But, of course, it's exactly the sort of production you'd expect from the onetime painting student who made punk-fashion history with Vivienne Westwood, founded and managed the Sex Pistols, ushered in hip-hop as a recording artist, and developed films for Columbia Pictures and Steven Spielberg: operatic, grandiose, demanding, clever, and a little cruel.

Titillating - which you might expect Shallow to be, given that each part is an appropriation of a scene from a sex film - it is not.

Unsurprisingly, Shallow began with music, and music determined its imagery. In 2007, McLaren was invited to participate in a group show called "Shallow" at New York's I-20 Gallery (from which McLaren's work presumably got its title), and he began making soundtracks of layers of songs and film dialogues that had influenced him, thinking that - since many people considered him shallow - his musical taste might reveal an interesting lack of depth.

Later on, realizing his contribution would require something visually banal, McLaren decided to make, as he puts it, "portraits of people about to have sex." He went through archives of old and often amateur sex films, the innocent precursors to modern pornography, selected scenes from them, and then had his selections slowed down, repeated, and otherwise altered, and matched them with his music mashups, creating the 21 individual pieces that make up Shallow 1-21.

A little more than half the Shallow pieces are compelling, and they're the ones in which McLaren's musical and filmic manipulations reach the least expected synchronicity, as in the piece that combines William S. Burroughs reading aloud (about a Mexican narcotics agent) and Jayne Mansfield talking about fashion over a soundtrack of classical movie music juxtaposed with a single, jittering, scratched still of a movie credit. (Burroughs himself was known for his use of the cut-up technique, cutting up texts to create new ones, and McLaren has credited the late writer with influencing his Shallow project.)

In a few pieces, the musical component outdoes the visual one; the opposite never occurs, probably because we're too accustomed to the intentional use of the banal image in art. You wish that McLaren had spent more time mixing and matching - that he would, over time, have come up with the perfect 21. Then again, maybe that would have been too good to be shallow.

Goodman downsizes

Goodman can fit a world into a smaller painting, too, though, as his current show at Seraphin Gallery demonstrates. Geo (2009), a sprawling work with intersecting planes of DayGlo orange, parrot green, and hot pink against a grid of like-minded colors, and Geo II, about half its dimensions and also from this year, prove the point ecstatically.