It could be argued that Tony Oursler’s “Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some)” (2004), the sprawling, multimedia installation currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is not entirely the artist’s fault. Were it not for the director of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, Serge Lemoine, who last year asked Mr. Oursler to create a work of art in response to a piece in the museum’s collection, there would be no “Studio.” Yet he did ask, and it has come: a flashy, noisy, disjointed garage-sale-meets-electronics-store-window-display, roughly 25 feet wide, 8 feet tall, and 20 feet deep – Mr. Oursler’s response to Courbet’s monumental oil painting “The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life” (1855).

Mr. Oursler’s “Studio” is part of a trend of video artists appropriating or redoing Old Master paintings. Last spring, MoMA showed Eve Sussman’s “89 Seconds at Alcazar” (2004), a video re-enactment of Velazquez’s “Las Meninas,” which debuted at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Courbet’s “The Painter’s Studio,” like the Velazquez, represents the artist, surrounded by people, working at his easel. It is a painting as rich and complex in scope – and as alluring a challenge to a multimedia artist, I would imagine – as “Las Meninas.”

The contemporary adage appears to go something like this: “If Giotto were alive today, he would most definitely be a computer or video artist.” Yet any real artist will tell you that tools and technology are not the answer; there is another old adage that goes something like this: “It’s not the wand. It’s the wizard.”

Mr. Oursler (b. 1957) is an imaginative, quirky, and mildly inventive artist. I have always thought he would do a great job designing funhouses for traveling carnivals and amusement parks. In 2000, with his multimedia installation “The Influence Machine,” in which genie-like talking heads were projected onto smoke and trees, he transformed a windy, autumn evening in London’s Soho Square into an entertaining spook house. Likewise, “Climaxed” – a multimedia installation at the Met that has fiery, orange explosions and yet another talking head, part Gene Simmons and part all-powerful Oz, all projected onto a white blob – would enliven any middle school party.

When it comes to translating Courbet’s painting, though, Mr. Oursler is more than out of his league. Courbet’s enigmatic “The Painter’s Studio,” approximately 12 feet high and 20 feet wide, has been the subject of numerous interpretations since it was first exhibited, during the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle. Denied permission to exhibit his most important work at the official Salon, the innovative and headstrong Courbet showed “The Painter’s Studio,” along with 38 other paintings, in a private gallery under the title “Realism.”

The meaning of this painting has always been elusive. Its mysterious, looking-glass conflation of approaches and genres – still life, portrait, landscape, fantasy, and allegory – all elevated to the grand scale of history painting, explore the magic of the artist’s studio and the urge to create, establishing art as the root and bedrock of culture. Roughly divided into three sections, it shows a vast, peopled studio in which nesting worlds continually open and unfold.

In this spatially elastic room, time feels frozen and individuals – one nursing, one reading, one playing, one seemingly crucified, one tending his dogs – seem lodged within their own lonely pockets of space. The studio, enveloped in a dreamy, gauzy light, is deep, hazy, and transparent in places, Venetian in feel. In others it is solid, shallow, fresh, and weighty, or it feels ageless, worn, and weathered, like a ruined Roman fresco.

In the center of the studio is Courbet, seated at the easel, painting a landscape. The artist’s brush and arm – indeed, half his body – are immersed within his landscape painting. It is as if Courbet, half in the studio, half out, had actually stepped into the canvas within the canvas. Or it may be that the artist is coming into being like the trees in his landscape, emerging into the studio from the canvas – which, like an open window or doorway, punctuates the distant, rear wall of the painter’s studio.

Standing in front of the landscape, a reverent boy gazes upward. He may be looking at the artist’s painting; at Courbet himself; or at the glowing, moon-like disc, which is suspended above the painter’s head. Possibly, he is making eyes at the nude model who, head tilted inward, stands pensively behind the artist, cupping her full, round breast. A cat – its snaking, phallic tail nearly brushing the boy – playfully paws at a pile of clothes out of which the nude rises, as if she had been reborn.

On the right is a group of people, some recognizable, described by Courbet as the “shareholders … friends, fellow workers, and art lovers.” (They include the writer Champfleury, the poet Baudelaire, and the philosopher Proudhon.) The large crowd of figures on the left – including a huntsman, a peasant, a cure, a Jew – Courbet described as “the world of commonplace life.” It has been suggested that, rather than allegorical, they may be representations of specific contemporary public figures, including the Emperor Napoleon III himself.

In his “Studio” Mr. Oursler throws together a hodgepodge of three dozen or more artworks by various artists that superficially or literally address, stand in for, or update aspects of Courbet’s painting. Rather than embrace the poetic language of painting – a fluid, layered, and spatially complex idiom – Mr. Oursler merely replaces Courbet’s complexity and poetry with clever twists, more things, or with the latest bells and whistles.

Usually this is done by Mr. Oursler with objects, sound, film, or movement: actual space for painted space; an actual book, table, and chair for the painted book, table, and chair; a video projection of Mr. Oursler’s friends and family, or actual artworks by contemporary artists in place of Courbet’s landscape painting and renditions of fellow artists. Yet Mr. Oursler’s one-to-one reading of the Courbet, where filmed, moving forms stand in for painted, immovable forms that Mr. Oursler treats as merely allegorical and static, fails to comprehend the medium it is adapting. In the hands of a master such as Courbet, painted forms are multifaceted, emotionally charged, never inert.

In his frenetic checklist approach to “Studio,” Mr. Oursler nods to paintings by Zita Mellon, Joshua Thorson, and Kaare Rafoss; videos by Matt Wolf, JD Walsh, David West, and Kristen Lucas; sculpture and multimedia assemblages by Jim Nolan, Aristides Logothetis, Maria Roosen, and B. Wurtz. He throws in a stack of books; an architectural model by Rem Koolhaas; the certificate “Genetic Code Copyright of Larry Miller” (1992); and a surveillance camera aimed at viewers and projected live against a corner of the installation. Yet the best work in the lot is a primitive-feeling, carved-wood head by Mark Oursler, in which one eye rises above the other, and the nose and mouth are comically off-center, a work that conveys multiple readings of a single face.

“I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition,” Courbet wrote in the preface to his 1855 “Realism” catalog, “the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality.” Mr. Oursler’s “Studio” is a lot of mixed-up, crazy fun. But because he stomps on rather than embraces Courbet’s language, his cabinet of curiosities dances around rather than engages with tradition. This has nothing to do with Mr. Oursler’s choice of medium; it has to do with a lack of sensitivity to Courbet’s own. Is Mr. Oursler’s “Studio” updated? Sure – but it has substituted automatons for Courbet’s humanity.

Until September 18 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).