When Beck was a child, his mother would take him and his brother to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and ask them to choose a favorite and a least favorite piece. “I remember thinking, That’s a lot of pressure,” he said last month, in the atrium of the museum’s Ahmanson Building, a few weeks before the release of his new album, “Hyperspace.” He often picked Millard Sheets’s “Angel’s Flight,” an American oil painting from 1931, as his favorite. It shows two dark-haired women on a small balcony overlooking Bunker Hill, in downtown L.A. “Bunker Hill is the neighborhood in all the old noir films,” Beck said. “It was very picturesque, kind of seedy, post-Victorian. Then the nineteen-sixties came, and the city dynamited it—they just blew the whole hill up.”

Much of the museum’s campus—a cluster of buildings interspersed with open-air courtyards—will be demolished early next year, to make way for a contiguous structure. Beck, who is forty-nine, was feeling vaguely nostalgic about the place. He wanted to take a few photographs of the interior (the mid-century brass clock by the elevators, the pebbled concrete floors) before it disappeared. He paused before a stretch of worn oak panelling. “Lately, I’ve been taking a lot of photos of things like this,” he said. “Saying goodbye to stuff from the past. Making way for the new.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me a black-and-white photo, taken in one of the museum’s courtyards, of his brother, Channing, at the age of five or six, grinning beatifically at the camera, his head slightly cocked. “Look at that little pose he’s doing!” Beck said. He swiped to a photo of himself, at age seven or eight, wearing a homemade Superman cape, with a plastic six-shooter slung low around his waist. He held an Oscar the Grouch puppet. “This pretty much sums it up,” he said, laughing. “Superman sheriff with a Muppet.”

Since 1993, when he released his first album, “Golden Feelings,” on cassette, Beck’s music has varied so deeply in style and tone that it is difficult to tether him to anything other than Los Angeles, where he has lived for nearly all of his life. He has made fourteen albums and won seven Grammys, including one for Album of the Year, in 2014, for “Morning Phase,” a collection of elegant, down-tempo folk songs. It is tempting to divide his music into a handful of categories—mournful folk, bedraggled hip-hop, postmodern sound collage, sexy electro-pop—but the majority of his records fall somewhere in between: Superman sheriff with a Muppet. He can narrate a seduction at a J. C. Penney in a slinking, Prince-like falsetto, as on “Debra,” from 1999’s “Midnite Vultures” (“I pick you up late at night after work / I said, lady, step inside my Hyundai / I’m gonna take you up to Glendale / Gonna take you for a real good meal”), or sing a raw and quietly devastating chorus, as on “Guess I’m Doing Fine,” from 2002’s “Sea Change” (“It’s only lies that I’m living / It’s only tears that I’m crying / It’s only you that I’m losing / Guess I’m doing fine”). Neither mode feels more authentic, though his work does sometimes require listeners to interrogate their own ideas about what they believe to be more profound: ecstasy or ruin.

At LACMA, we visited “Sound Stories,” an exhibition by the artist and composer Christian Marclay, who used the millions of videos publicly shared on Snapchat to build a series of audiovisual installations. Beck was familiar with Marclay’s work. “He’s incredible,” he said. “I remember seeing him on TV. He had done this thing where he had chopped up vinyl rec­ords and glued them all together.” Both Beck and Marclay have relied heavily on the recontextualization of samples, and tend to question received norms about how music should be made and distributed. In 1985, Marclay released “Record Without a Cover,” a single-­track experimental album that was sold without packaging—any scratches or dents that the record accumulated became part of its sound. The piece suggested that the way most of us had come to consume music, by listening to a fixed recording, was unnec­essarily limiting. In 2012, Beck released “Song Reader,” a boxed set that included twenty pieces of sheet music and more than forty illustrations. “Song Reader” uncoupled the idea of music from the idea of recordings—songs could be social, they could be pliable, they could be temporary.

“The Organ,” one of Marclay’s installations, featured a small, spotlit synthesizer in a dark room. Each key cued a different sound and projected a series of vertical images on a screen. Beck patiently tried to teach me how to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” so that we might duet. “You’re getting it,” he said, though I was certainly not getting it. We moved on to “Talk to Me/Sing to Me,” a room with forty-two iPhones suspended from the ceiling. Each phone invited visitors to talk or sing and, in response, receive a blast of video, culled from Snapchat, that in some way mirrored the sound and pose they’d just made. Beck launched into a low, echoing version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” “I just got a guy with his shirt off, talking in Portuguese,” he said.

It is easy to become cynical about the cacophony of modern living, particularly when you are being bathed in human skronk—all the showboating and gasbaggery of social media. Yet Marclay’s work is charming in its playfulness and humor. Beck’s music operates in a similar way. It forces a person to consider that, sometimes, two things are true at the same time. The world is grim and hilarious; the future is bright and unthinkable; you are sad, but you are dancing; you are home, but it is not the same.

Critics tend to take Beck’s darker, singer-songwriter records more seriously, but he has found that capturing true joy is often more difficult. “Wow,” a song from his thirteenth album, “Colors,” is built around a howling synthesizer melody that recalls the Italian composer Ennio Morricone. “Wow!” Beck sings, dragging out the word. “It’s, like, right now.” The production is opulent; the sentiment is dopey. During the first chorus, Beck utters the phrase “Oh, wow!” He sounds so genuinely dazzled that I regularly find myself thinking of this when I need to be reminded of pleasure. “It’s like how people talk about comedy being harder to pull off than drama,” he told me. “How do you make something levitate?”

Beck has spent twenty-six years making music that is complex in form but scrappy in spirit. His work is as likely to be featured in the credits of “The Lego Movie 2” (“Super Cool,” a collaboration with the pop star Robyn and the comedy trio the Lonely Island) as it is to appear on an album of songs inspired by the Alfonso Cuarón film “Roma” (“Tarantula,” an echoing and apprehensive electro-dirge). Though his earliest albums are often described as dilapidated assemblages, he has precise ideas about craft and structure. At times, he has leaned more deeply into funk and R. & B., refining his falsetto and doing the splits onstage. “I want to defy / The logic of all sex laws,” he sang on the single “Sexx Laws.” (The line was inspired by a verse in “Don’t U Know,” an Ol’ Dirty Bastard song.) Like the R. & B. singer Ginuwine, Beck has an uncanny knack for writing lyrics that totter between farcical and titillating. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t exist,” he sang on “Nicotine & Gravy.”

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Shopping Cartoon by Roz Chast

There were hints of Beck’s scope and ambition on “Mellow Gold,” his first album for a major label, released in 1994. The single “Loser,” which reached No. 10 on the Billboard charts, sounded like a refracted, postmodern version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Beck had the same scavenging instinct as Dylan, but he was mining from several more decades; besides blues, country, gospel, and folk, he incorporated elements of hip-hop, disco, punk, and electronic music. It’s odd to think that Beck’s first few albums preceded the rise of file sharing, because they so adroitly reflect the thrill and terror of having everything all at once. He is still the musical figure who best anticipated and reflects the reigning aesthetic of our time: abundance.