Alienating, self-aware pieces about appropriation; projections and headphones everywhere; condescending, vague wall panels, some including explications by the artists themselves: welcome to the contemporary art exhibit in 2008. “Not Quite How I Remember It,” The Power Plant’s big group show for the summer, can’t be taken to task for being singularly bad. Its artists come from everywhere, and share the same degraded, solipsistic notions on art-making and its relationship to memory and history.

The exhibit begins with New York artist Dario Robleto, who typifies the kind of work on display. Regarding his piece I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away — a cluster of origami airplanes made of candy wrappers from one of Felix Gonzales-Torres’ installations — he asks the following, quoted on an adjacent panel, “Can a creative gesture begun by one artist be passed like a baton through the years to be continued or completed by another artist in another time so that it never has to end…?” The answer is yes, of course it can, but another question, please: why is new conceptual art so caught up in recycling old conceptual art? This cannot save, validate, redefine or enrich the creative gesture (which is pretty self-evident anyway). It actually goes quite far to cheapen it as an act of hope (which was Gonzalez-Torres’ intention to start with).

In an unintentional encapsulation of the exhibit’s approach, the panel for Olivia Plender’s Monitor describes the titular program, of which the piece is a relative parody, as “embodying the patrician BBC mandate to ‘Inform, Educate, Entertain.’” Excuse me, “patrician”? If the notion that culture should inform, educate and entertain is now considered patrician, well… either we’ve come to a catastrophic impasse, or I just wasn’t made for these times.