Unlike the far more prominent Whitney Biennial, the National Academy Museum’s annual exhibition of contemporary art feels like a real salon, resembling those of the École des Beaux-Arts and the Royal Academy in the 19th century. It is one of the ironies of art history that the Whitney show, which is supposed to incarnate subversive vanguardism, has long since become predictable, even boring, in its rebellious posturing. It has as much to do with true rebellion at this point as Revolutionary and Civil War re-enactors have to do with the tumultuous birth of America. But even as the Whitney goes through its formulaic tantrums, the 182nd Annual Exhibition at NAM, for all its conservatism, is full of surprises and can be viewed with outright pleasure.

This pleasure is not always derived from the art as such — there is considerable dead weight here — but from the exhibition as a whole, from the opportunity to examine the art as art and to argue for or against it with some clear sense of what the artists, as artists, were trying to do. There is relatively little humbug in this show, and such as you might encounter is so old as to seem almost new. Come to think of it, we could probably use a bit of 19th-century humbug, and some of the earnest portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes in the 182nd Annual are a fine place to start.

Though there are some mixedmedia pieces among the 195 works on view, most behave like paintings that — despite the occasional impastation — seem content to exist in two dimensions, or like traditional sculptures, manifestly happy in their objecthood and ready for installation in the nearest living room.

Because of the clashing multiplicity of styles, however, one’s assessment of the show invariably says as much about the critic as about the art. Thus although I esteem great representational art above all else, I would rather see an accomplished abstraction than a mediocre still life. And so the works that impressed me most at NAM tended to belong to the former category. Diana Horowitz’s “Untitled,” for example, is a wobbly reverie in various moods of green, subtly painterly but almost geometric in the clarity of its patchwork zones. Though derivative of Hans Hoffman and Ad Reinhardt, it nevertheless manages to break through to the freshness and fertility of springtime.

A truly distinguished painting is “Hester Street Hip-Hop,” by Richard Sloat. The title, no less than the forms, is a delightful reference to Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” Unlike in Ms. Horowitz’s painting, the sheer, angular patterns abolish any trace of the artist’s hand. Rather, the emotional register is conveyed through the choice and rhythmic juxtaposition of colors, with the brighter hues collected in the center. Mr. Sloat has managed to doing something quite rare among abstract painters: He has conveyed good humor without destroying the painting’s aesthetic integrity, as happens, for example, to several works in MoMA’s current “Comic Abstraction” show.

Most of the paintings on view, however, are resolutely representational, at times to the point of photorealism. A beguiling example of detailed observation is Daniel E. Greene’s “Ring-A-Ghoul,” which depicts a man in a green short-sleeve shirt who stands at the front of a shooting arcade. Behind him is the motley of prizes in the form of stuffed teddy bears. The great mystery of this painting is why it works as well as it does. The paint textures are unexceptional and the quality of the observation has a whiff of pedantry to it. But that pedantry, while unimpressive in its individual details, accumulates a surprising power in its totality, aided by a scrupulously balanced composition that also manages to be unique to this work of art.

I have no idea what is going on in Mark Greenwold’s “Why Not Say What Happened,” but I am sure it is a good painting. Oil on wood, it combines aggressive observation with comic distortion in its depiction of two middle-age men and one woman standing in a bedroom rendered in tilted two-point perspective. At the feet of the woman is an ant the size of a poodle with a human head. Here again, as in Mr. Greene’s “Ring-A-Ghoul,” the brittle and nearly pedantic accumulation of data succeeds in winning its way to an unlikely aesthetic integrity.

One final piece that caught my eye is Gregory Kondos’s “Meteora, Greece,” an airily blue landscape depicting a Greek town serenely perched upon a steep rock. Mr. Kondos exhibits the sort of intuitive response to landscape that the great Alice Neel brought to her portraiture, a seemingly effortless one-off act of visual tact. And like the figures of Neel, Mr. Kondos’s largely schematic forms achieve an entirely satisfying painterly richness, whether in the shape of mountains or valleys.

In addition to these and other worthy examples of painting and sculpture, the 182nd Annual includes works by such well-known artists as Gregory Amenoff, William Bailey, Paul Resika, and Dorothea Rockburne, among others.

Until June 24 (1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-369-4880).