Art is changing so fast these days that even museums sometimes cannot be bothered to give us a sense of how we got to our current state. Curators, moving at market-driven speed, are now operating with an “out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new” mindset. Such is the case with the Guggenheim Museum’s “The Shapes of Space,” a sprawling assortment of approximately 75 works — paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, and videos — from the museum’s permanent collection. The gradually expanding show, which first opened in April, is now completely installed and will remain on view until September 5.

Had its subject been more thoroughly explored, “The Shapes of Space” could have been an engaging journey from Renaissance-based perceptual Realism or Post-Impressionism up through Cubism, abstraction, Minimalism, and Postmodernism. If its curators had been even more inspired, and had wished to borrow works, they could have gone full circle and connected Modernist European abstraction to ancient Egyptian abstract funerary art, Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts, and Coptic textiles. But that would have been too conventional. Instead, the exhibit, thematically installed, works subversively against historical context.

The hodgepodge show, whose earliest work is a 1913 painting by Kandinsky, is too nearsighted and unfocused to ground us in its theme. Lopsided with recent contemporary art, the exhibit has virtually no art historical base, and it uses the work of some of its best artists — Mondrian, Calder, Moholy-Nagy, Léger, Giacometti, Gabo, and Kandinsky — only perfunctorily or as fuddy-duddy foils for some of the worst contemporary work in the show.

One example is the placement of Carl Andre’s Minimalist “Zinc Ribbon, Antwerp” (1969), a banal, snaking metal strip “that directs our awareness,” we are informed, “to the architecture of the surrounding site,” on the floor below Kandinsky’s masterful abstract painting “Several Circles” (1926). Another is Mondrian’s phenomenal, hard-edged “Composition No. 1: Lozenge With Four Lines” (1930) (a masterpiece alluded to in the wall text as a “purely formal exercise”), hung near Agnes Martin’s do-little Minimalist grid painting “White Stone” (1965), Sarah Morris’s painting “Mandalay Bay (Las Vegas)” (1999), and Piotr Uklanski’s “Untitled (Dance Floor)” (1996).

“Mandalay Bay” is a tiresome, colored grid that is said to challenge both consumerism and “the self-referential nature of abstract painting.” Mr. Uklanski’s interactive installation “Untitled (Dance Floor)” amounts to nothing more than a flashing, lighted dance floor and music played loudly on a bad sound system. Transforming museum into discothèque, “Untitled (Dance Floor)” allows visitors to stomp the rotunda while they get their photos taken. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most popular works in the show, especially with children.

“The Shapes of Space” takes its title from Alyson Shotz’s “The Shape of Space” (2004), a wavering wall of beveled, clear plastic lenses which, hung in front of a ground floor lobby window looking out on Fifth Avenue, reflect images and light and shimmer like falling water. The sculpture, the first work you encounter, has its charms, especially in a show with limited aesthetic merit, but it is little more than sparkling window dressing.

Curated by Ted Mann, Nat Trotman, and Kevin Lotery, under the supervision of chief curator Nancy Spector, “The Shapes of Space” gives us a wide variety of artworks and of approaches to the subject of space (albeit mostly from the last 10 years); and there are good works among the acquisitions, including Yuken Teruya’s “Notice-Forest” (2005), five small, delicately crafted cut-paper trees carved from shopping bags. But the show is one of those exhibits that cut its subject off at the knees, if not the head.

My sense is that the curators were less interested in “The Shapes of Space” than they were in trotting out a bunch of the museum’s recent acquisitions of contemporary art. Midway up the Guggenheim’s spiral, I felt as if I had been duped by a classic baitand-switch: The exhibit includes only about a dozen works made before 1959, and most of the show’s objects were made since 1982 and purchased in the last 15 years — half since 2000. To be true to their actual subject, the curators should have begun only as far back as Louise Bourgeois’s “Fée Couturière” (1963, cast 1984), acquired in 1992, and titled the show: “The Shapes of Things We Have Bought Recently.”

The subject of this show is not that artists from every period must grapple with the concrete, spiritual, sociological, psychological, and metaphorical implications of space. Otherwise, we wouldbeseeingthehighlycharged perceptual explorations of Cézanne and the perceptually based Cubist inventions of Braque and Picasso, as well as those of Robert Delaunay, whose Cubist paintings of the Eifel Tower led him toward pure abstraction. All of these revolutionary works (examples of which are in the Guggenheim’s permanent collection) are essential bridges between the spatial constructs of the Renaissance and those of Modernism — innovations without which none of the contemporary works in “The Shapes of Space” would have been possible. We also would have seen works by visionary Paul Klee, who studied nature from the inside out, who deviated from the optical image but did not contradict it, and who, in his own words, “rendered visible” worlds parallel to those we can see — inner realms in which man is presented not as he appears, but as he might be.

“The Shapes of Space” begins with a quote from Moholy-Nagy: “Every cultural period has its own conception of space, but it takes time for people consciously to realize it.” This statement bears witness to the facts that art often leads and society follows, and that art and concepts about art evolve together within a culture. It also reminds us that human beings make art about their relationship to the world. When man is comfortable in nature, as he was in the Renaissance, he pictures himself within it. But when he is more spiritual, more connected to another realm and more removed from this world, as were the ancient Egyptians, or when he is less and less comfortable with his surroundings, he moves toward abstraction.

In “The Shapes of Space,” Mondrian’s neutral, flat plane, free line, and syncopated rhythms — an abstract world in which space and form, irreducible and inseparable, create a purely metaphoric realm of comparison — are equated with the flashing lights of a discothèque. This fact tells me not that we have left Mondrian’s conception of space behind and that we have moved on, but that, lagging behind the genius of his art, or possibly uncomfortable with its truths, we still need time to realize and to digest its impact and importance.

Until September 5 (1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).