view at AXA Gallery. Both raise questions about the ability of art to deal with recent catastrophes: Is it too soon for us to digest, let alone respond to, what has happened? Are we rushing the process of healing, comprehension, and resolution? And without the necessary period for distance and reflection, doesn’t the art run the risk of being weighed down by its subject or, worse yet, feeling exploitative?

In the case of Katrina, the answer to each of those questions is a tentative “yes.” It has been less than seven months since the storm ravaged New Orleans. And to differing degrees, both exhibitions suffer from their inability to transform Katrina from specific events into universal subject matter – which is the business of art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is America’s greatest museum, and Philippe de Montebello is America’s greatest museum director. But “Kara Walker at the Met,” a muddled, meandering mess of a show, is the latest sign that the Met we know, like the MoMA of yesteryear, may soon be a thing of the past.

Ms. Walker (b. 1969) has made a fast-track career appropriating the 18th-century medium of the black paper cutout silhouette. “Kara Walker at the Met” comprises some 60 works selected by Ms. Walker from the Met’s permanent collection or from her own work, which deals with race, gender, sexuality, and slavery. Ms. Walker has included some charming 18th-century original cutouts in her show, along with a commanding 19th-century sculpture, a kind of African St. Sebastian, “Male Power Figure (Nkisi).”A mixed-media work of wood, rope, nails, a mirror, and metal shards, “Power Figure” greets viewers and is by far the strongest work on view. Also here are mediocre seascapes by Winslow Homer, Joshua Shaw,and John Carlin,all seemingly chosen for their subjects rather than for their artistic merit.

The worst work in the exhibition is that done by Ms. Walker herself, whose cutouts, because she lacks the most rudimentary drawing skills, have no volume, grace, tension, or spatial complexity. They do not interact with their grounds. Unlike the best of the 18th-century originals, or those by Matisse, the master of the cutout, Ms. Walker’s works remain flat, lifeless caricatures of black people.

The show’s catch-all thesis – “the banality of everyday life,water,and its impact”; “the transformative effect and psychological meaning of the sea”; and of “the role assigned to Black figures represented in art” – reduces art to political speeches and the museum to a political platform. Clearly, Ms.Walker is not at the Met because of her skills as an artist. She is there because she is auction-house hot and because of her topical, politically correct subject matter.

“Kara Walker at the Met” is part of an ongo ing series of contemporary art at the museum. Organized by Gary Tinterow, who holds the broad title of “Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan’s Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art,” the series has brought us recent throwaway shows of Tony Oursler and Sol LeWitt.

These stand in stark contrast to some of the groundbreaking and monumental exhibitions recently mounted at the Met: “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams,” “Prague,” “Van Gogh Drawings,” “Antonello,” “Fra Angelico,” and “Hatshepsut.” Shows that lead rather than follow, they continue to re-establish the benchmark for museum scholarship, taste, and professionalism.What is odd about Mr.Tinterow’s (and, by extension, Mr. de Montebello’s) choice of contemporary artists is that here the Met, acting on received “wisdom” from the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the Whitney, is following blindly rather than leading courageously – a sign that maybe the Met should stay away from contemporary art altogether.

Recent contemporary or late-20th-century exhibitions that the Met should have taken on include the Joan Snyder retrospective at the Jewish Museum, the Louisa Matthiasdottir retrospective at Scandinavia House, and the Jean Helion retrospective at the National Academy.Instead, the Met is bringing us the same old contemporary crap we are force-fed elsewhere. By rushing ahead and merely following trends instead of making aesthetic judgments, the Met is severing art at the neck within its own institution. Here, Mr. de Montebello and company are switching teams: They are standing behind great art only up to around 1945.

Recently, Mr. de Montebello, speaking with Charlie Rose about the fate of the Euphronious Krater, emphasized the ongoing importance of the dialogue between artists of the present and the art of the past – a “precious dialogue between and among … cultures” available only in a museum such as the Met:

De Kooning, when he came to this country, a modern artist, actually was hugely inspired by looking at our frescoes from Pompeii in the production of his work. It was absolutely critical to him. You look at our great Greek Kouros, the standing figure, and then you look at Giacometti’s standing figures, they come right out of there. It’s by looking at a Greek Kouros that Giacometti arrived at some of these things. So you cannot divorce the ancient world from our world.

I believe wholeheartedly in what Mr. de Montebello is saying about the importance of the artistic dialogue between past and present, and I believe he believes it, too. But Mr. de Montebello may have spoken too soon. For with the uninspired shows of the Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg and of Mr. Le-Witt, Mr. Oursler, and Ms. Walker, artists whose works have no substantial lifeline to the art of the ancient world – or to that of Giacometti – the Met, if not yet divorcing itself from the art of the past, is certainly involved in a dangerous and illicit affair.

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“The Big Easy in The Big Apple,” though aesthetically flawed, is a genuine, heartfelt exhibition whose theme is fairly simple: art about New Orleans and by New Orleans artists.The exhibition at times resembles a tourist brochure, but it brings its subject to life. Made up of well-crafted American Indian baskets and jewelry, great folk and decorative art, as well as drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, and a rich collection of photographs, the show gives us a broad view of New Orleans.

Thematically structured to a fault (as if subject trumped art), “The Big Easy” includes a mediocre painting by Degas and a number of weak, racially motivated works by contemporary artists. But half the exhibition consists of beautiful photographs of New Orleans by such photographers as Diane Arbus, E.J. “Papa” Bellocq, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Dureau, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Arnold Genthe, Clarence John Laughlin, and Edward Weston. Together, they express a melancholic portrait of an old and now-lost New Orleans. This is heightened by the work of Dennis Couvillion, a Lakeview area resident whose black-and-white photographic series of the damage done to his neighborhood when the 17th Street levee broke – overturned cars, unearthed graves, a boat lodged in a tree – is frank and understated.

Although “The Big Easy in the Big Apple” is far more successful than “Kara Walker at the Met,” both shows are hodgepodge collections that do not cohere. This failure, which pushes our buttons instead of bringing us art,shifts too much emphasis to the power of the shows’ loaded subjects. When art is forced to move at the pace of industry, entertainment, commerce, and the news cycle – as we continue to see with the World Trade Center memorial and with artists who move directly from art school to blue-chip galleries, auction houses, and museums – business, politics, and egos can get in the way of aesthetics. Art, not allowed to take its own sweet time, cannot properly do its job.

“Kara Walker at the Met” until July 30 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).”The Big Easy and the Big Apple” until May 20 (787 Seventh Avenue at 51st Street, 212-554-2018).