Reviewing Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle necessarily involves a debate about the nature and purpose of art and film. If that sounds grandiose, it's only appropriate to the five-part, seven-hour opus mirabilis, which has been derided as a massive con job and hailed as the birth of a new kind of filmmaking. The extent to which The Cremaster Cycle is seen as one or the other, or maybe both, has much to do with whether you believe a work of art should, in some sense, stand alone, or whether it's inevitably part of the larger context of the artist's work and the world at large, and therefore has no responsibility to be in any way self-contained.

As a sculptor, one whom The New York Times called "the most important American artist of his generation," Barney is perhaps best known for his frequent use of Vaseline, and indeed, the Cremaster movies have a similarly slippery, amorphous constitution. Named for the muscle that raises the testes during sex, the series (at least originally) purported to concern itself with the fetal state before secondary sex characteristics emerge, and by extension with the process of gender differentiation and all that extends from it. By Barney's own admission, that model faded away as the individual films in the series were completed -- in the order 4, 1, 5, 2, 3 -- to be replaced with a more generic focus on transformation, or "the life-cycle of an idea." The Cremaster films feature many of Barney's sculptures as props or set pieces, while the sculptures bear titles and employ iconography that can only be understood in the context of the films.

"Understood" remains a relative term. Despite the series' ample length, and the numbing repetitions of the video-shot 1 and 4, there's very little room for explanation, even of such basic facts as who figures on the screen are meant to represent. Without reading the synopsis available at www.cremaster.net, you'd be hard-pressed to divine, in 3, that the "female corpse digging her way out of a grave is the undead corpse of Gary Gilmore, protagonist of Cremaster 2," or that, to quote Barney, the two computer-generated Goodyear blimps floating over the Bronco Bowl are "attempting to diagram the fetal reproductive system before the point of differentiation." Sometimes a blimp is not just a blimp.

The dyed-in-the-Merino art-heads who genuflect before Barney's gooey altar will retort that the films aren't meant to be taken on their own, that they form a part of Barney's extensive cosmos, including sculpture, site-specific installations and, presumably, what he had for breakfast this morning. But the prejudices of the contemporary art world notwithstanding, the extent to which a work of art has to be explained, by its creator or his emissaries, ought to be understood as a mark of its utter failure. To anyone who cherishes the belief that art is, or ought to be, a means of communication, Barney's hermetically sealed cosmos seems like little more than art snob fantasy camp.

A few years ago, a sculptress friend was in the midst of art school, and when she'd show off a new piece of work, she'd immediately launch into explaining it, without giving her audience more than a few seconds to contemplate it on its own terms. The Cremaster Cycle requires not only footnotes but advance reading. How else could you know that the ogrish figure whose story bookends 3 is Finn McCool, the hero of Irish folk legend, or that the Bronco Bowl was chosen as a site for 1 because Barney grew up in Denver and played football through college?

The failure to communicate such basic ideas is due in no small part to Barney's sheer incompetence as a filmmaker: As a director, he makes a great sculptor. While 4 begins the cycle with some memorable imagery, most notable the sight of icky flesh-pods making their way up the jumpsuits of racing motorbikers, 1 and 5 (the first to be shot on film) are excruciating in their tendentiousness. With 2, Barney and co. begin to grasp the basics of editing, so that the three-hour 3, the final installment, doesn't seem nearly as long as the 40-minute 1.

By contrast with the rest of the series, 3 is positively action-packed, with a five-Chrysler demolition derby, slapstick humor (featuring the cycle's only notable performance, by Terry Gillespie), a female chorus line, dueling hardcore bands and numerous feats of derring-do by Barney himself, who scales both the Chrysler building's elevator shafts and the five-story courtyard of the Guggenheim museum. Indeed, the cycle wastes few opportunities to show off Barney's physical prowess and toned, hairless physique. Frequently nude, though with prostheses covering his, er, differentiator, Barney scales the Budapest opera house in 5, rides a bull (via body double) in 2, and punches out fellow sculptor Richard Serra (playing Masonic architect Hiram Abiff) in 3. The strikingly handsome Barney, who evidently knows just how good he looks in a '30s moustache, might be the first artist to jockey for the cover of Outside magazine.

While the auteur theory may have taken its knocks in the world of film, it's clearly alive and well in the art world. Without Barney to act as locus and interpreter of his own canon, it's hard to imagine how anyone could begin to make sense of it all. 2 and 3 contain imagery worthy of a David Cronenberg movie, but that just brings to mind how much more successfully Cronenberg has integrated a fine art sensibility into the world of film, to say nothing of Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman. It's too simple to call The Cremaster Cycle narcissistic or arrogant, but there is something insufferably smug and self-congratulatory about Barney's abstruse vision, as unobtainable as the Masonic initiation sought by Barney's apprentice in Cremaster 3. If seven hours of film is only the beginning, who wants to see the end?

Written and directed by Matthew Barney Through Sun., July 27 Prince Music Theater.