Exhibitions of collections, a staple of art-museum programming, usually celebrate what individuals have amassed while highlighting objects of special distinction.

"Pictures, Patents, Monkeys and More... On Collecting" at the Institute of Contemporary Art is different. By bringing together four collections of markedly different character, it tries to stimulate thinking about the nature of this acquisitive activity.

In the exhibition catalog, ICA curator Ingrid Schaffner defines her objective with questions such as:

How are institutional and individual collecting different from each other?

Is fine art really the "big game" of collecting, or can collectors express equivalent innovation and individuality through other kinds of objects?

Does the fact that an object has been added to a collection transform our attitude toward it?

Can a collection itself become a work of art?

These issues represent only part of Schaffner's brief on the subject, but you should get the drift. She urges us to look deeply at the collections she has brought together, and try to winnow some philosophical nuggets from them.

If we didn't try to reach for profundity, the exhibition wouldn't make much sense, because its four parts don't relate to one another.

The largest segment is a selection of contemporary art acquired by Robert J. Shiffler, an Ohio businessman. The other three segments are smaller, and plug in like attachments.

One is 100 cloth dolls called sock monkeys from a private collection in New York.

From the National Museum of American History in Washington, Independent Curators International, the exhibition organizer, borrowed several dozen 19th-century patent models.

To these, the ICA added a small group of Egyptian artifacts borrowed from the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

This high-low-middlebrow recipe provides something for every taste and degree of intellectual curiosity. While the Shiffler contemporary art is the most prominent part, and also the most challenging, the sock monkeys and patent models are the most appealing.

The American history museum owns 10,000 of these little models, from locomotives to clothespins, which were submitted with patent applications to render inventions tangible.

Other models in the ICA show include a pinball game, a pill-coating machine, a dog-powered treadmill, and a sewing machine whose action mimics a galloping horse.

These objects weren't consciously selected by anyone. They accumulated randomly, and became a collection retrospectively, but only in the loosest sense. The sense of purpose that forms art collections is missing.

The toys sewn from stuffed socks stand for a slightly higher order of collecting. They speak of a strong impulse, perhaps even an obsession, to amass examples of a particular species of object.

In this case, the impulse is narrowly defined and intellectually facile, even though there are numerous variations among sock monkeys.

The Egyptian artifacts, mostly scarabs and small funerary sculptures called shabtis, were originally collected by Dillwyn Parrish, a cousin of the famed artist and illustrator Maxfield Parrish, and bequeathed to the University Museum.

The nature of Parrish's interest in them has not been determined, but now they serve an educational purpose that is mainly historical, scientific and aesthetic. As such, they represent a didactic archive.

The Shiffler collection, which contains works by many of today's more provocative artists, is the most instructive aspect of the show in terms of exploring its theme.

Shiffler is quoted in the catalog as being "driven by a genuine belief that people's lives are enriched when their minds are opened to new ideas or directions. I view the sharing of the collection and its archive... as a natural obligation of the collector."

The artists that Shiffler favors, such as Lorna Simpson, Fred Wilson, Janine Antoni, Lisa Yuskavage and Jessica Stockholder, offer ideas and directions that can be difficult to grasp and follow.

Much of the art is object-based, but also intensely conceptual. For instance, Tony Tasset's sculpture Collector is a storage rack filled with canvases painted a uniform dark green. Stockholder's sculpture of common building materials looks like a half-built, and poorly constructed, partition.

Gregory Green's sculpture resembles a pipe bomb fitted with an egg timer. Performance artist Karen Finley's sculpture is a dollhouse filled with nostalgic tokens such as crayons.

Such enigmatic, obliquely allusive art accentuates the hierarchies of collecting that this show reveals. But otherwise, the show doesn't go beyond that basic stratification. It doesn't answer the questions that it poses. Viewers must do that for themselves, if they figure out what the questions are.

One wonders, too, whether the show's makeup inevitably discourages serious thinking about the nature and cultural implications of these four collections.

The exhibition can be a lot of fun, but only if you don't take it seriously. How many visitors will, I wonder?

Cosmic Beetle. For that matter, what will they make of Mexican artist Damián Ortega's deconstructed Volkswagen, which hangs from the ceiling on the ICA's second floor?

Ortega calls this installation Cosmic Thing - why I can't imagine, because there's nothing the least bit cosmic about it. It's just a classic Volkswagen Beetle that has been taken apart. The components are hung by cables in an "exploded" configuration, similar to the views of appliances presented in parts manuals.

Ortega's car is described by the ICA as being "thick with national [i.e. Mexican] symbolism," presumably because VW Beetles have been manufactured in Mexico since 1967, and the cars are ubiquitous in that country.

Why this should be considered symbolic of anything is a mystery. Beetles were once popular in this country, too. Trying to insinuate a German car into Mexican culture seems fatuous.

(Note to ICA: The Beetle was not "conceived by Nazi engineers." It was designed before Hitler came to power by Ferdinand Porsche, an innovative German automotive pioneer, who was not a Nazi. The Hitler government decided to build the cars because it wanted all Germans to own either a car or a tractor.)

Cosmic Thing is, at least, a fascinating spectacle. It was especially so for me, because my son and I once deconstructed a worn-out Beetle as an entertainment.

If we'd had a place to hang it up, we could have anticipated Ortega by several decades. But for us it wasn't anything as profound as a metaphor, it was just spare parts.

Women wilding. If you resist being entranced by Ortega's handiwork and continue on to the ICA's Project Space, you'll encounter eight odd but compelling gouache drawings by New York artist Amy Cutler.

All portray women engaged in bizarre and improbable activities. In one, foxes tear at the dresses of women with teapots for heads. In another, a woman collects disembodied pig snouts. In a third, women with unbrellas strapped to their heads ride goats.

The fantastic scenarios usually involve actions that suggest combat, violence or discord. One instinctively tries to imagine fairy-tale-like narratives that would accommodate Cutler's freewheeling imagination, but this is hard to do.

Accepting these drawings as allegories for personal relationships or, as ICA curator Elyse Gonzales believes, for the socialization of young girls seems most credible. Yet Cutler's vision is so deliciously dark and zany that just looking is enough.