We should begin by acknowledging that there is nothing really wrong with New York’s Percent for Art Program, which was inaugurated by the Koch administration back in 1983. This program mandated that 1% of the money for each public building project be set aside for the creation of art to occupy it. As a result, more than 200 paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and installations have been commissioned to adorn and enliven plazas, schools, and community centers around the five boroughs.

What do I mean when I say, partially to provoke certain earnest souls, that there is nothing really wrong with the program? Throughout its history, the program has seen little of that unpleasantness that usually occurs when the suits start talking to artist types: none of Diego Rivera’s depictions of Lenin in the lobby of Rockefeller Center, none of the contretemps occasioned by the art of Mapplethorpe and others in the early 1990s, none of the recent kerfuffle at the Drawing Center regarding ground zero.

The resulting art has, on the whole, been sufficiently pleasant and uplifting, and the Percent for Art Program is now the subject of one of those charmingly wonkish exhibitions that the Center for Architecture does so well. This informative show coincides with the publication of an even more informative book, “City Art,” by Eleanor Heartney and others, that documents each of the 200 works created to date.

But beyond this faint praise, both the exhibition and the book testify to the limitations of the Percent for Art Program. Its artistic achievement feels far less compelling than that of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, and there has yet to emerge a dominant style such as the one fostered by the WPA. The Percent for Art Program’s overarching goal, I gather, was to nurture a citywide sense of cultural fermentation, of beautiful grace notes that would extend throughout the five boroughs. This has not been achieved: Most people encounter only a few such grace notes in their daily lives, and even if they stray farther afield, they rarely connect the dots or realize that these discrete outbursts of creativity are part of a single coherent legislative program. As a consequence, the 200 projects in this survey never reach a critical mass; at no point does one sense the emergence of a coherent cultural statement.

In part this is due to a lack of stylistic coherence among the objects. In an age in which it is no longer possible to speak of an artistic mainstream, it was to be expected that 200 artists would work in 200 varied styles. Most of the artists are little known, but some, like Alice Aycock and Donald Lipski, are highly regarded, and at least two, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Pat Steir, have had brushes with greatness in their careers. But not here. The work the latter two have done for two different public schools is tame and toothless compared with their best work.

Ms. Steir, known for her huge and exuberant abstractions, is limited in this case to 137 small and polite porcelain tiles that recall Mondrian. Mr. Wodiczko, a master of subversive light displays, has installed several false windows in a windowless auditorium; these contain photographs of the neighborhood that change according to the amount of light in the room.

If there is little or no stylistic coherence in the works engendered by the Percent for Art Program, there is a distinct spiritual sameness in most of them. The legislation that brought them into being was in essence a 1970s phenomenon, and they maintain something of the touchy-feely temperament of that time. Each in its own way is imbued with that complaisant faith in communitarian goodness and togetherness; that makes for very nice people, but not necessarily for good art.

Nitza Tufino’s “Feather Explosion,” in P.S. 12 in Brooklyn, depicts colorful West Indian costumes. In the Alonzo Daughtry Day Care Center, Julie Dermansky has covered the floors with pleasant flowers and birds. In P.S. 306 in the Bronx, Andrea Arroyo’s fiberglass friezes, “Harmony I” and “Harmony II,” depict airborne figures of a man and a woman and images of the Earth and the city.

I suspect that the whole project is a projection of a certain midcult conviction, raised to the municipal level, that art – and by extension creativity – is always a good thing, an ennobling thing, a vaguely valuable thing. But there is an even deeper cause for the generally lackluster pleasantness of most of the art commissioned by Percent for Art, and it has to do with the way we conceive art in modern times. For the first time in its history, art is conceptually sovereign. Even when we ask it to harmonize with the context into which it will be set, as the members of the dozens of community boards have done around the city, even when we demand that it reflect the values of the community, we nonetheless view the art in such a way that it effectively burns itself out of any context, because it is seen to be radically individual and alone. This is why few objects that this program has fostered fit memorably into their contexts. They either clash with that context or appear irrelevant to it.

Earlier generations had no self-conscious public arts programs. They didn’t need them since they were almost incapable of building anything without adorning it. They did not aspire to creativity and perhaps would not even have understood the concept. But they effortlessly and intuitively grasped the perfect state of equilibrium between art and its public context. That equilibrium was one of the first things to perish in the emergence of modern culture and, to date, it has never been regained.

Until September 3 (536 LaGuardia Place, between W. 3rd and Bleecker Streets, 212-683-0023).