The common assumption is that people want to “interact” — with their newspapers and televisions, with science or history museum displays, with politicians during a debate, and with art — is all too rarely questioned. “25 Years Later: Welcome to Art In General,” an exhibition in the UBS Art Gallery, consists of 10 works all requiring some degree of audience interaction. The accompanying booklet, with its three explanatory essays, never asks — or answers — why an artist might want to make interactive art.

Yet the show — which celebrates the 25th anniversary of the art funding organization Art in General — begs the question.

Each of the pieces has been allotted one of the bays lining the outer edges of UBS’s corporate lobby. This leaves some of the bays, those devoted to performances, looking confusingly empty. On one wall of the bay given to artist Sharon Hayes, for instance, hang five small posters on pink, yellow, orange, brown, and blue paper. Each has an image of a woman at a microphone stand and the title of the work, “Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love?” Other than that, there is only a speaker on a tripod in the corner, which is meant to play recorded speeches — though the two times I walked by, none were to be heard.

For listening, I much preferred Kianga Ford’s “Complex, So. Cal, Multi-4,” four white plastic pod-like structures, arranged on the floor together like leaves on a lucky clover. Equipped with rugs, pillows, and earphones, the pods allow one to escape the lobby’s bustle and listen to short narratives, read by Ms. Ford herself. Meant to follow the lives of residents in a fictional apartment complex, the stories were culled and adapted from the artist’s experiences in Los Angeles. A man named Richard listens to a CD on the power of positive thinking, for instance, or a woman named Sophie decorates with items from IKEA.

Mere listening would seem to be the least onerous form of interactivity, though sitting through the whole of Alejandro Cesarco’s “Dedications” (2007) will test your dedication to tedium. Again, the bay here is virtually empty but for foam stools and speakers in the corners from which one hears the artist reading the dedication pages of books in his library as a sort of found poem. Unfortunately, it’s not an especially good poem.

If you prefer a decidedly quieter form of art, you can head to the nearby “Index of the Disappeared” by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani. The on-site portion of their piece is a library: shelves, books, a couch, file boxes. Visitors are invited simply to use it for reading. More interesting is the accompanying Web-based project “How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database” (http://www.turbulence.org/Works/seethedisappeared/), the purpose of which is “to create alternative systems for collecting stories from the immigrants whose lives as individuals are lost in the abstractions of legalities and headlines.” Essentially, it allows you to read about and submit data on immigrants lost in government labyrinths.

Should you want to disappear yourself, the Dutch artist team known as Bik Van der Pol (Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol) has set out photocopies — free for the taking — of an out-of-print book by Doug Richmond called “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found.” It’s a how-to manual, and the author has apparently taken his own advice: The other part of the project entails the artists trying to locate the still-missing author.

Reading and listening are, admittedly, relatively passive forms of interactivity: Active participation is, of course, the gold standard of the mode. Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong’s “Ping-Pong (New York Common Sense)” (2007), for example, isn’t really a complete work until you play this somewhat unplayable game. It’s a mirrored ping-pong table littered with various objects — a Philippe Starck gun lamp, Bambi figurines, large dice, and other porcelain and wood figures. The point is to avoid the objects while playing the game.

My own favorite — and the only really funny piece — among the works here is Serbian-born Ana Prvacki’s video and demonstration booth for “laundering” money, by which she literally cleans dollar bills of whatever microorganisms are found on them. An amusing, advertising-style video describes the process — wiping each bill with a special cleaning fluid. The demonstration booth contains foil-wrapped bills with labels on them and rubber gloves. In addition to being humorous, it is one of the only works here that comments on the exhibition’s bank lobby setting.

And, unlike so many of the pieces at UBS, it doesn’t demand more effort from visitors than the artists themselves have expended. That, in the end, is the problem with so much interactive art: For it to be meaningful, the artists need to bring more to the table than paddles, balls, and a few trinkets. They need to ask themselves why someone should engage with this work. The artists in “25 Years Later” ask much of their audience but too little of themselves.

Until November 9 (1285 Sixth Ave., between 51st and 52nd streets, 212-713-2885).