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Remember when a museum was a loved and fearsome place? Sherrie Levine surely felt it as one, and she is still getting over her love and her fear. In her museum retrospective, at the Whitney through January 29, she wants others to get over it as well.

She is smart enough to know that it will take some doing. And she hardly minds if it means that others will not exactly love or fear her art. Still, is outsmarting her audience enough? For better or worse, Levine makes protest cool and elegant. It is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. (I include a review of “Crazy Lady,” some months ago at Schroeder Romero & Shredder, that first appeared in this space in an earlier form, for some feminist madness along with the mayhem.)

Levine might have heard that story on coming east with her MFA from Wisconsin, and it is the story she tells to this day. It helps explain why “MAYHEM” both is and is not a retrospective—and is and is not mayhem. It opens with a wall of reproductions or, as she helped redefine them, rephotography. She exhibited her photographs of Depression-era photographs as her own, and the complete set after Walker Evans from 1981 is still her, well, signature work. Beyond it, she displays a full career, but hardly in chronological order. In fact, it looks like nothing so much as a high-end showroom.

It is the showroom of her imagination, where art, money, and death are always in the air. It has ample room for her latest work—twelve crystal skulls, each in its own display case—and one may not walk among them. They leave no doubt how one is to see two abstract heads from 1993 and 1994, each on a baby-grand piano. They leave no doubt, too, how one must see half a dozen more abstract casts from 1991. One can see them in False God of 2008, a golden calf reduced to a cast bronze skeleton. One can see them in the hush surrounding four mahogany pool tables from 1990, identical down to the positions of their three billiard balls.

Levine is ever the skeptic with no room for doubts. The skepticism turns first and foremost on men, starting with Evans. The more cryptic fragments in their “vitrines” look like body armor, and Levine calls them Bachelors. She adds subtitles in French after suitably masculine occupations, from an undertaker’s assistant to the police as “guardians of the peace.” Gilded urinals from 1991, too, are wrenched from a man’s world—or at least from a room that women cannot enter. Figures after Krazy Kat slink off into that world in shame.

Of course, she has cast her cold eye on art along the men who made it. Obviously the urinal preserves Duchamp’s Fountain. Less obviously, Bachelors copies the Cubist architecture of his Nude Descending a Staircase. Each postcard crotch appropriates Gustave Courbet, each absinthe drinker Edgar Degas. The pool tables play off Man Ray, from a painting in the Whitney’s “Real/Surreal” right downstairs, and the black pianos mimic a collector’s display of Constantin Brancusi. And if you did not know all that, go immediately to the rear of the class.

Levine does not easily run out of lessons, and the 1980s were full of them—all, like my opening, at least partly a fiction. She came up with the “Pictures” generation, but without the heat of Barbara Kruger, the swagger of Richard Prince, or the humor of either one. Levine never really tolerated mayhem anyway. She was always too smart for her own good, and she is smart enough to know it, too. She knows that, on a Web page like this one, her Walker Evans is indiscernible from the original. Some days I have had enough of the art scene and the mayhem myself, but this once I would just as soon learn my lesson on my own.