"I want to give African American people some sense of nobility and integrity," Nelson says. "I don't want any negative images of African American people."

The Folk (of all hues) tend to buy art that cultured Aficionados consider corny. The regular Jane doesn't give two hoots about this. She'll pick up a nice print at a street fair, mount it on the wall and keep stepping. The nouveau riche — ballers and shot-callers from all walks of life — would love to buy the "good" stuff, but often aren't sure what that is. They too must settle for what they like, and hope to God they don't blunder, embarrassing themselves among more cultured friends. Meanwhile, the artists themselves are just trying to get by while (one hopes) getting better at their craft. These camps rarely cross paths.

"Black Romantic," a new show running now through June 24, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, deftly collides these disparate spheres. Curator Thelma Golden's latest exhibition presents figurative works — the kind that might appear on postcards, posters, or in Spike Lee's personal collection — to an audience used to taking its art abstract, post-modern and highbrow. The art here is realistic and often nostalgic. We get noble black figures, sun-kissed family outings, and religious and ghettofantastic allegories. Angels abound, as do black men with ripped torsos. We also see common men and women, children and old folks with piercing faces, Kente cloth and pop culture-inspired illustration.

The exhibit has caused a minor sensation in the high art world, not because its works are confrontational, but because they are so shockingly commercial. Still, within this motley group exists a wide assortment of styles, agendas and visions.

At its best, "Black Romantic" presents striking yet slightly off-kilter images. Kehinde Wiley's surreal large-scale paintings of men whose kinky hair makes black clouds above them are truly something to behold. The Yale-schooled 25-year-old has a fantastic way with light and color. Oliver B. Johnson, Jr.'s primary-colored "Madonna and Child" — a reed-thin black woman who holds her young son close while fixing the viewer with a direct yet sloe-eyed stare — is indescribably beautiful and confrontational at the same time. The 54-year-old artist is self-taught. There are others, like Iana L. N. Amauba, Jules R. Arthur, III, Dean Mitchell, Jonathon Romain, AJ Smith, Larry Walker, who also manage to complicate their figurative impulses, often to thrilling effect.

These provocative works form a kind of bridge between the radically abstract images high art rewards and the more transparent work the masses demand. For the large part of her career, Golden has mirrored the mainstream art world in that she has pursued post-modernists — artists who threw off essentialist black-is-beautiful manacles and kept it real with "post-conceptual interrogations of race, gender, and identity." In lay terms, they created weird abstract sh-t. An acquired taste.

"Black Romantic" mostly features the opposite breed. Though often just as highly trained as their postmodern brothers and sisters, these cats come from a cosmos of (in Golden's words) "overwrought sentiment, strident essentialism and problematic authenticity." In the show's catalogue, Golden describes her initial dismay at a world of "crass commercialism," "rampant reproduction" and "bombastic self-promotion." Her biggest concern lay with the notion of the "real" black experience these artists strove to present. Golden writes, "The real seemed to be based on a mixture of revisionist history and willful fantasy, weirdly combined with reportage. The absence of irony is profound."

But the aritsts themselves may have more complicated aspirations than Golden acknowleges. "Sure I'm interested in irony, but I'm also interested in sincerity and the question of how I can tie the two together," says Kehinde Wiley. "I'm not interested in choosing between being real and being heady."

As to the charge that this work is unrelentingly uplifting, Kadir Nelson, a 28-year-old whose work has been commissioned by Spike Lee, Will Smith and Steven Spielberg, pleads guilty. "I want to give African American people some sense of nobility and integrity. I don't want any negative images of African American people."

"Black Romantic" ultimately feels like the one-woman journey Golden describes in her essay. She describes how the idea for such a show gestated in her discomfort when bourgie friends asked her to validate their more pedestrian tastes. She began trying to understand, she writes, why there is such a "figurative impulse" in contemporary black art, and also why black audiences have "such a profound desire, even love, for this work." As for the work itself, Golden says she finds it "nice" but "unchallenging."

The show that resulted isn't exactly nice or unchallenging. Its major problem is that the quality of the work fluctuates so wildly. Strong figurative paintings share space with cheesy illustration. In Wiley, Walker, Mitchell and others, Golden has found a small collection of artists skilled enough to tangle with art history and classical figuration yet fierce enough to address multiple and complex black realities. The result is an awesome coup. But for every accomplished imagist who matches impeccable technique to multilayered vision, there are several who make you think, one more year, perhaps two...and a few more who seem to belong on the cover of a romance novel.

Golden's method — an open call via email, snail mail, flyers to community centers and galleries around the country — is in large part to blame. "If you're the top curator of the top black museum on earth, what you do is you call any curator, tell them who you are and what you're looking for," says Melvin Marshall, a Brooklyn art dealer who has major beef with Golden's choice of the web as a research guide. "It's like she didn't want to do the extra legwork," he complains.

But what about Golden's assertion that since figurative black work is precisely what is excluded from mainstream venues, she had to use non-traditional means of putting together a non-traditional show? "Fine," says Marshall. "Then find what is best among that stuff. Let's talk about that. Why do museums exclude it? My impression of 'Black Romantic' is that it is an uneven look at what black people buy...and it's sh-tty, isn't it?"

As exhilarating as "Black Romantic" is at times, it ultimately showcases the exceptions that prove the rule. A more riotously curated show might have spawned the seismic motions that our anemic visual art scene so desperately needs.