Tucked modestly into a new show of works from the UBS Collection, Sarah Morris’s 1998 “Midtown-PaineWebber (With Neon)” seems almost to lean away from the two Damien Hirst paintings across the gallery. The spare grillwork of a building facade, a grid lit in blue, black, and red, Morris’s painting reads equally as an abstraction or as a pedestrian’s vertiginous perspective looking up a glass-curtain skyscraper. To be sure, Ms. Morris is a deserving young artist who works in film and photography as well as paint, though the inclusion of her canvas here can also be taken as a sly bit of curatorial irony. The PaineWebber Building is now the UBS Building, and the collection from which “Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection” is drawn is comprised largely from the former PaineWebber Art Collection.

Like it or not, corporations today fulfill the role once assumed by the Medicis and the Catholic Church: They are our most effective patrons of the arts. Few among them have been as active as UBS, which also sponsors the world’s two biggest contemporary art fairs, Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Indeed, the creation of the PaineWebber Collection was led by Donald Marron, a one-time chairman and CEO of the company and the vice chairman of MoMA.

An exhibition of close to 70 pieces, “Contemporary Voices” presents a hodgepodge of artists from several postwar generations, from Willem de Kooning to Ms. Morris and Mr. Hirst. But, as a friend and critic announced upon entering the show, the real story is in the wall labels. Some 40 of the works on view are gifts or promised gifts to the museum, chosen by its curators to buttress its holdings in contemporary art. So the wall labels, which tell us if a work has been gifted to MoMA, provide some insight into the collecting needs and tastes of the museum.

The show is arranged chronologically, and one of the oldest pieces, an early Joseph Beuys, demonstrates the usefulness of this collaboration between a financial services company and a museum. “Gold Sculpture” (1956) consists of six mounted sheets of notes and sketches in graphite and gold paint. I cringed slightly at the thought of the museum spending precious acquisitions funds on such visually inert ephemera. Still, “Gold Sculpture” has significant art-historical value, and thus I was pleased to see it donated to an institution that can put it to good scholarly use.

By the 1960s, the story becomes clearer. Among the pieces from that decade given to the museum are early Pop Art works by Richard Artschwager and Andy Warhol, important Minimalist sculptures by Dan Flavin (notably, his “‘Monument’ for V. Tatlin 1” of 1964) and Donald Judd. There is also Gerhard Richter’s blurred, photo-based portrait “Helen” (1963), a standout here, one that almost certainly would not have seemed as essential 15 years ago, before the current thirst for contemporary German art had taken hold. “Helen” will join a less impressive, multi-colored Richter abstraction from 1986 – one might quibble that the artist’s best abstractions were made a decade later.

Apparently MoMA felt its German holdings needed some bulking up: Seven of the donated works are by German artists, and there are a handful of others on display. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to find among the seven an unexceptional Georg Baselitz oil from the 1980s and no fewer than three works by Anselm Kiefer from the late 1970s and 1980s. Along with Beuys, Baselitz and Kiefer kindled the initial fires of interest in German art in this country, and I would have expected MoMA to have been collecting them for some time now. I would have thought Neo Rauch’s beguiling “Wound” (1998), which refashions Socialist Realism for post-Cold War eyes, or Sigmar Polke’s untitled abstraction of 1985, or Andreas Gursky’s large photograph “99 Cent” (1999) – all of which are on view – would plug bigger collecting gaps than the earlier Germans.

The three less famous Germans certainly speak more to the concerns of younger artists and collectors operating today, though it is equally true that museums need not, and probably should not, be swayed in their collecting by the prevailing winds of taste. Whether those winds affected the choice of the other donated pieces remains open to debate. On the one hand, one can point to the three Ed Ruscha works – a 1960s drawing and paintings from the 1980s and 1990s – as examples by an artist whose stock has risen sharply in recent years. On the other, Susan Rothenberg’s six large panels and Frank Stella’s polychrome wall sculpture, “The Wheelbarrow (B#3, 2X)” of 1988, are hardly fashionable.

One downside to assessing a corporate art collection is that there is no individual to whom we can pin the choices made, no one person who represents the taste behind it. Did the same eye select Willem de Kooning’s late abstract “Untitled III” (1982) or Philip Guston’s iconic “In the Studio” (1975) as well as Tony Cragg’s crescent-shaped assemblage of found plastic objects, “Grey Moon” (1985), and Vija Celmins’s elegant “Drawing Saturn” (1982)? Or were they chosen by a committee of advisors?

Like the Morris painting, this show can be taken several ways at once. In the end, however, you’ll want to look up from the wall labels and engage the art. For no matter how it came together and no matter what it means for MoMA, “Contemporary Voices” assembles an impressive chorus of styles and works. It’s worth tuning in.

Until April 25 (11 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-908-7000).