Unflattering reflection

“This is Killing Me,’’ the unfortunately apt title of one of them, is a group show about, of all things, the anxiety and unease artists feel about their identities and their creative inclinations. It amounts, I’m sorry to say, to utter drivel.

If one could detect in the “creative inclinations’’ of the artists here anything more than narcissism and self-pity, the subject could potentially be of interest. But, besides a bit of frictionless parody, there’s little evidence among the eight poor foals singled out by curator Diana Nawi of any attempt to make a leap beyond the self and its various lifelines.

One of them, Whitney Bedford from Los Angeles, paints broken and bandaged hands, allegedly because they symbolize and exorcize her greatest fear - “that she could be physically unable to paint.’’ The result is about as edifying, and not nearly as funny, as listening to a prima donna sing about her fear of catching bronchitis.

Another, Andrew Kuo from New York, presents a work called “My Relationship to Art as of May 10, 2008 [Crooked-Mouth Face],’’ in which he ranks the artists he most admires in a bar graph labeled “Twelve Artists I Wish I Was [Based Solely on Their Stuff].’’ According to the exhibit brochure, Kuo’s “obsessive self-reflection’’ (the phrase feels right, but hardly something to boast about) is “inspiring, but potentially crippling.’’

In truth, it is neither - at least not if we are to take words like “inspiration’’ and “crippling’’ seriously. When it comes to inspiration, art that doesn’t even get to first base can hardly be expected to provide a convincing commentary on its real vexations.

Other artists in the show wallow in similar gloop: Sean Landers, also based in New York, covers a canvas with such negative words as “desolate,’’ “doubt,’’ “melancholy,’’ and “doom’’ and riffs on his own signature. Boston’s Joe Zane (who was a finalist in last year’s James and Audrey Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art) makes medals, neon signs, and faked monographs all featuring his own name. And Marco Rios from Los Angeles makes work about the weight he gained while on antidepressants.

Only New York-based Kalup Linzy, whose video about an “emerging’’ artist called Kotanya “trying to find love, glory and gallery representation in the big city’’ is hilariously extreme, and LA’s Shana Lutker, whose quieter, handmade meditations probe the nature of creative satisfaction, provide moments of relief.

The assumption that the public should be interested in artists whose “practices’’ (to quote the brochure) “are grounded in self-reflection and the anxieties inherent in making art’’ says much about current aspirations in the art world.

Navel-gazing in art is nothing new, of course. Nor is self-pity. But the plight of the artist as a legitimate and even pressing subject of art has really taken hold in recent decades. Where in the past the theme had some bite and drama to it (one thinks immediately of Van Gogh, Munch, and the German Expressionists), the results in recent times have been depressingly downbeat.

Why the rise in this tendency toward self-reflection? Two explanations I can think of seem almost contradictory.

On the one hand, the plight of artists, always romanticized, drew extra sympathy within the art world during the culture wars of the 1980s, when artists’ ability to express themselves freely while enjoying any form of state patronage, even indirectly, came under sustained attack. Artists raised the specter of state censorship; naturally, art institutions rallied to the cause, and they have remained vigilant ever since.

But at the same time, notions of genius, inspiration, and heroism in art came under their own sustained attack in art schools and in the academy, where they were systematically deconstructed, ridiculed, and subjected to ideological critique.

This was deflating, to be sure, for those rare artists with both talent and conviction. But it opened up a field of possibilities for those with neither. It wasn’t long before anyone attracted to the idea of being an artist was made to feel reasonably good about himself, regardless of talent. Sure, a degree of hobbling self-consciousness was inescapably part of the bargain, but that was something many of these artists - clever, but full of doubt - could happily live with.

If the artists in “This is Killing Me’’ need to be seen in this context, so too does Guy Ben-Ner, the Israeli artist who is the subject of “Thursday the 12th,,’’ the most extensive solo show at Mass MoCA since last year’s opening of the Sol LeWitt retrospective.

Ben-Ner’s work is very likable on paper. He makes funky, low-tech films that pay homage to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Don Quixote, as well as stars of video art like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci.

He’s more intelligent and compelling than most of the artists in “This Is Killing Me.’’ But like them, he’s deeply, at times fatally interested in his own status as an artist. In his particular case, it’s the tension between his own dreams of significance and the awkward fit they make with his life as a father of two young children that drives him.

Ben-Ner tries to turn his creative anxiety into humor. But it’s deflating how often his lighter, more inspired touches get bogged down in longueurs and arcane references.

Sitting through them (most of them provide rather too many opportunities for the mind to wander) I thought of Glenway Wescott’s observation, in his novel “The Pilgrim Hawk,’’ about the “absurd position of the artist in the midst of the disorders of those who honor and support him, but who can scarcely be expected to keep quiet around him for art’s sake.’’ Ben-Ner’s novel solution - he works from home - is to give his children roles in his art.

His films have a homemade quality - at once delightful and deliberately pathetic - which contrasts with their philosophical ambitions. The first film in the show was both the best and the funniest. Called “I’d Give It to You If I Could But I Borrowed It’’ (a line from a hilarious Pink Floyd song called “Bike’’), it’s shown on a screen attached to an exercise bike. Viewers must sit on the bike and peddle to make it work. Slow down and the film slows; stop and it halts.

As we peddle, we see Ben-Ner and his children stealing artworks in a gallery, including replicas of Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel’’ and Picasso’s “Head of a Bull’’ (which was made from bicycle handlebars). When the guard is not looking, they reassemble these parts into a functioning bike.

Our three heroes are then seen cycling around Münster, in an homage (typically hard to get unless you read the exhibition brochure) to an artwork and album by Rodney Graham, which shows Graham cycling around Berlin’s Tiergarten while tripping on acid. It’s all very silly, but so mischievous and poker-faced that you have to laugh.

A new work commissioned for the show stars not only Ben-Ner but Mass MoCA’s director, Joseph Thompson. Filmed in the Berkshires with a big enough budget to allow for a small plane, it’s a brainy parody of an action movie, which draws on famous comic duos like Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sancha Panza, A.A. Milne’s Pooh and Piglet, Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Fool, and Becket’s Vladimir and Estragon. Predictably, nothing much happens, although there is, gratifyingly, a plane crash.

I liked the film, and would gladly see it again. But its ostensible theme - the conflict between our desire to be masters of our fates and the ultimate absurdity and powerlessness of our position - tends to get lost in layers of obscure references.

Another film, called “Wild Boy,’’ is based on Francois Truffaut’s 1970 film about a feral boy, “L’Enfant Sauvage.’’ Ben-Ner’s version is a quaint meditation on the tension between socialization and our innate impulses, filmed in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment.

The feral boy is called “Buster,’’ in an homage to Keaton. The job of the father figure, played by Ben-Ner, is to teach him. Having learned to write, the boy spells out “life sucks’’ in refrigerator magnets. As the boy learns to imitate the man, the man seems to regress, and the two wind up drumming on pots and pans to the music of “Break on Through (to the Other Side)’’ by the Doors.

It’s droll, but, like most of Ben-Ner’s films, funnier and more succinct in the description than on the screen, where the appalling editing and lousy audio make the longer films unendurable.

Contemporary artists and the institutions that support them frequently bemoan the lack of public interest in what they do. Such exhibitions as “This is Killing Me’’ and, to some extent, “Thursday the 12th’’ can trigger the suspicion that some of them secretly cherish their embattled, obscure, put-upon status.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.