But the most extravagant handwork in this show is the bizarrely compelling object created by Eliza Trask, a Maine woman who spent five years pasting tiny seashells and family photographs onto a modified candle stand to commemorate the return of her husband from the war.
Although the installation takes up a lot of space it is not the only compelling object in the room.
The exhibition, "Stories in Sterling: Four Centuries of Silver in New York," promises to interpret "these compelling objects within a cultural context," the Web site says.
But here it looks as if they all might have graduated recently from an M.F.A. program that favors semiotic sophistication over the fashioning of compelling objects.
If the Eastern side seems more attractive psychologically, the Western side — in this exhibition, anyway — boasts the more compelling objects, many of them tiny and weird.
Yet many of those who did so still thought they were, as Ezra Pound urged, making it new, and the human body remains one of the most compelling objects of attention and desire for contemporary painters.
And the variety and abundance of work on hand, in bins and on walls, guarantee that connoisseurs, collectors, artists and lay people are sure to find compelling objects to study.
"It's one of the most scientifically compelling objects in the solar system — perhaps in terms of ease to get to, the most compelling," said Scott Hubbard of Stanford University.
He said Lehnert and colleagues had made a compelling case for the object's great distance.
Out of artificial objects emerges a compelling simulation of the seemingly confounding idea of life being born out of otherwise inanimate material.
