This seductive come-on, spoken by artist Andrea Fraser impersonating a New York gallerist in a film parody called May I Help You?, can chill the hearts not only of art critics but of innocent art browsers.

What is one supposed to reply to such a perniciously unctuous greeting? Speak truth to marketing? No, the critic smiles wanly and swallows the inanity. The browser can be excused if he or she bolts for the sidewalk.

Fraser's smooth but slyly caustic performance, filmed and edited by Jeff Preiss, attacks the insidious way that language is manipulated - and sometimes perverted - to sell art.

Watch this film long enough and one begins to think of other ways in which contemporary art in particular has become encased in a glutinous matrix of ambiguous, obfuscatory and sometimes misleading language deployed indiscriminately by dealers, docents, curators, critics, and even artists themselves.

May I Help You? is one of the more wickedly incisive works in a spirited and frequently amusing exhibition at Arcadia University called "Air Kissing." The show was organized by Momenta Art, an artist-run institution in Brooklyn; it was seen there late last year.

In various ways, the artists involved in "Air Kissing" expose the unsavory reality behind the romantic facade of art-making, dealing and collecting. Fatuous marketing language and effusive blather, both representing the corruption of language to make art appealing to people outside the art industry, haven't escaped the attention of artists, who aren't averse to self-deprecating humor.

While they sometimes benefit from aggressive merchandising, they also have been rebelling against art-world conventions and pretensions at least since Marcel Duchamp - although when Duchamp was active, the art world had yet to metastasize into a full-blown industry.

Some artists recognize that, by entering the industry, they have compromised themselves in ways that aren't always easy to live with. They enter art school dreaming of creative breakthroughs and recognition that will lead inevitably to fame and fortune. Most are lucky to come within sniffing distance of either.

Newly minted professional artists soon discover, for instance, that their prospective market is tiny. Creating quality art is hard enough, but selling it can be practically impossible, at least on the scale necessary to sustain life.

Artists usually camp at the bottom of the industry pecking order, behind dealers, consultants, collectors, curators and auctioneers. Once an artist discovers this law of nature, he or she is bound to sour on the whole business.

I presume that most of the laments expressed in "Air Kissing" come to the public's attention infrequently, if ever. The work in this show, created by insiders, allows outsiders to recognize the absurdities, banalities and chronic frustrations that professional artists must endure.

Some pieces, like Fraser's, are wryly comic. Alex Bag's video, one of four in the show, dramatizes the coming of age of an art student, from her first to her final semester. In the process, Bag evolves from starry-eyed proto-careerist to emerging cynic as she discovers the bitter truth about her chosen career path.

From "I work hard every day to learn, to change and grow" she proceeds to "I'm going to do the fine arts thing because everyone is much cuter and smarter" to "Stop selling my culture back to me." Her performance lasts nearly an hour, but, like Fraser's impersonation, it amply rewards one's patience.

Jennifer Dalton addresses another perennial area of anxiety in a slide show called How Do Artists Live? (For many, it's by teaching art students how to prepare for a vocation that will fail to reward them significantly.)

In 2005, Dalton conducted an Internet survey to which 856 artists responded. She posed real-life questions about how much they earned, whether they had health insurance, and whether they had support from their families.

She converted her statistics into colorful, hand-drawn graphs that are projected as slides. If the questions are sobering, the answers can be downright depressing. They illuminate another aspect of the art industry's dark side, which is that most creators are like migrant workers - they're just scraping by. The industry lives on their idealism, effort and energy, yet other people profit more handsomely from their labor.

The recipe for success? One of two colorful circus-type posters by Carl Pope suggests this: "Add a cup of Warhol (Andy) and a stick of Nauman (Bruce) and serve." Except it usually isn't that simple, because who can predict who or what the industry will choose to reward?

Collectors can help if an artist can forge a bond. In a painted trompe l'oeil parody of a New York Times article, William Powhida imagines himself becoming acquired as a living artwork by a rich collector, who "installs" him in his apartment. There's a risk, though, that the collector might eventually tire of his unusual acquisition and "deaccession" him.

By demystifying art industry practice, these artists are, obviously, biting the hands that occasionally feed them. Yet that, too, could be a strategy. Apostates and critics can be co-opted; transgression readily transmutes into the fashionably avant-garde, and eventually into convention.

Why else would Christian Jankowski's video Telemistica be so hilarious? Invited to participate in the 1999 Venice Biennale, Jankowski, by telephone, asked five Italian fortune-tellers who appear on television questions guaranteed to elicit positive responses, such as, Will I realize my new art piece?

The prognosticators answered his questions on the air; Jankowski appropriated the footage, added English subtitles, and compiled the segments into a subversive example of how an artist can exploit the media culture to his own benefit.

The last word on the mystique that keeps the industry afloat might belong to David Hammons. He obtained 165 copies of Arturo Schwartz's catalogue raisonné for Marcel Duchamp, published in 1969. Hammons fitted the telephone-book-sized tome with a black leather binding stamped The Holy Bible: Old Testament on the spine, and edged the pages in thick, glistening gold.

Conceptually, it's a one-liner, yet Hammons has produced a sumptuous object that affirms a melancholy truth: Art is not only business as usual, the industry that promotes it can be as doctrinaire and self-deluding as communism, and intolerant of artists like the "Air Kissing" cohort who dare to expose its character flaws.

Art: Unpleasant Truths

"Air Kissing" continues in the gallery at Arcadia University, 450 S. Easton Rd., Glenside, through April 25. Hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, to 8 p.m. Thursdays, and from noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Information: 215-572-2131 or www.arcadia.edu/gallery.