Biennial? Who needs it?

These days the Whitney Museum of American Art is lodged firmly between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the Whitney Biennial, the periodic survey of recent art that was launched during the depths of the Great Depression, in 1932, and grew into the museum’s most prominent exhibition. The hard place is the sheer irrelevance of the show today, a fact again on painful display in the museum’s Madison Avenue galleries.

The need for a national art survey disappeared long ago. What use does it have in a global art world characterized by broad public popularity in international urban centers, inexpensive travel, instant communications and a roaring marketplace? Even with work by 101 artists, as the show boasts this year, surely no one considers the biennial a reliable survey of anything.

By contrast, the need for marquee exhibitions at art museums is greater than ever -- and precisely because of that same global art economy. Culture is a multibillion-dollar, multinational industry. The rise of the culture industry killed the show’s exigency, even as it simultaneously inflated demand.

The biennial is the Whitney’s brand-name show, and the brand is inflated by Manhattan’s unique mass-media density. The result: Everyone, everywhere, instantly and inevitably knows the intimate details of an extravaganza predestined to be dull and insignificant.

Marketing now runs every modern cultural enterprise, for better and for worse, and the biennial brand should serve the Whitney’s mission. At present, things function the other way around. The collapse of a star creates an energy-inhaling black hole, which hovers biennially on New York’s swanky Upper East Side. Now that’s a quark of a different color.

In fact, there may be no other way. Whitney curator Chrissie Iles and guest curator Philippe Vergne, deputy director at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, indicate that the museum is aware of the bind. They abandoned anything resembling an established biennial format for the current installment, which remains on view through May 28.

Two unprecedented changes yield a Whitney Biennial in name only. First, the selection of artists is international, which contravenes the inherent character of a museum specifically chartered for American art. (Iles is British and Vergne is French.) Second, rather than survey the best work made during the last two years, the show is thematic.

The notion of an international theme exhibition is smartly folded into this biennial’s title -- “Day for Night,” the English translation of “La Nuit Americaine,” Francois Truffaut’s Oscar-winning 1973 foreign film. The title contains a nice curatorial inside joke because the movie concerns an English woman and her French husband. But the cinematic technical term is more to the point; “day for night” refers to a filmmaker’s use of filters to transform scenes shot in broad daylight into images of post-sunset darkness.

The biennial’s theme is our current “American night,” conceived as an international environment of gloom and corruption that rankles in the blinding light of day. Overall the show is chilly -- gray seems the prevailing color on every floor -- and tries variously to represent the cultural, social and political tenor of the times.

Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli nails it in a 5 1/2 -minute, 35-millimeter film transferred to video, “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula.’ ” This pseudo coming attraction outlandishly plugs what is in fact already here, describing a culture awash in cheap sex and expensive violence, stained by an unbridgeable chasm of class distinctions and other signs of imperial decadence.

The Whitney shows the video in a makeshift movie theater with red plush seats, just as it was displayed at last summer’s Venice Biennale. Still, I half expected a vomitorium to have been added at the exit, so that celebrity-stuffed viewers could be disgorged. The sumptuous bravura of Vezzoli’s magnificently crafted propaganda spectacle is at once irresistible and revolting.

More subtly yet more eccentrically, Los Angeles sculptor Liz Larner crosses an industrial-strength tumbleweed with a Medusa’s head in a big, tangled ball of aluminum tubes. It stands taller than a person does. Each bent and snaking conduit is dressed in a carefully sewn and fitted fabric sleeve, as if some abstract Barbie doll.

The costumes’ color scheme of red, white and blue is punctuated with small brass padlocks, keys and shiny bits of gold lame. The gold adds a nice touch of martial glamour, as jaunty as the epaulets on a fascist parade uniform and as playfully absurd as the pompoms wielded by a high school cheerleading squad.

The object label for this exploding ball of Fourth of July dyspepsia does not specify whether the star-spangled aluminum tubes have been fortified, meaning they’re the type specially manufactured for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium in a nuclear weapons program. But surely someone could make the claim.

More typically, diligent one-liners pass for art. Jordan Wolfson’s short film translates Charlie Chaplin’s final, futile speech in 1940’s anti-fascist satire “The Great Dictator” into American Sign Language, which few viewers are expected to have the capacity to decode. For that you have to read the object label because the work’s title is composed of the entire speech. Once you do, you never have to look at Wolfson’s solipsistic silent film again. That is a flaw.

This would be the place in a review where I’d go on to offer a sizable sampling of what’s in the show. Paul Chan projects a video animation on the floor, transforming fundamentalist religious faith in the coming biblical rapture into an earthly image of failed communication. Sturtevant shows a room filled with recreations of Marcel Duchamp’s famous World War I-era ready-made sculptures -- a urinal, a snow shovel, a coat rack -- installed as a re-creation of a 1938 Surrealist show, on the eve of World War II. Nari Ward splits apart oil drums to make a tanning bed, which would burn the stripes of an American flag onto a user’s skin.

Ouch, three times. And ouch, again and again, all over the show.

The biggest groaner is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s restaging of Mark di Suvero’s 1966 Artist’s Tower for Peace. The original Constructivist-style tower, a grass-roots Vietnam War protest, was erected in Los Angeles on a vacant lot at Sunset and La Cienega boulevards, where hundreds of contributors added 2-foot-square panels registering their political opinions -- sparking a citywide commotion. (A man even got shot.) Rebuilt in the sculpture garden at the Whitney, where it pokes its head up to greet shoppers along Madison Avenue, the once-anarchic public sculpture is tamed like a goat in a petting zoo.

The peace tower is emblematic of the show -- earnest and stale. Having abandoned the Whitney Biennial format without abandoning the Whitney Biennial, the museum has created a no-win solipsism of its own.

Had the museum organized -- separate from the regularly scheduled biennial machine -- a sharp, cogent theme show dissecting imperial U.S. ambitions and taking on an activist role, the exceptional effort might have galvanized attention. By contrast, pretending that the best recent art is characterized by international anxiety over an environment of gloom and corruption serves no one.

The last time I thoroughly engaged with and enjoyed a Whitney Biennial, the Persian Gulf War had just come to an abrupt end, grunge music was on the horizon and Octavio Paz had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. It was spring 1991. Maybe the Whitney’s marketing specialists can tell us how long it takes before perpetual frustration begins making a serious dent in cultural tourism.