It’s a funny fact of museum-going that most visitors spend very little time actually looking at each individual piece. But having departed these institutions built for leisurely contemplation, they often find themselves with ample time to view the art in the one place everybody would love to be rushing through: the subway.

A handsome, intelligently mounted exhibition at the UBS Gallery celebrates the range and volume of murals, decorative schemes, and furnishings commissioned from artists and craftspeople by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in stations across the five boroughs and beyond. There are more than 140 projects represented, some dating back to early in the 20-year-old program, others still awaiting realization. Some of the most successful have waited a decade or more to reach the light of day – if that’s the right expression for subterranean art.

In terms of sheer quantity, the subway is a museum and music festival rolled into one, but few commuters can really get an aesthetic sense of the system. That’s because the century-old underground railway is so oppressively functional, with its low ceilings and claustrophobic beams. However much art and craft the MTA throws into its stations, they remain essentially ugly, whereas other systems have successfully tailored themselves along aesthetic lines.

The Paris Metro, for instance, has an art nouveau organic unity. The Moscow Underground, built at abysmal human cost, is ludicrously luxurious. The London Underground used stylish deco design to unify visually what had been a plethora of competing private lines. And Washington’s Metro, anti-modeled on New York, has no need for ornamentation: The whole experience is pure opera.

Like most public artists, those working in the MTA are torn between pacifying passersby and stopping them in their tracks. Some artists favor such minimal activity that you need to look hard to discover them, while others try to assault the senses.

The exquisite, whimsical figures of Janet Zweig and Edward del Rosario at the Prince Street R/W station play nicely with the scale of the legendary subway tiles (which remain, it could be argued, the subway’s greatest contribution to visual culture.) Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz collaborate on an even more subtle, delicate intervention with their bronze birds, titled “A Gathering,” at the Canal Street A/C/E station. James Garvey’s “Lariat Seat Loops” (1997) at the 33rd Street 6 stop have been sat on by many commuters – this author among them – who had no idea they owed their repose to an artist.

For Eric Fischl, on the other hand, the station at Madison Square Garden was a broad canvas on which to create his “The Garden of Circus Delights” (2001), a luminous, glowing, painterly celebration of the annual Big Top that comes to the Garden. Robert Kushner’s “4 Seasons Seasoned” (2004) offers a glittering floral display at the 77th Street 6 stop.

The best subway works acknowledge where they are. Nancy Spero’s almost Klimtian divas and acrobats against a glistening mosaic at 66th Street/Lincoln Center cushions the dull reality of the commute home after the exhilarations of the Met. Samm Kunce’s “Under Bryant Park” (2002) is a visually and verbally dense mural filling the long tunnel linking the 42nd Street/Bryant Park station with the Public Library on Fifth Avenue, interweaving quotes from mostly Romantic authors and a tile-work evocation of geology.

The heroic, posthumously completed 2002 “Times Square Mural” of Roy Lichtenstein and Jacob Lawrence’s “New York in Transit” (2001) at the same Times Square station are true to two very different artistic tempers that both make sense of the commuter experience. Lawrence, the laureate of migration, has the gravitas and humor of a Mexican muralist in a piece that emphasizes the human scale of urban usage. Lichtenstein has a back-to-the-future optimism in the chirpy irony of his Machine Age optimism; his mural makes specific reference to the iconography of the World’s Fair with its rosy view of technological futures. The two images have contrastive tempos, each appropriate to the class experience it embodies, almost as if the Lawrence is there for the blue-collar commuter whose train is running late, while Lichtenstein is for the executive whooshed efficiently to work.

Given the kind of creative freedom that obviously prevails in such works, remarkably few artists have aimed for a gesammtkunstwerk, a total, in-the-round aesthetic experience. But Elizabeth Murray’s “Blooming” (1996) at 59th Street/Lexington Avenue – one of her two MTA commissions (the other is in Long Island City) – and Al Held’s “Passing Through” (2004) at the 53rd Street E/V are both sensually engrossing, formally absorbing works. Ms. Murray, ironically, takes inspiration from graffiti, the great bugbear of subway art. Her work and Held’s are translated into mosaic from different mediums (colored drawing, watercolor) with aplomb. But even they, like ads, stick to the wall: You can stop and look if you wish, or go your merry way, your senses subliminally teased.

New York’s subway art is a joyously losing battle against banality. Far from using design to give a calming, satisfying unity to the system, the art seems intent on individuality, on making each place memorable. This may indicate confused, rather than enlightened, patronage, but in any case the result is a surprising contrast of approaches.

The display at the UBS Gallery mimics the ubiquitous (but no less distinctive and admirably legible) signage of Massimo and Leila Vignelli – itself a museum item in MoMA’s design section. But only a few high profile commissions are given large-scale installation shots and represented by such artifacts as material samples and working sketches. Most are listed along sidebars with a single, almost thumbnail installation shot. This creates something of a gentlemen-and-players division between lesser-known artists and craftspeople and the celebrity artists who have fulfilled prestige commissions, recalling the days of first- and second-class compartments.

Until September 9 (1285 Sixth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets).