It’s a rainy morning, and the Museum of Fine Arts is bustling. The Foster Gallery, the space devoted to the exhibition of contemporary art at the MFA, is particularly lively, as school groups and their harried teachers move restlessly among images, commenting and laughing, walking in small gangs among tourists and morning art lovers. This environment is striking in a museum — the art of our time demands less reverence than, say, the galleries devoted to colonial portraits or classical statuary. And the best pieces in the MFA’s current " Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art " speak in a vernacular that is familiar to a society that routinely watches TV, views icons on its computer screens and at international airports, and experiences photographic imagery in a jillion forms constantly and simultaneously, without batting an eyelash. This is to say that the language of contemporary art can feel more immediate to us than the historical language of painting and sculpture. And the new acquisitions on view in the Foster Gallery bring that language — the language of our personal experience — to this encyclopædic museum, which has for decades had a fitful relationship with contemporary art.

In this show — which includes acquisitions made since the arrival of the department’s current curator, Cheryl Brutvan, in October 1998 — you can see the seeds of a genuine commitment to acquire art in new media and to support emerging artists, as well as the efforts being made to fill some of the many gaps in the museum’s collection of art made since 1950. I moved to Boston from New York City in the early 1990s, and some of my earliest visits to the MFA were to see the Contemporary Department’s " Building a Collection, " which, shown in two parts in 1993, was the forerunner to the current exhibition. (I even worked in that department, from later that year until 1998.) On view then were works that had been acquired during the ’80s and early ’90s. A shift was occurring in art, and the collection revealed a move from the conceptual, photographic, appropriation-based pieces of the ’80s (Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer) toward the more body-, race-, and gender-oriented pieces that took off in the early ’90s (Lorna Simpson, Nan Goldin).

The present " Building a Collection " exhibit has an entirely different feel, one that reflects the changing landscape of contemporary art. You can see Brutvan adjusting for past omissions (minimalism, ’80s expressionist painting, conceptual art) while staying on top of current developments. The show includes works from four decades (1970s through today) presented not chronologically or thematically but in an effort to provoke mini-dialogues among the movements, media, and generations represented. It integrates paintings with installation work and photography, in the process pointing out several encouraging directions in which this collection might be headed.

Brutvan blazes into new territory by showing the first video work to enter the department’s collection — an hour-long Bruce Nauman DVD from 1999 called Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) that presents the iconic cowboy artist on his New Mexico ranch, setting a (probably very good) corner for his ranch fence. The color is kind of washed-out, and it’s very quiet — all you can hear is the faint sound of the desert wind, and little " umphs " when the artist whacks the soil with one of his digging tools — yet it becomes more and more absorbing the longer you watch. Nauman has always been a groundbreaking artist; his videos from the 1960s are some of the earliest ventures into video and conceptual art. His current work continues his ongoing exploration of the idea that " art is what an artist does " ; it’s a significant addition to the museum’s collection. The irony of using a medium that moves and projects sound to record something so slow and quiet is dis-quieting. Of course, it would be good to see an early Nauman in the collection too, but this is an excellent start.

Many considerations go into a museum’s choice of new work. Some works are here not only because they’re worthy acquisitions but because they initiate interesting dialogues with other new works, and with the rest of the museum’s collection. Upon entering, you encounter the wild spaceship-type images of Takashi Murakami’s colorful If the Double Helix Wakes Up (2002), a large, bright canvas by a young Japanese artist who had an eye-popping one-person show in the Foster Gallery two years ago. Murakami’s work adds a new dimension to the museum’s holdings in traditional Japanese art, yet it also converses with the Contemporary Department’s American pop and post-pop art. The large David Hockney photo collage Luncheon at the British Embassy Tokyo Feb 16th 1983, one of a series of hundreds of photo collages produced by the artist in the mid 1980s, is a good addition to a collection that already boasts one of Hockney’s landscape paintings from the late 1990s.

To me, the strength of this show lies in the examples of geometric abstraction — past, present, and, in young artists like Torben Giehler and Kate Shepherd, future — and in the forays into minimalism and installation or new-media work, which have been underrepresented. One of my favorite pieces is Jennifer Bolande’s Appliance House (1998-’99). The almost eight-foot-tall work, which is sculptural as well as photographic, re-creates New York’s famous Lever House building, an icon of the modernist International Style. Bolande made her version out of steel and strips of color transparencies illuminated by a lightbox. The glowing images that make up the front of the building represent a series of glimpses into appliance-store and office-building windows at night. The interplay between the formal language of minimalist architecture and that of domestic utilities (most recognizably, washing machines), and between rational public structures and hazier interior spaces, is presented with beauty and humor.

Another outstanding work that deals with the spaces we occupy — how we delineate them, and how their outlines reflect the physicality they imply — is a two-part painting by Kate Shepherd called Orange and Blue, Big Room View, Some Molding (2001). Two panels, each divided into two parts, and one slightly smaller than the other, hang together to reveal the white painted outline of a room. Shepherd uses the slim lines and monochromatic colors of minimalism, and she creates a wonderful dialogue with the earlier geometric abstraction on view, including Al Held’s Jupiter V (1974) — a terrific black-and-white spacy ancestor to Shepherd’s work — and Robert Mangold’s minimal Plane/Figure Series C (Double Panel) (1993). Held’s work also acts as a kind of grandfather to the spatial turbulence of Torben Giehler’s Untitled (1999). Giehler, a recent graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, makes paintings that seem to cross Mondriaan with a deep-space video game, to charming effect. For me, the geometric abstractions of Giehler and Held outshine Frank Stella’s hulking construction Pachanak (1979), which is the MFA’s first major piece by this once-interesting artist.

More fun with abstraction: Bridget Riley’s Song of the Orpheus 5 (1978) is made up of painted strips of pastel colors that have the effect of rolling and undulating and inducing a bit of seasickness. A great example of the work that grew out of the psychedelic 1960s, it also relates to environmental art and other art that works with physical properties like light and sound.

A weak element, for me, is the wall of painterly portraits, including small paintings by big painters Lucian Freud and Alex Katz. More compelling are three powerful Tracey Moffatt prints called Scarred for Life (1994) — looking as if they’d been taken from the old pages of Life magazine, they deal with cruelty and the early formation of self-image, with a sharp psychological point — and a four-part photographic work about origins and identity by María Magdalena Campos-Pons called Nesting IV (2000).

Another acquisition that steps outside painting and sculpture is Christian Boltanski’s Lumières (blue square — Sylvie) (2000), a grid of blue light bulbs and their black cords surrounding and partially obscuring a framed black-and-white photograph of an anonymous girl. As in Bolande’s work, the use of light and the sculptural quality creates an otherworldly aura, though Boltanski seems to keep you at a distance, whereas Bolande seems to draw you in.

But ultimately it is the light in the Nauman video that is the most irresistible, even though the artist himself seems ambivalent about capturing your attention. For all that video has become so pervasive as to be practically invisible to us in our daily lives, it is still an amazing thing in a museum. As I stand in the Foster Gallery, I see young people tentatively touching the wall that Nauman’s film is projected onto, as if checking its weird physical non-presence for presence. The new new works are inviting even when they are mysterious, and the 2002 " Building a Collection " indicates the possibility of an ever-more-interesting contemporary collection at the MFA.