I mean no ill will toward Pixar – the award-winning animation studio founded by John Lasseter in 1986 that has been creating magical and entertaining, feature-length and short animated films for a decade now, and several shorts before that – but I do not believe an exhibition honoring those achievements belongs at the Museum of Modern Art.

The museum’s commitment to film was established, in 1935, under Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s first director. Under Barr’s directorship, the museum shifted the public’s view of film, photography, and design, elevating and legitimizing those forms as art. Since then, MoMA, rightly so, has continued to support, conserve, and collect film and, later, animation.

“Pixar: 20 Years of Animation,” a film series and lively exhibition featuring more than 500 “sculptures, drawings, and paintings” created in the development of Pixar films – including “Toy Story” (1995), “A Bug’s Life” (1998),”Toy Story 2″(1999),”Monsters, Inc.” (2001), “Finding Nemo” (2003), and “The Incredibles” (2004) – is presented by MoMA’s Department of Film and Media. “Pixar” marks the addition of the studio’s complete library of films to MoMA’s permanent collection, including the short “One Man Band” (2005),which debuts in America during the run of the exhibition. It’s also difficult not to see “Pixar” as an advertising plug for the studio’s slated June 2006 release of its new feature-length animated film, “Cars.”

The show honors, celebrates, and glamorizes the behind-the-scenes processes, innovations, and tools of the animation trade.Yet the problem with “Pixar” is the same problem often encountered in the contemporary art world: Innovation, especially technological, is mistaken for artistic advancement or for the advancement of tradition.

I have thoroughly enjoyed some of the films from Pixar’s studio, and I found the exhibition to be interesting and informative. I imagine that almost all children and many adults will enjoy parts of the exhibition. I especially liked the studio’s “Toy Story Zoetrope” (2005), an update of the 1867 model, in which a carousel covered with stationary “Toy Story” characters in various positions spins quickly under a strobe light, giving the plastic action-figures the illusion of animation.

But in many ways “Pixar” is both too specialized and too pedestrian. On the one hand, it wants to establish that the computer animation that made the company famous is only part of the story – many of their artists use traditional media. The exhibition also wants to make clear that the computer, like the pencil or brush, is merely a tool – that it is only as good as the illustrator who uses it.

All of this is true enough, but animators are the only ones who really care about the distinction. There is more to “drawing, painting, and sculpture” than illustrative rendering or modelmaking; art is composed of metaphors. The show mistakenly attempts to elevate creative, inventive, and technically adept illustrations and maquettes – cartoon characters rendered for the screen – to that of great drawing and sculpture. What it all amounts to is a purposeful leveling of the playing field: Art is dumbed down and illustration is dumbed up.

Increasingly, artists want to have their tools and eat them, too. MoMA and Pixar want us to believe that the studio’s computer-generated illustrations should be considered as art. Yet they feel compelled to remind us that their illustrators work with paint and pastel. It seems to me a bit of overly defensive posturing: Enjoying “Toy Story” doesn’t make you a philistine; putting it on a par with Picasso is another story.

So the Guggenheim Museum claims that the work of Norman Rockwell is equal to that of Vermeer. Then the painter David Hockney (whose work comes closer to mediocre illustration than painting) attempts to debunk the genius of Vermeer by claiming that his mysterious abilities can be duplicated and explained away by the camera obscura.

Unfortunately, this is not all “Pixar” has in common with the Rockwell retrospective. In every aspect of our lives, competitive institutions are relinquishing their positions of authority and power in favor of market share, popularity, and user-friendliness. The lowest common denominators – celebrity, commodity, fashion, politics, money – are increasingly the driving forces.The museum is no exception.

At museums, standards and quality are falling in favor of shows with broadbased entertainment value and appeal. Curators are giving us choices, but they are also taking serious curatorial expertise out of the equation, covering all of their bases with a “You decide what is and isn’t art” approach. The mission of curators seems to be increasingly one of bringing the public to museums rather than that of bringing art to the public. Currently at MoMA, you can choose to see the fabulous Odilon Redon retrospective, which features some of the greatest illustrations ever made, or you can choose to watch cartoons – yet no distinction is being made between the two.

Museums are gradually transforming themselves from cultural institutions into easily accessible, entertainmentand consumer-based megaplexes that can be openly used to promote commodities (or artworks as commodities) and be rented out to the highest bidders.

Most of us by now are familiar with the recent product-based “Art of the Motorcycle” and “Armani” exhibitions at the Guggenheim. This fall, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts allowed donor William I. Koch to display his enormous yachts on the MFA’s lawn as part of the exhibition “Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch.”

Museums certainly are businesses, but they should be cultural institutions first. They are as responsible as anyone for the increasingly commoditized and competitive art world.When a museum such as MoMA (which charges a $20 admission fee) finds that people are unwilling or uninterested in paying to engage with art – that viewers would rather drop their $20 at the cineplex and see a blockbuster movie – they should take that as a sign to further distinguish, not demean, themselves.

Until February 6 (53 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).