Dive in. The water's fine.

Boston has famously conservative tastes. When it comes to art, most of us prefer the sunny comforts of a Monet haystack to the complexities of contemporary art. But the new Institute of Contemporary Art is growing up into a museum that has the potential to be a player on the world stage. Boston's aesthetic can grow up with it.

Contemporary art is a mirror: It reflects who we are as a society, what we value, and how we position ourselves. If you want to consider where the world is going and what it means to be an individual in society -- ideas that are in constant flux, what with war and climate change and technological advances, what with communities, real and virtual, transforming every day -- then go to the ICA and look at the art.

If contemporary art isn't exploring the world at large, it's exploring . . . art itself. Artists specialize in shattering art history's icons, then incorporating them into new ones. Contemporary artists push envelopes; they use new forms, materials, and methods to challenge our senses, our imagination, and the very idea of what makes art. This needn't be forbidding to the uninitiated. Art is not hermetically sealed in a bubble filled with impenetrable theory and jargon. It reaches out to everyone.

All these aspects of contemporary art come together in the ICA's opening shows. And if they enthrall you, you may find yourself making trips to the ICA on a regular basis.

Just one tip: Don't try to figure anything out. Explore it. Let it wash over you. Looking at art is a visceral experience first, one you process with your eyes, your bones, and your gut. Your head will play catch-up in its own time.

"Super Vision," the ICA's inaugural showcase, is an exhibition that looks at how we see and how technology changes perception. It's the perfect intersection of cultural commentary and visual exploration, and a canny way to kick off the museum's programming. It serves up a lot of art that's just plain fun to look at -- works by Jeff Koons, Bridget Riley, and many others. Call it the "Wow!" factor -- pieces that affect the eye the way fine chocolate kisses excite the taste buds.

In the show, chief curator Nicholas Baume looks back to Op Art with Riley's 1964 painting "Pause," a panel of undulating black polka dots that will make your head spin. "Pause" reflected its time -- late Modernism's dissections of space, psychedelic designs -- but it also anticipated today's digital graphics and the virtual space of the computer monitor.

Installation art -- an environment that envelops the viewer -- is the most experiential art form. It can be giddily disorienting. In "New Light," James Turrell plays with shadow and colored light to throw your perceptions off. What you initially see is not what's really going on.

Mona Hatoum's installation "Corps étranger (Foreign Body)," takes viewers spelunking through the artist's body via endoscopic camera. What are the implications of being able to see yourself, as Hatoum does, on the inside? Contemporary art like hers can push us out of our comfort zones. The intention isn't to needle so much as it is to wake us up.

When it comes to social commentary, contemporary art has an edge over the talking heads on the 24-hour news channels. It makes connections and raises questions, but doesn't rush to answers. Art leaves that to us. Head into the ICA's exhibit of its new permanent collection, and you'll find Paul Chan's video installation "1st Light," which links 9/11 anxieties and fundamentalist Christian convictions about the Rapture.

Contemporary art also uses new imaging technologies to change the way we understand our place in the universe, just as the first photos of our little blue planet did. Look at the growing presence of surveillance in our lives. In the "Super Vision" show, Chantal Akerman blends surveillance footage with video she shot in an installation about a hot-button issue, tensions along the US-Mexican border: "From the Other Side."

Art, once something just to look at, now often invites viewer participation. Jane D. Marsching , one of the exhibitors in the James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibit of four Boston-area artists, contemplates global warming; she also reaches out to the viewer virtually, via blog. Her "Arctic Listening Postland" features comic digital images of the mythic Arctic and a Web-based conversation about the environment.

Another exhibit, "Momentum 6: Sergio V ega," presents the Argentine-born artist's installation "Tropicalounge." Vega explores the 17th-century myth of South America as the new Eden. Here's another classic theme in art of the last century: the chasm between self and other. In this case, the "other" is the imagined paradise and its inhabitants.

How about pure, old-fashioned beauty? Have no fear. In the ICA's lobby, Chiho Aoshima's colorful mural "The Divine Gas" depicts a giant girl in a gorgeous, fantastical landscape.

In the permanent collection, you'll find the Rubenesque nudes of Marlene Dumas. Her watercolors are voluptuously handmade, her tones ruddy and welcoming. The content, which examines feminine sexuality, can be unnerving; all the more reason to draw us in with loveliness.

Then there's Sheila Gallagher , another finalist exhibiting in the Foster Prize show, who has made an installation entirely out of living flowers, "painting" the image of a cloud with blossoms. The piece definitely has the "Wow!" factor, as in: "Holy cow, how'd she do that?"

Contemporary art can be fun and amazing, and it can be provocative and chilling. The best of it helps us come to grips with ourselves, and that's reason enough to celebrate the new ICA.