“This is a photography show about magic,” declares the press release for “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” on display at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. This attractive exhibition spans nearly 150 years of the medium’s history and presents a diverse array of techniques and approaches. Collectively, its 41 images are meant to “propose a history of photography which emphasizes the spiritual over the rational.” As in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2005 exhibition “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” the camera is presented here as an instrument that not only documents reality, but also touches on the invisible realm of the spirit.

The anthropomorphic possession of nature is the subject of several works, including William Balch’s “Arethusa (arethusa bulbosa)” (1917), which presents five flowers emerging from the ground, with long fingerlike petals that curl in gestures evocative of clawing hands. The three sisters of Darius Kinsey’s “Three Sisters, Sekiu, Washington” (1925) are not its young female subjects but the rocky outcroppings around them. Crowned with hairlike tufts of vegetation and containing jutting protrusions that look like rows of buck teeth, these curious geologic forms appear haunted by human presence.

Other photographs depict a near opposite phenomenon, their human subjects blurring into ill-defined specters.”Women With Long Hair,” by an unidentified artist of the 1860s–1870s, views eight figures from behind, their long flowing hair spilling onto long flowing robes, so that each becomes an indistinct, almost ghostlike, brown form. And the Japanese pilgrims on a foggy ascent to Mount Fuji in Corey McCorkle’s three untitled works (2005) are apparitions crossing a hazy borderland between earthly and spiritual realms.

Bas Jan Ader’s “Broken Fall (Organic)” (1971/94) is haunted by irresolvable ambiguity. Its lone figure is suspended in the air — midjump — beside a large tree overhanging a small creek. The young man’s action is simple enough, but what does it mean: Is he leaping ecstatically, plunging dangerously into the water, or simply hopping over the creek?

“A Rabbit as King”is full of excellent images, but as a whole it fails to live up to the expansive claims of its press release, or its title’s allusion to the splendid Wallace Stevens poem of the same name. The mysteries, hauntings, ambiguities, and liminal states depicted here are just not that otherworldly or supernatural. But there is still plenty of “magic” on display, and it is exactly the sort you hope to find when you enter a gallery — namely, art.

The Elizabeth Dee Gallery’s “Bring the War Home” is also a haunted show — haunted by what the contemporary art world is and what it’s not.The title references Martha Rosler’s celebrated Vietnam-era photomontages that sought to introduce the reality of the war into the American home. The target of this two-gallery affair (the companion exhibition is at QED in Los Angeles) is not our current war, but the supposedly related state of the contemporary art world, which is described as market-obsessed and apolitical.

In place of the standard white cube with a few highly priced objets d’art shown amid expanses of empty wall, “Bring the War” presents a crammed warehouse-style display with more than 100 reasonably priced objects (several works are free; others cost as little as $10–$50) hung on walls, strewn on the floor, and spread across tables. With a few exceptions, these are not gallery-ready paintings or sculptures, but bric-a-brac meant to represent less traditional art practices: artist’s books, exhibition posters and ephemera (buttons, matchboxes, and stickers) for unconventional shows and alternative display spaces, pamphlets, sketches, and binders recording collaborative gatherings. Together, they constitute an ad-hoc manifesto for the present-day avantgarde, instructing how to remain outside the corrupting influence of the art market.

Broadly speaking, this show offers two critiques of the gallery system. The first has to do with its superficial marketing methods and overt image-consciousness. For their several “Faxbacks” (1998–99), the London-based collective Bank annotated several exhibition press releases and faxed them to their respective galleries in a futile attempt to “improve” the quality of art discourse. Bank’s handwritten comments range from helpful copyedits (missing hyphen, unnecessary apostrophe) to snarky observations about word choice and graphic design, to sardonic overall assessments like: “Manages to be pretty full of nonsense in nine idiotically banal lines. Well done, but not very good.”

The second occurs through the dissemination — by way of photographs, texts, and other documents — of the activities of collaborative groups such as ESL (Esthetics as a Second Language) who represent noncompetitive alternatives to the standard focus on individual “star” artists. ESL is represented by several works, including “Presentation Project for Exhibition ‘Bringing the War Home’ by Drew Heitzler” (2006), which invites visitors to grab a free postcard and send them a one-word review of the show.

Cyprien Gaillard’s “Hall of Fame” (c. 2002) gets at both ideas. The artist mocks the celebrity of contemporary art stars such as Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall with a series of cheap touristy T-shirts, each with silkscreens of an artist’s face and signature.

Not surprisingly, there is plenty to criticize in “Bring the War Home” — not only can the work be amateurish, solipsistic, and unattractive, but much of it is, rather hypocritically, totally dependent on galleries and their marketing mechanisms to have any meaning or value at all — but the show’s chaotic grab-bag aesthetic is mostly just a lot of fun. Its polemical press release aside, it manages to suggest that art-making need not always be a heavy-handed, pretentious undertaking; it can also be teasing, light-hearted play.

Take, for instance, one of my personal favorites, Nicholás Guagnini’s booklet on sale for a mere $10. The piece, which features an unprintable title, contains Xeroxes of the seven art reviews the artist wrote for TimeOut New York between December 2002 and April 2004 and two critical essays, one of which explains his self-imposed restrictions for the project — the last of which was not shared with the editors of TimeOut: 1) that he not review a living artist; 2) that he not write about a major New York figure; and 3) that each piece reference either monkeys or excrement. (If you’re skeptical, track down his reviews of shows such as “Southern Exposure” [Museo del Barrio, 2004], “Edward Krasinski” [Anton Kern Gallery, 2003], and “Theodore Chasseriau: The Unknown Romantic” [the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002].) Although my sensibility is less scatological than Mr. Guagnini’s, I was impressed by his silly, irreverent act. In fact, it served as partial inspiration for my postcard to ESL, on which I simply wrote: “magic.”

“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” until August 11 (534 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-744-7400).

“Bring the War Home” until August 19 (545 W. 20th St., between Tenth Avenue and the West Side Highway, 212-924-7545).