Wilshire Center

Red Grooms has a kid’s knack for making wisecracks that make you laugh, even when you know the matter is supposed to be serious. Or maybe he just makes things less serious because he doesn’t believe art needs to be pompous. For years, this Huck Finn of the art scene has made stand-up, pop-up, zany tableaux and walk-in sculpture that brazenly cast art as commodity and galleries as supermarkets. His installation at MOCA of “Tut’s Fever Movie Palace” transformed the museum into a blatant theater of hype and entertainment. Indeed, all his pieces make enjoying art a roller-coaster ride where life and its parody are all jellyrolled together in a sweet, good time confection.

That’s why it’s not surprising to see Grooms designing kid’s furniture. In this case, it’s “The Fire Engine Bunk Bed for Children.” It’s art, it’s fun and it reminds us the gallery is an art showroom.

But even after that good-natured reminder, the group show in the next gallery looks pretty impressive. Victoria Nodiff’s untitled white wolf carrying a snow hare through a gray storm of expressionistic mark is as beautiful as James Griffith’s “The Woods (Composite)” is intriguing for its suggestion of global connectedness.

The unbounded energy and Pop-cum-Stella sensibility of John Hernandez is delightful alongside Dawn Arrowsmith’s willow branch telemetry tower for the stone age. Cranston Montgomery’s lyric bronze garlic clove puckers up to kiss a floating fish.

You have to enjoy Alice Fellows’ gutsy yellow and red transparent cones on two green grounds just as you will probably admire Rupert Garcia’s delicate touch with black pastel and John Valadez for his lusciously rendered flaming figures dissolving in smoke in the “Fall of Babel.” If art is a commodity and the art scene only commerce, it’s nice when the products are so appealing. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Sept. 2.)