In Bernardo Bertolucci's film "The Dreamers," a young American film buff declares, "I was one of the insatiables. The ones you'd always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh."

That kind of obsessiveness has always driven my contemplation of art. I believe that's the way art should be taken in — like food we can't restrain ourselves from devouring. Hardly the stuff of polite engagement.

That's because art, as Bertolucci suggests, is not just a screen that separates us from the world in a privileged, protected place (though it does that, too). It's also, primarily, a way of knowing that world — one that might feed our insatiable human hungers.

But art has to live up to those hungers. It's a tough bill: to be new, fresh; to be necessary, even imperative; to provide sustenance. In graduate-school critiques, we'd refer to any piece that didn't deliver as a "dead fish" on the table — which we, through dissection, were attempting to revive. It was a futile endeavor, but we did it anyway. One could say that we were hungry.

In 1765, humanist Denis Diderot disparaged merely pretty, pleasant paintings: "First touch me, astonish me, tear me to pieces, make me shudder, weep and tremble, make me angry; then soothe my eyes, if you can."

First, touch me. There's hunger there. I couldn't shake those thoughts as I wandered, twice, through the painting-laden "Artists of Hawai'i 2006" exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

To be fair, it may be unrealistic to apply an emotional directive to a juried show, in which a single juror is the legitimized arbiter of taste. Still, maybe that's all the more reason to expect that the art chosen is both accomplished and feeds one's hungers.

This year's museum-selected juror, Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, sampled 814 works by 335 artists, choosing just 79 works by 50 artists.

That's some serious winnowing. And typical of years past.

Like most jurors, Capon admits his choices are personal and so limited. And like most jurors, he can't resist also laying claim to a "critical response" — in his case, an attempt to project the work forward and "sense if it will stand up to that ultimate and severest of critics: time."

Yet many selections here are more coolly modernist than progressive — some regress a century to modernism's origins (early German expressionism, for example, or synthetic cubism); others, to purified abstraction of the 1950s and '60s, that last gasp of modernism. Is this fresh, new? Is it truly work that will stand the test of time, or work that's already stood the test of time — and time's long since moved on?

Capon also says that he tried to select works "that seem relevant to Hawai'i now." I'm not certain what that statement implies, but it seems dangerous.

What is relevant to Hawai'i now, aesthetically or otherwise? Is it essentially different than what's relevant nationally or internationally? And is it best expressed in these 79 works of art? I doubt that any one person can answer any of those questions legitimately.

Hawai'i may be paradisiacal, but like many contemporary urban locales, it's no paradise. What speaks to me (and like the juror, I represent only a singular aesthetic), here — or anywhere — now, is art that responds to human hungers.

Give me, then, something that addresses erosion, something organic: blood on the canvas, or dirt. For this reason, I rather liked Vincent Hazen's mildew-eaten fabric, which a friend remarked made him nauseous.

Give me something swollen with silence: Dorothy Faison's mysterious, nuanced charcoal and watercolor on paper, in which negative space and formal motifs become narrative opportunities. Or the less-accomplished, but equally intriguing, oils by Russell Sunabe, whose compositionally challenged "Island Son" recalls the raw anger and existential struggle of later-20th-century painters such as Leon Golub.

Give me the otherworldly and imagined: Johannette Rowley's savagely hooked silver shoes, morphing into futuristic fish costume as replicants do in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner." Or Rebecca Horne's well-drawn, if obvious, "Marking Time" prison series, which makes my mind wander as the cinematic angels do, through libraries, in Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire."

Yes, give me desire, thought and skill: the painterly passages of Timothy Ojile's, Carl Jennings' and Marc Thomas' works; Wayne Miyamoto's finely etched topographies that evoke the female anatomy.

I want to tremble and rage. But I don't respond that way, except ironically, to digitally reproduced giclee prints that remove the artist's hand; or to recycled aesthetics; or digitally manipulated surf photographs; or stereotypical visions of a place and its people, which I know to be more than what's on view in Waikiki commercial art galleries. There was too much of that here and not enough imperative.

Here's hoping that the 285 rejected artists find other venues to screen their work. I'm betting the insatiables are still hungry.