It is rumored that “The Hours of the Day, 2006,” an artist’s book created by Louise Bourgeois, is a response to her chronic insomnia. Regarding its likely effect on viewers, though, it is more apt to serve as a cure for that unenviable affliction.

With one exception, the 25 leaves of the book, now on view at the Carolina Nitsch Projects Room, have a uniform ground suggestive of staves of music. On the right hand side of each page is a rendering of a 24-hour clock, whose minute hand shifts from one leaf to the next, while the hour hand remains fixed at midnight. On the left hand side are groups of words in English or French that change from one leaf to the next. Both the words and the clock are printed on cotton cloth in reddish-brown archival dyes. Though the configuration of the words in a corner of the page is apt to change from one leaf to the next, the sheer wattage of that aesthetic choice is hardly sufficient to endow these lackluster pages with anything approaching artistic power or appeal.

Indeed, if there is anything at all remarkable about this undertaking, it is that Ms. Bourgeois has succeeded in packing so much dullness, such potently drab monotony, into so few words. A lesser artificer would doubtless have required hundreds of pages of dense prose to generate the dream-inducing lull that this artist can command with a simple juxtaposition of two or three words. For although Ms. Bourgeois is now in her 97th year, she possesses powers of strategic dullness — fully evident in this latest project — that would be the envy of many an artist one-quarter her age. In this she seems to have learned well the lessons of Laurence Weiner, the conceptual artist whose retrospective has been up for the past two months at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Eruption of the unconscious. Place it in magistracy. Place it in history. Place it in time,” Ms. Bourgeois says. And yet what on earth is Ms. Bourgeois trying to say? Surely this simple question is rarely if ever asked among consumers of contemporary art, however mystified they may be when standing before a work of art. It is not that one understands these statements. It is that one has long since ceased to expect the remotest connective tissue between the utterances of contemporary culture and anything like intellectual coherence (other than the brutal literalism of certain forms of politically engaged art.)

As for the meaning of the words, they are different from those of Mr. Weiner primarily in that they are inspired by Continental European poets — men such as Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon — whose Surrealist works had few equivalents if any in the poets of the English language. Ms. Bourgeois, who was born in France in 1911 and moved to this country in the early 1940s, has essentially been a surrealist throughout her career, even though she first achieved prominence when she was past seventy. Known primarily as a sculptor, she has occasionally broken through to visual interest in such obscurely menacing works as her building-sized spiders. As regards the words that make up “The Hours of the Day,” their surrealist origins endow them with a leaven of dreaminess, a halation of something more.

But though they are not quite as dull as Mr. Weiner’s words, they are not nearly interesting enough to hold the viewers attention. In this connection, and in so many others concerning contemporary culture, it is useful to recall the words of another scion of France, Blaise Pascal: “It is the meaning that derives its dignity from the words, rather than bestowing it on them.” That is to say, by extension, that what makes any cultural undertaking laudable is not the nobility of the sentiments expressed (whether in words, pigments, or musical tones) but the skill and grace with which they are given form and expression.

The consensual refusal of artists, critics, dealers, and the public at large over the past three decades to appreciate and act upon that point, their insistence upon the precedence of meaning over form, has resulted in some very feeble artifacts, indeed. Among these, Louise Bourgeois’s “Hours of the Day,” comes very close to being an unfortunate paragon.