In America — where, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, “money is a kind of poetry” — it makes sense that advertising might be seen as a kind of art. From Gerald Murphy and Charles Sheeler to Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, our artists have imitated and drawn inspiration from advertising graphics. Similarly, advertisements often copy the look of such graphic-art pioneers as the Constructivists.

Matthew Brannon, a young New York artist, uses the look of promotional graphic design and the conventions of marketing to create artworks that explore the poetry of money, status, and taste. His first solo museum show, “Where Were We,” opened this spring at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, where it remains on view through August.

Consisting of 12 letterpress prints on paper, with sharp-edged Mod graphics illustrating a title, and accompanying text, the show is arrayed in custom display cases that tilt the prints toward the viewer for easy reading. You can absorb the texts, which convert the phrasing of marketing speak into waspish poetry, individually or follow them as a loose narrative.

Throughout, the colors remain muted and the design sense restrained, spare, and exquisite. Mr. Brannon doesn’t pack in the imagery but rather allows a few silhouetted objects to relate to each other. All the letterpress prints were made in 2007 and appear in a uniform 24-by- 18 inch format.

“Ladies Choice” combines a light blue champagne bucket, black bottle, and flutes, a light bulb, and, in the lower left, two wall sockets. The jabbing text reads: “It looks right / But it isn’t / Just looks like something you already think you like / But maybe / Just maybe / You don’t like it at all / I could be wrong.”

Reading it, you catch whiffs of the New York School poets, Frank O’Hara in particular — a Museum of Modern Art curator who collaborated with his artist friends — though the pastiche of marketing speak, of promotional pamphlets and TV ad voiceovers, is pitch-perfect. Indeed, the poetry makes this work sing. I didn’t come across a single clunker.

And, while the roots of this work nourish themselves on ‘zine culture, samizdat, and such pop-culture ephemera as dime store novels, movie posters, and other types of graphic design, it bears thinking of it, for a moment, in the context of pop art. Though thoroughly enjoyable to look at, pop art, despite claims made on its behalf, never fully succeeded in criticizing the mass culture it mimicked. Mr. Brannon’s work is much less celebratory than pop art.

He can be a wicked ventriloquist, accurately throwing the corporate marketing voice, and pointing out something hollow in it, without sounding shrill. Here, for instance, is “Steak Dinner”: “This year tell her you love her all over again / With a grab bag of diamonds / With mouthfuls of caviar / With your rent in clothes / A credit card of hotel rooms / Stockings / Champagne / Plane tickets / And a soft slap on her bare ass.” His witticisms are not, however, confined to text. Above the words and title stands a little pyramid of objects: a blue coffee mug, a black cell phone on its side, supporting a watch, and, crowning this trio, a speckled banana peel — in case you weren’t aware that we often slip, and trip, on what we desire.

Of course, in order to be any good, a poet, whether he works in concrete, visual signs, or words, must have a range of tones. I was pleased, and a bit surprised, to find that Mr. Brannon can be affecting as well as needling. In “Alarm Clock,” a yellow towel drips by an oval mat. “When he writes he sees himself as someone else / As someone who writes well / And when he talks to others about what it is he does / He pictures someone else / A conversationalist beyond compare / And when he’s home at night trying to sleep / He sees himself as a gross pig that everyone hates.” With such a confession, you can’t help wondering if the towel above the text isn’t dripping on an autobiographical mat.

Beyond the suite of letterpress works, one finds a couple of larger prints, colorful treatments of Japanese food that could pass as restaurant poster art. In one, abstracted pieces of sushi are arrayed on a pink ground; in the other, a sake bottle, business card, and bill complement a stylized Japanese meal. One can only guess whether Mr. Brannon’s black, 30-foot coiled eel printed on vinyl film gracing the public windows of Altria’s Sculpture Court will eventually find itself on the menu. The accompanying literature explains that the eel is a “conflicted logo for abjectness, refinement, and wealth.”

However, guarding the Midtown lobby of a corporate building, which, for the time being, houses art that mocks — gently, tastefully — its host, the eel would seem more accurately to be an emblem of the slippery artist who made it. Then again, the setting for this show seems ideal: Workers and visitors can stop in, have a thoroughly engaging interruption to their day, before returning — as if to a conversation — to say, Where were we?

Until August 26 (120 Park Ave. at 42nd Street, 917-663-2453).