It is only a matter of time before museums begin burying mogul benefactors on site, like kings at Westminster. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art makes do as a crypt for “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s moribund monument to the gullibilities of identity politics. Obsequies begin tomorrow in the world’s first cathedralette to feminism as a category of art.

Built by female volunteers who traveled to Ms. Chicago’s West Coast workshop at their own expense, “The Dinner Party” opened in San Francisco in 1979. It was first exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum a year later. A best seller, the project went on the road and then into storage for two decades. Thanks to the tenacity of Through the Flower, the nonprofit foundation Ms. Chicago established to promote it, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation bought the relic and enshrined it, Lenin-like, on the museum’s renovated fourth floor. (Ms. Sackler is a trustee of the museum on whose behalf she accepted her own gift in 2002.)

The main format of the exhibition is a huge triangular table laid with 39 place settings representing the stylized pudenda of specific women, real or imaginary. Vaguely suggestive of an open flower, each serving-platter-size vulva is prettily decorated with emblems of the woman’s attributes. This is Ms. Chicago’s “butterfly-vagina” imagery, a hot lunch for women hungry for affirmative symbols.

Liturgical trappings and inspirational tags are everywhere. Dinner guests include Ishtar (“Great Goddess of Mesopotamia, the female as giver and taker of life, whose power was infinite”) and Amazon, representing “Warrior Women who fought to preserve gynocentric societies.” About the grounds for such societies, Margaret Mead wrote: “All the claims so glibly made for societies ruled by women are nonsense.” But mistaking goddess worship for evidence of women’s primordial status is fundamental to guerrilla anthropology. And it coincides with the neopagan revivalism that has been a secular refuge from Enlightenment rationality since the 19th century.

Devotees of “The Dinner Party” find nothing askew in depicting the variety of women’s achievement in terms of labial display. Emily Dickinson’s mortal privacy and the granite of her inventiveness are honored by a flirtatious, pink lace crotch resembling a Victorian tea cake. Virginia Woolf, who repeatedly rejected emphasis on the sex of a writer as superfluous, is just another floral orifice. Composer Ethel Smyth’s vaginal opening is formed by the curve of — guess! — a baby grand. On it goes, down the line of this lunatic communion table.

The incongruity of the imagery and its sober feminist purpose is lost on women. The installation’s vulgarity is inseparable from its inane solemnity. “The Dinner Party” exploits its era’s zealous insistence on women’s supposed intimacy with nature, a solipsism that ultimately affirms the old canard that the center of a woman’s creativity is between her legs. The work’s reductive silliness is entertaining; its mendacity is not.

Christina Hoff-Sommers’s distinction between equity feminism and gender feminism is useful here. The first is a mainstream movement that sought for women the same rights as men (historically hard won for common males, too).The latter is a militantly partisan, academic kriegspiel that applies the boilerplate rhetoric of class struggle to relations between the sexes. The feminist art movement stems from gender feminism.

It was spurred by Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” The real answer, it seems, is that the movement did not really want any. It preferred sneering at “the myth of the Great Artist” and indicting the nature of art. Ms. Nochlin complained that no appropriate “language of form” existed for women. In short, women could not be judged by “male” standards of quality. These were “intellectual distortions,” pretexts for the “unstated domination of white male subjectivity.”

Protectionist and retrograde, the argument was a godsend for a trick of the bazaar that needed strength of numbers. False opposition between women’s abilities and concepts of excellence opened the floodgates to self-assertive levels of amateurism. These now carry the imprimatur of a one of the city’s major museums.

The feminist art movement rallied those women whose resentments welcomed an assault on taste. Ideology gilded mediocrity — and ritual grousing — as celebrations of “women’s way of knowing.” Consequently, women’s magnified presence in the arts (rather than, say, statistical mechanics) is a cheap grace. Any segregated body devoted to women’s “different voice” in art valorizes the unremarkable.

Annex to the women’s studies industry, the Sackler Center and its programs are undoubtedly expected to pump attendance. Box office concerns have led the museum down the primrose path before.

A candid stocktaking of the movement and of Ms. Nochlin’s role in it would be useful. The Sackler Center makes any such appraisal unlikely. Ms. Nochlin herself co-organized one of its inaugural exhibitions, “Global Feminisms.” And the accompanying ceremonial show, “Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses,” is only the first in a series showcasing themes from “The Dinner Party.”

Exaggerated grievances and fantasied matriarchal utopias were titillating for a privileged generation of Western women free to play at trouncing the male gaze. But that was in another century. Now, the jihadist gaze surveys us all. Expect the Sackler Center, with the 1970s on perpetual wake, to keep aiming at red herrings.