Manhattan's new Museum of Arts and Design piles on the schmaltz pretty thick. Fortunately, its inaugural exhibition also veers on the edge of danger.

When MAD opened its new $90 million home on Columbus Circle Sept. 27 in a reclad 1960s white marble building with lollipop columns, it did so with a show that offers all manner of furniture, chandeliers, wall hangings and trinkets that bring to mind the phrase, "if looks could kill."

These things just might.

Boris Bally presents a necklace of pistol triggers. Willie Cole's "Loveseat" is made from dozens of women's pointy-toe stilettos bound together vertically. Sitting on it would be like laying on a bed of nails.

The show supplies one of those, too, in the form of Jaehyo Lee's charred-plank divan, which has extra-long bent nails flattened to its undulating surface in a squiggly decorative pattern.

Obviously, there's more than a touch of surrealism, if not sadism, at work here. But what characterizes "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary" most is a pronounced sense of earnestness.

The show dives right into a current trend among artists who practice a socially conscious form of bricolage, assembling or recycling discarded consumer goods into equally nonfunctional but highly decorative objects of wonder that also make a point.

ASSIMILATION

The figures of Steven Deo's father-and-son fishermen are made entirely of jigsaw puzzle pieces, the American Indian artist's metaphor for establishing a clear identity in a culture of assimilation.

Soyeon Cho works hard to imbue worthless objects with value. Her "Self-Portrait 2" is a lighting fixture in the shape of a sunflower built from small pyramids of white plastic forks and cotton swabs. The long shadows they throw on surrounding walls are what actually enrich the piece, giving it the fleeting nature of life whenever the light is shut off.

Accumulation is clearly king at this museum, which tries to blend high-concept art with the passions of a hobbyist. What goes into making a work becomes more important than the sum of its parts.

LOTS OF BUTTONS

The "wow" factor looms large in sculptures like Tara Donovan's pint-sized "reef" made of hundreds of clear plastic buttons glued together into jagged peaks.

The same is true of Terese Agnew's tapestry of 30,000 designer labels and Jean Shin's "Soundwave," which consists of many old 78 rpm records melted into a tall, curling tube-like wave that surfers will love.

These pieces are meant to dazzle, but mostly they exude a certain ominousness that saves them from being outright kitsch.

JOINING IN

One page of a soon-to-be-published book is blown up on a wall behind a computer where viewers are invited to type in a word to draw up its corresponding figure.

This isn't the only interactive moment in the show. Viewers can choose documentary videos in which the artists explain their work on touch screens placed at different points throughout.

They merely distract from the art at hand, adding to a sense of overkill in an exhibition where so many works tend to show off rather than create much meaning.