On Sunday – along with hundreds and hundreds of other people – I attended P.S.1’s opening of “Greater New York 2005” in Long Island City, Queens. After a couple of hours looking at artwork, I wedged myself into a tiny, crowded room, where (between 3 and 5 p.m) Clifford Owens’s interactive performance piece “Tell me what to do with myself” was displayed on three monitors.

I watched as the artist (who was performing alone in an adjacent room) wailed, coiled like a snake, and rolled around on the floor at the behest of various viewers. It wasn’t long before – in response to Mr. Owens’s continuous prodding: “Are you afraid to tell me what you really want me to do?” – an audience member picked up the microphone and told the artist to “masturbate.”

This was not a command he obeyed during the few minutes while I was there. But, when I passed by later, Mr. Owens, after some hot talk, did go off camera (supposedly to disrobe) and handed his underwear through a hole in the wall to a woman in the audience. Following the artist’s instructions, she chewed avidly on the crotch of his black bikini briefs.

Like the first incarnation of “Greater New York” – which, held in 2000, launched the affiliation of P.S.1 with the Museum of Modern Art – the 2005 edition features artists who have emerged in New York and nearby towns in New Jersey in the last five years. Like the first show, “2005” includes painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, audio, video, performance, and installation by artists who are mostly in their 20s. And, like its predecessor, the current show is much too big, childish, and weak to sustain itself as a cohesive body.

The show, which takes up nearly the entire museum, including the courtyard, is probably a pretty accurate barometer of what most up-and-coming artists are doing (masturbation or no masturbation) in their studios. Youth and inexperience are this exhibition’s draws and drawbacks. Comprising more than 300 works by more than 160 artists, “Greater New York 2005” is a sprawling zoo in which juvenilia is the order of the day. That said, this is all around a better, more alive, and more diverse group of works than was found in “Greater New York 2000.”

Walking through the exhibition – wild, fresh, young, and fun, something children will definitely enjoy – is like going to a carnival. Although many works have serious themes (there are works about suicide bombing, terrorism, transgender sex, war, and world politics), most of the art is immature: either in execution (that is, underdeveloped or without aesthetic sophistication) or in approach (that is, dealing with childish ideas, formats, and materials or merely out for a good time).

Many brightly colored, psychedelic, or washy paintings, meandering wall collages, cartoonish drawings and videos, and toys, stuffed animals, dolls, and dollhouses fill the show. Typical are such works as Peter Coffin’s “Untitled (Hollow Log With Model of the Universe)” (2005), made of spinning disco lights mounted in a hollow log; Ian Burns’s mechanically challenged, rough-hewn, and rickety carnival ride “The Epic Tour” (2005); Justin Lowe’s “On the Beach” (2005), a large musical tepee in a sandbox; and Lara Kohl’s “Once Upon a Time, Yesterday” (2005), an ice castle inside a music-box freezer.

There are also Dr. Seussian contraptions, such as Rina Banerjee’s “Tropical Fatigue and the seven wanderings: You are not like me” (2005), a hanging sculpture made of a television antenna, suitcases, feathers, banana leaves, ostrich eggs, and dried fish, and over-the-top installations such as Peter Craine’s “Overseer” (2004), a crystalline winter wonderland that fills an entire gallery. Mr. Craine’s version of a Macy’s window display is made with laser lights, sound, and approximately 20 white, furry animated snow creatures.

Not as stodgy and full of itself as the Whitney Biennial, which attempts to be the show of record and to cover the entire United States, “Greater New York” is culled from thousands of local artists. It is a good indication of what is being taught in a lot of art schools but also what is being favored by New York galleries, curators, and collectors. This does not mean that the work is any good; generally, it isn’t. I had to wonder, though, if the fault lies mostly with curators, dealers, collectors, and educators or with the artists themselves. I tend to think it is a collaborative effort.

It is not that the art in “Greater New York 2005” is slipshod – although some certainly is, either in facture, concept, or both. The overwhelming lack of quality in the work is not so much dependent upon the artists’ unwilling ness to work hard and long to realize their visions: Most of the artists are fanatical about craft, minutiae, and detail, as if each were constructing a ship in a bottle. The problem is that the artists lack concepts worth pursuing, as well as proper training at the most fundamental levels.

Laleh Khorramian’s digital animation “Sophie and Goya” (2004) shows an artist with great potential but who lacks a firm grounding in drawing and narrative structure. David Opdyke’s “U.S.S. Mall” (2003), a model of a shopping mall on a 5-foot-long aircraft carrier, must have taken ages to construct – but so what? Other artists who certainly have facility when it comes to making things include Dominic McGill, whose “Project for a New American Century” (2004), a very large drawing, full of big political ideas, remains mired in bad draftsmanship and composition.

Yuken Teruya’s “Notice-Forest” series (all 2005), of delicate and magical trees cut from shopping bags, is striking (the Tiffany bag in particular); Kristen Hassenfeld’s meticulously crafted spiraling, paper wedding-cake-like sculpture and Tobias Putrih’s biomorphic, corrugated-cardboard sculptures and large pencil, pattern drawing, whose shapes slowly build outward from infinitesimal to large, are impressive. But though all these artists have facility, their works, as jaw-droppingly difficult to make and technically adept as they are, fall far short of the realm of art.

And there is not one good painting, nor hardly any good drawing, in “Greater New York 2005.” The paintings, in particular, all fall apart in every possible way – color, space, weight, concept, and composition.

I did note two artists of real merit in the show: Will Villalongo and Jose Leon Cerillo. Mr. Villalongo’s cut black velour paper drawings resemble woodcuts and are fluid and especially vibrant. He does not yet have a true grasp of how to move from shape to line, but his flame-like hand and his mythical flora and fauna, at times reminiscent of Dufy, are engaging. And Mr. Cerillo’s two faceted floor sculptures made from medium-density fiberboard (one covered in black formica, and one in aluminum) have a real presence. Planar, they appear to unfold like origami or to float like icebergs yet, curled as they are on the floor, they suggest qualities that are human.

Certainly, “Greater New York 2005,” as its curators intend, represents some of the “new artistic directions” Gotham’s artists are pursuing in their studios. But an obsession with variety, youth, and “the next thing” keeps it from telling the whole truth; it represents only one side of the story. There is a much, much “Greater” New York out there. You just won’t find it at P.S.1.

Until September 26 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718-784-2084).