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A three-part invention entitled "Greeter, Exhibitionist and Jeer" welcomes visitors to the National Academy's 179th Annual. Neither a painting nor a "traditional" sculpture, the work, by Nina Levy, makes manifest a statement in the catalog that is certain to cause grumbling: "This year we have included installation art in the Annual for the first time." For an institution known to prefer the haft to art's knife point, it's a sentence designed to provoke.

One can almost hear the argument among the Academy's members and fans. "How could they?" will inevitably be answered by "Why have they waited until now?" In that debate, however, both sides would be missing the point.

In Ms. Levy's piece - one of the strongest in the show - an otherwise hyper-real fiberglass man, the Greeter, sports a lurid, comic-strip smile with huge, horsey teeth; nearby, the Exhibitionist, a nude fiberglass woman reminiscent of a Duane Hanson sculpture, sits cross-legged with her back to the room and her arms paradoxically shielding her nudity; on a wall hangs Jeer, a photograph of a person in whose open mouth the face of another person appears. The work unites opposites: realism and cartoon exaggeration, exhibitionism and modesty.

(Note: this article makes reference to "Jeer" but actually refers to the photograph, "Small Head," and the the three pieces are self-portraits)