Trippy, yes. But no black-light posters.

NEW YORK -- For years I have been telling my friends that if I ever write a book, it's going to be about the impact of psychedelic drugs on art since the 1960s. So it was with a keen sense of anticipation that I rode the rails down to New York to view "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era," an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The exhibition, I'm sorry to report, is disappointing. Taking up two full floors of the museum, it is a loose, sprawling grab bag of posters, paintings, light-show projections, films, and far too many journalistic photographs of rock bands performing and such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg , Timothy Leary , Mick and Bianca , and the Beatles. It's more of a giant walk-in scrapbook -- with some important pages unfortunately omitted -- than a coherent art exhibition.

For visitors who were in their teens or 20s at the end of the '60s, the show may be an entertaining nostalgia trip. But it offers no revelatory insights as to what psychedelic art was or what its broader effects may have been. It was organized by Christoph Grunenberg , a former curator and acting director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and now director of Tate Liverpool in England, where the show made its debut.

Part of the problem is that psychedelic art was never as stylistically distinct a movement as Pop Art, Color Field Painting, or Minimalism. More important than any particular form it may have taken was the state of mind that it tried to reflect or induce.

So what sort of state is the psychedelic state of mind? Walking through the exhibition, one finds different features exemplified.

Many works in the show are designed to appeal to senses that are typically heightened by psychedelic influences. With its aggressively blinking strobe lights and pulsating music, a reflective mylar tentlike structure by a group called USCO could mesmerize you, drive you out of the room, or give you a seizure.

A film of a light show with music by Joshua White of the Joshua Light Show , with its throbbing, amoebic imagery, suggests a state of consciousness in which things lose definition and boundaries become elastic and swirly.

Elsewhere, mandala-like paintings and drawings by John McCracken (who is better known for his sleek Minimalist sculptures) and Jordan Belson's kaleidoscopic film of a constantly morphing, circular form accompanied by sitar music evoke a sense of meditative entrancement.

Another important aspect of psychedelic experience is hallucinatory fantasy. This dimension is realized in a painting of a deliriously elaborated, wildly colored flower called "Cosmic Orchid" by Isaac Abrams , who only began his painting career after tripping on LSD. And a large circular painting by Abdul Mati Klarwein teems with little images of sexy women in technicolor land- and cityscapes, all of which are exactingly replicated within a smaller, central circle.

A section on architecture and design presents colorful, complicated prints by the group Archigram envisioning fantastic buildings and exuberantly irrational utopias. Here you can also doff your shoes and enter Verner Panton's "Phantasy Landscape Visiona II ," a hedonistic environment of organically shaped forms that you can sit and recline on. It's the kind of space where you can imagine visitors smoking a joint while relaxing in the womb-like ambience.

One aspect of psychedelic experience that is not well represented is humor, and what strikes me as the show's most glaring omission is the underground comic books of R. Crumb . A kind of existentialist hilarity was central to the psychedelic experience, and no artist translated visionary comic fantasy into graphic imagery, language, and stories more inventively and infectiously than did Crumb.

Speaking of omissions, how can you do an exhibition about psychedelia without including a room lit by black lights and decorated with fluorescent posters? This brings up perhaps the largest problem with the show: It is just not very trippy. It seems like the perspective of a nerdy art historian who missed the '60s but has done a lot of dutiful research. It is just not hip enough to capture the heady spirit of the time.

So how consequential was the psychedelic revolution after all? Going by the exhibition, you'd have to think not very. Hardly any of the art in it is any good, and there is little evidence that the movement had much social impact beyond a number of large gatherings like the invasion of Haight-Ashbury by hippies and runaways, San Francisco's Human Be-In, and Woodstock. The antiwar movement is represented in some photographs, posters, and a terrific, nightmarish Pop-surreal painting of U S soldiers raping Vietnamese people by Peter Saul , but psychedelics weren't the driving force behind the war protests or the rise of feminism and black power.

Psychedelic drugs have influenced some now classic rock music -- the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" being arguably the greatest -- and a lot of now dopey-looking album covers. Well, there is one great album cover: R. Crumb's for Janis Joplin's "Cheap Thrills." The acid-rock concert posters displayed in the exhibition in numbing profusion are not nearly as exciting as they were back in the day when their liquefied texts and neon colors gave viewers a contact high.

But I am still convinced that psychedelic consciousness had deep and lasting effects on art as we know it, if only because a lot of artists in the '60s actually inhaled.

Surely it had something to do with changing the relationship between viewer and artwork. The traditional attitude of measured, connoisseurial judg ment gave way to the idea of art as a mind-expanding experience. Boundaries between traditional media such as painting and sculpture stretched and dissolved. Viewers entered into the space and time of art literally, as in new forms of installation art, and imaginatively, as perspective, illusionism, story-telling, and metaphor returned to painting in the '70s, filling the vacuum left by pure, formalist abstraction.

A lot of art of the '60s and early '70s makes more sense if you imagine yourself or the artist stoned. The simplicity of Minimalist sculpture and the empty space around it become fraught with enigmatic, mystical significance. Color Field Painting floods your visual perception the way acid-rock light shows did. Earthworks like Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" take on a cosmic, pantheistic import. Photorealism dazzles eyes opened to the complexity and visual richness of ordinary objects.

Many different sorts of quirky, idiosyncratic styles flourished in the '70s. Intrigued by all things great and small, psychedelic consciousness is pluralistic by nature. (In "Summer of Love" this is hinted at by a pair of wildly fanciful chairs by Lucas Samaras .) The art that younger artists are producing today is, if anything, more pluralistic, visionary, nutty, erotic, and, in a word, psychedelic than ever. See, for example, Cameron Jamie's exhibition at MIT's List Art Center.

Of course, it would be reductive to attribute all developments in art since the '60s solely to psychedelia. And it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge that many lives have been wrecked by psychedelic drugs. But, for better or worse, the core legacy of the psychedelic revolution remains a source of inspiration for many artists today: the quasi-mystical idea that minds can be radically altered and expanded, that consciousness can be raised in ways that increase aliveness to the world, to consciousness itself, and, possibly, to some cosmic meaning that transcends the ordinarily human. Whether changed minds lead to a world changed for the better is a whole other story. I'll try to get to it in my book.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.