The self-regard of our art establishment, bloated like a puff adder, is doing a full monty at the Drawing Center. That calls for music and a theme song, and Pete Townshend has the lyrics. The center was founded in 1977, during Townshend’s tenure as lead guitarist and resident virtuoso of the Who. Townshend’s “Let’s Get Pretentious” should be piped in during the current exhibition: “Let’s get pretentious / Put on an act / Let’s get pretentious / Embroider fact / Exaggerate it / Dress up the bland / Let’s overrate it / Let the critics be damned.”

One small word change – from “fact” to “drawing” – does the trick. If it throws off the rhyme, all the better to accord with the center’s mission to unsettle concepts of what constitutes drawing. “Wall to Wall Drawings: Selections Summer 2005” presumes to extend the concept of drawing. And who knows? Maybe it does. In an age when we are asked to ponder what the definition of “is” is, we can be excused for not having a clue what drawing might be, what its purposes and limits are, or at what point it passes into irrelevancy.

At any other time, the current installation of seven site-specific works would pass without a trace, an ephemeral nonevent inhaled by the art crowd and paid for with tax-deductible money. But this particular nonprofit has been selected, together with the International Freedom Center, as the cultural showpiece for ground zero redevelopment, and so it is getting a harder look. But first, the art.

Avantika Bawa cuts corrugated cardboard into parallelograms, paints them gray, and arranges them around the wall. You see variations of these arrangements in scores of lobbies across the country. But here they “hint at the architecture and infrastructure that is hidden behind the wall.” We get a look at the hidden stuff – studs and insulation – through the holes, some as large as 6 inches in diameter, cut into the walls by Chris Sauter. The artist uses the drywall bits to construct a makeshift telescope, which is aimed at the Swiss-cheese wall. The telescope looks bandaged (all those frayed edges from sawed plasterboard), a mummy in winding cloths. No worry over the cost of replacing the wall.

Mark Licari’s insect-and-anteater contribution snakes across the back wall. It is demented Dr. Seuss, the kind of cootie-anthology the class clown drew on his forearm with ballpoint in 10th grade, here offered to us as “private mythology.” One anteater sprouts a light bulb; a bleeding eyeball rotates on an armature; bits of hardware seem to vomit and excrete while fighting for space with bugs. You might forgive Mr. Licari his imagery, were it drawn with any attention to quality of line. But the Drawing Center has freed itself of such concerns.

What is there to say about Rosanna Castrillo Diaz’s entry? You can barely see it: a 1/8-inch dot with a faint line descending another 8 inches. On the line is a near-invisible trace of letters, isolated from the words they once formed. In such a manner Ms. Diaz is said to “redefine the wall as an ethereal space of knowledge in an inaccessible library.” It is an impeccable visual synechdoche of what passes for intellect among art minds.

Shoshana Dentz is good with a ruler. For more, see Ms. Bawa, above; the concepts are quite similar. Sun Kwak covers the floor with curvaceous zebra stripes that climb the wall at one end. To spare the expense of resanding the floor afterward, the stripes (“an architectural nervous system”) are made of masking tape.

Every insignificant show needs its political statement to boost its box office. The Drawing Center has a mild incitement in Charbel Ackerman’s PowerPoint presentation about the Axis of Evil. It is a predictable riff on “Follow the Oil” graphs that have been wending their way through galleries since the 2000 election. The true subject of shallow stunts like this is the smug rectitude of the artist who dares to tweak the nose of a president at war.

When will someone do an “Axis of Money” presentation, tracing the lines of connection among dealers, collectors, museum trustees, and curators – to be accompanied by a timeline of the passage of certain works by certain artists to sale at Sotheby’s? That might be instructive. As it is, Mr. Ackerman’s vaguely accusatory pseudo-lesson presents merely a stance. Therein lies its dishonesty: It offers no intelligible information and cannot be questioned or refuted. It is a power play exerted on a captive audience.

The substantive eyebrow-raiser here is not Mr. Ackerman, however. It is that the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center – brainchild of Tom Bernstein, president of Chelsea Piers- were intimately involved in the design process of the proposed cultural center at ground zero and in selecting the architectural firm (Snohetta). Mr. Bernstein is also president of Human Rights First, which sued Donald Rumsfeld over alleged abuses of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are there possible conflicts of interest?

This exhibition indicates what the Drawing Center will stage at its new address. What makes it bewildering for the World Trade Center memorial is its overweening fatuity. While young men and women – mainly men – risk death and disfigurement for the sake of the commonwealth, cultural impresarios “liberate” us from discipline, refinement, modesty, good sense, and any vestige of the dignity of labor.

Installing one of Mr. Bernstein’s golf driving ranges at ground zero would be less of an affront to the families of of the victims of September 11 than third-rate installation art. Go to the Drawing Center to see how a culture swallows its own tail.

Until July 30 (35 Wooster Street, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-219-2166).