Explaining the rigorous, arcane, and exquisitely illustrated mythology of his Prophetic Books, William Blake said that he must create a new system or be enslaved by another’s. He labored in obscurity throughout his life.

The obscurity of sculptor, performance artist, and filmmaker Matthew Barney, on the other hand, has been highly publicized. Barney started The Cremaster Cycle, a five-film epic inspired by the title muscle (it raises and lowers the testicle), in 1994, and it has turned highbrows into the hoity-toity equivalent of Star Wars fanatics. Cremaster 3, the climactic and last-finished of the films, and at three hours the longest, premieres this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts.

I confess that I have my doubts. I could compare Barney’s work to David Lynch without the black comedy or David Cronenberg without the surreal misanthropy or Peter Greenaway without the symmetry or Busby Berkeley without the toe-tapping delight, but I find those filmmakers much more entertaining and enlightening. Not that Cremaster 3 lacks stunning images: Saratoga trotters decomposing on the run illustrate Barney’s notion of the decay of an idea; a cheetah woman (Paralympian model Aimee Mullins) poised on a ledge conjures symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff’s The Sphinx. And like Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, it’s a tour de force of cinema as architecture, starring the phallic Chrysler Building and the womblike Guggenheim Museum.

Some of the motifs, however, seem like personal therapy, such as the prolonged sequence in which a woman (Mullins again) dices potatoes with cookie-cutter platform shoes. And what the hell is that crawling out of Barney’s anus? Cremaster begs for exegesis (I can hear the PhD theses cranking out now), but in fact the films play better seen cold; Barney’s own explanations of the varied Masonic rites and Celtic myths and personal mythologies underlying his work make it seem less inspired than programmatic. And self-indulgent. Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; with Barney it leads to the Guggenheim, where Richard Serra splashes the walls with molten Vaseline. (178 minutes)