A car destroyed by a suicide bomber’s attack in Baghdad, part of Jeremy Deller’s “It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq.”

In recent years, museums have been getting into commissioning artists to create new works. It is a controversial practice. Some critics think that museums have enough to do just sorting out what already exists. Curators may argue that they are in the best position to identify promising artists and to make possible the creation of important works that might otherwise never be realized.

The problem is that you cannot know for sure what you’re going to get. Consider Daria Martin’s film “Minotaur,” one of four new commissions at the New Museum in what amounts to an uneven and meager whole-museum exhibition.

Ms. Martin’s film, the only piece on the third floor, is a ponderous, clichéd homage to Anna Halprin, a pioneer of modern dance who is 87 and lives in Northern California. (Born in San Francisco, Ms. Martin now lives in London.) In slipping and sliding images it mixes scenes of Ms. Halprin studying pictures of Rodin sculptures in a book; views of the forest around her home; and a slow, sexually suggestive dance by a barrel-chested, gray-haired man and a younger woman in an empty studio. It was choreographed by Ms. Halprin in response to Rodin’s “Minotaur.”

Dressed in flimsy beige garments, the dancers perform what seems almost a parody of modern dance. No disrespect to Ms. Halprin, but in Ms. Martin’s film it comes off as turgid, stale and unerotic. And here the idea of translating sculpture into dance is like a lesson on an educational television program for children — the kind that no child really wants to watch.

“Minotaur” was commissioned by the New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Sponsored by Deutsche Bank, “The Three M Project,” as this collaboration is called (M as in museums), will continue “to commission, exhibit and acquire contemporary art by artists whose work has not yet received significant recognition in the United States,” according to a New Museum news release.

Artistically the most compelling piece on view is “Crystal Palace,” a structuralist film by Mathias Poledna, a Viennese artist who lives in Los Angeles. It consists of long, static, close-up shots of the rain forest in Papua New Guinea accompanied by the sounds of insects and birds. The title refers to the glass and steel structure built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, so academic thoughts about European imperialism are implied. Mainly the work is an occasion for slowing down and meditating on nature and the nature of film. But it is not so powerful as to warrant giving it the museum’s entire fourth floor.

“Urban China: Informal Cities,” an installation in the glassed-in first floor gallery, concerns a magazine called Urban China that is edited and published by Jiang Jun, a young Chinese architect. One long wall is covered by snazzy verbal and visual graphics representing topics covered by the magazine, which include inventive forms of recycling, knockoff sneakers, migration, vernacular building forms, new architectural concepts like “dirtitecture” (haphazard, grass-roots construction or development) and much more. Computers on wooden desks allow visitors to browse through hundreds of photographs of things contemporarily Chinese.

All this is mildly informative but superficial. You won’t gain any very deep or revelatory insights about Chinese modernity. It isn’t really art, after all; it’s more like an overblown advertisement for the magazine.

The art status of Jeremy Deller’s “It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq” is questionable too. Mr. Deller, who is British and won the 2004 Turner Prize, has organized a lounge with comfortable chairs and sofas on the second floor, and he has enlisted people who have expertise about Iraq to be present and to talk with visitors. The 33 so-called “guest experts” include soldiers, refugees, scholars, artists and journalists. (I had a fascinating conversation with Zainab Saleh, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia University who grew up in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein years and left the country in 1997.)

Mr. Deller has included a visually compelling element: the crumpled, rusty remains of a car that was destroyed in a suicide bomber’s attack in Baghdad. It has terrific sculptural presence, but it’s not an artwork; it’s an artifact and a conversation piece. To call it a found-object sculpture would be to trivialize it.

Next month, with the car and two experts — an American soldier and an Iraqi artist — Mr. Deller will take his show on the road, stopping in Washington, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Santa Fe and 10 other cities before ending at the Hammer Museum.

What Mr. Deller is doing may be useful therapy for our national post-traumatic stress. Is it art? You can call it an exercise in Relational Aesthetics, the conceptual art movement that takes social interaction as its medium and sociability as its goal. Otherwise there is no way to make any critical or evaluative judgment about it in artistic terms.

Mr. Deller’s project is not nothing. Its potential for doing good and raising consciousness is great. If it isn’t art, that is not a bad thing. It is what it is, as the title says, and what it is is an educational program. To call it art is to pretend it is something it isn’t.

An installation view of “Urban China: Informal Cities,” based on a magazine about urban issues.