With every installment of "Artists of Hawaii" we are treated to the strong and the weak, cliches and experiments, upstarts and repeat offenders. We celebrate the diversity of our artistic family, and struggle to find meaning in the show as a whole. Everyone finds evidence that standards aren't high enough, and that faith in the power of art can be restored. It is a semi-random sampling of Hawai'i's locally adapted artistic repertoire, organized according to the given juror's area of specialization or interest.

This year that juror is Laura Hauptman, a senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. She specializes in painting, likes it abstract, and in an interview with the Academy's communications director Lesa Griffith, says she has a "weakness for cruder or self-taught work." Though we shouldn't reduce her entire perspective on art to these three qualities, for some people it might explain the presence of work they don't like. It's also easy to turn her being an outsider who doesn't "get" Hawai'i into a plus or a minus, again depending on individual tastes.

Take her inclusion of Douglas Britt's "Eight Palm Isle." This charming painting entices with tourist-friendly colors and caricatures of steamer ships converging on idyllic icons of green volcanic slopes, grass huts and palm trees. Would an informed local curator have selected this piece as exemplary? Though it subtly acknowledges the implicit understanding that we all have about the West's colonization and mythologizing of these islands and the Pacific in general, the critique cuts only one way. For doesn't the constant convergence Britt is poking fun at make life as we currently enjoy it possible?

This elementary reading can be performed on any piece in the show. Some pieces, like Lian Lederman's "Fantasy Leftovers" with its pile of shredded vinyl (the medium of Hawai'i's indigenous car window art) excreted from the word "aloha" on the wall can bear the weight of the investigation. Perhaps as Hawai'i artists have gradually entered into more conceptual territories, the purely aesthetic or technical criteria that dominated Artists of Hawaii in the past have been undermined.

I viewed "Artists of Hawaii 2009" during the roiling chaos of egos on opening night, and again after the dust had settled. The question is whether a juried exhibition with no requirements other than state residency and the work being made the same year as the show can transcend these limited categories. The Buddhist "zone" represents a successful attempt to define areas of thematic or visual cohesion among the 86 works of 63 artists. Here Joe Bright's "On The Road Through Burma," a photo-collaged Buddha composed from the bodies of brutalized Burmese monks, dialogs with Andrew Binkley's "Just Being," which uses one monk's varied poses in each square of a monochrome grid to create a radial gradient from something to nothing.

You will find your own pockets of effectiveness, but overall the show feels unfocused and noisy. Literally so, in the case of David Merrit's video installation "Pendant," whose noirish soundtrack dominates the gallery, sometimes improvising with the urban noises of Kloe Kang's "Oblivion: Invisible Cities." Merrit samples Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 crime drama "Le Samourai," editing and looping a sequence in which a man searches for the one key (among perhaps a hundred) that will start the car he is sitting in. The music identifies him as hero or villain, and the futility of his efforts is a relief and cause for concern.

This suspension of judgement or inability to reach a conclusion is an allegory for the whole show. Hauptman has selected trained professionals and self-taught amateurs, set raw dedication and found materials against elite standards of craftsmanship and execution, and mixed exoticism with Hawai'i's genuine multiculturalism. This will be radical and challenging for some, and entirely inappropriate for others. You will love or hate Doug Ing's Kikaida jacket, which perfectly demonstrates Hauptman's preference for the raw and self-taught. But didn't Kikaida come to Hawai'i on Britt's steam ships along with a thousand other cultural forms that eventually defined what it means to be local? These kinds of real but tenuous links are everywhere in the show if you want to make them yourself.

"Artists of Hawaii" is at a crossroads. The open call, though grueling for the juror, is celebrated for its democratic properties and the career boost that institutional recognition can bring. However, the weak criteria that underlie shifting curatorial strategies discourages innovation in an already conservative artistic community, and teaches us very little about ourselves. It's time for the Academy's biennial to have an actual theme grounded in contemporary local issues, to give jurors a more productive framework for expressing their ideas through our artists' work. We could maintain current levels of participation and artistic diversity and benefit from an outsider's take on our isolated art world, and a much more cohesive and generally legible show.

David A.M. Goldberg is an independent cultural critic, writer and lecturer at Kapi'olani Community College.