JIM DINE

'Hot Dream (52 Books)'

PaceWildenstein

534 West 25th Street, Chelsea

Through Saturday

Word of mouth and Internet has it that Jim Dine's is the worst exhibition in Chelsea right now, maybe already the worst of the year. This show hijacks approaches to installation and other art practices made ubiquitous by numerous young artists over the past three decades. It is a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall layering of photographs of all kinds, including the set-up variety, made here using Santa Claus dolls, some of which are painted black. There are also framed drawings, banner-size blowups of drawings, page proofs of images and autobiographical prose poems scrawled on long swaths of paper.

Of course it could be argued that, as one of the founders of Happenings, Mr. Dine probably has a right to be as messy as he wants to be. But the messiness, coupled with an audio of the artist reading his poems, sculptures of Santa Claus and Pinocchio and the labyrinthine rooms, hews rather closely to the well-known installation-performance extravaganzas of Paul McCarthy. Even knowing that Mr. Dine has made Pinocchio sculptures since the 1960s doesn't do much to mitigate the resemblance.

Happenings and a few classics of early Pop Art aside, Mr. Dine has always been something of a scavenger; his art tends to resemble that of other artists. In addition, sentimentality is one of his long suits.

Still, despite the theatricality, there's a sense of emotional exposure in this show that is not Dine-as-usual. It wears its desperate ambition on its sleeve. At its center are 52 modest books, made at the rate of one a week over a year. They consist mostly of blurry photographs and sometimes poems by Mr. Dine or other poets. Eventually you realize that everything on the walls or pedestals is in the books.

The onslaught may not raise your opinion of Mr. Dine's art, although it can arouse the suspicion that his poetry is his strongest work. Either way, the show provides an unusually raw, first-hand experience of the inner demons that drive artists, and other people too. ROBERTA SMITH