The Forever Now, Moma’s long-anticipated new exhibition of contemporary painting, is a show worth seeing – which is not the same as saying it’s good. It takes (largely) abstract painting, the medium most beloved of the oligarchical art collectors of our time, and turns a blind eye to its market status. It makes grand, not entirely convincing claims about painting’s potential, then illustrates them with art that feels safe or unambitious. It takes familiar names from the last decade of painting and picks winners and losers, though without really establishing the rules of the game. It waves big, expensive flags in front of the angry bulls of the art world, and waits to be gored.

Still, whatever anyone says about the paintings in The Forever Now – the New York Museum of Modern Art (Moma)’s first contemporary painting survey in an astonishing 30 years, and open to the public on Sunday – it is definitely worth fighting about. You might leave depressed, but at least you’ll have something to say.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laura Owens’s Untitled (2013). Photograph: Jonathan Muzikar/Moma

Laura Hoptman, the veteran curator who organized it, has undertaken the artistic equivalent of a suicide mission. When new possibilities for painting appear stalled, and when trashy pump-and-dump collectors fawn over so-called zombie abstraction (safe, reductive pictures that look good in an art fair booth), she has gone all in. Rather than present a full survey of contemporary painting, she’s elected a small group – 17 artists, mostly Americans – who, she claims, reflect a new “atemporal” practice of painting. For the first time, Hoptman claims in her audacious catalogue essay, culture no longer “define[s] the time in which we live”, but rather reflects “a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the internet, all eras seem to exist at once.”

No more avant garde, she says. No more linear history. For that matter, no more Moma: after the stately progression from one movement to another in the museum’s 20th century galleries, nothing in particular will follow. Contemporary painting, instead, looks in Hoptman’s vision a little like an Amy Winehouse record: not really new, not really retro, just afloat between past and present, or else wrenched out of time completely.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Forever Now: no more avant garde. Photograph: John Wronn/Moma

So Nicole Eisenman, who’s the closest this show has to a figurative painter, mashes together west African masks, German expressionist brushwork, and early American regionalist motifs in large paintings of disembodied heads. Laura Owens, whose work looks better than ever, mimics digital editing software or computer drawing tools, then combines those with Matisse-like decorative passages and silkscreened texts. And even the junkier, lazier abstract painters here, such as the thought-murdering 28-year-old Oscar Murillo, strive not for novelty but overlapping, uncertain reconstitutions of atemporal styles and gestures.

The elder stateswoman of The Forever Now is Amy Sillman, 59, whose jaunty, at times humorous abstract paintings arise from layer after layer of forceful mark-making, sometimes in an abstract expressionist vein. (And, as a sidebar: the women in The Forever Now pummel the men. Not one of the eight male artists here comes anywhere close to the intricacy or complexity of Sillman, Owens, Eisenman, and others. It’s almost embarrassing.) Sillman, like all the best painters here, privileges imprecise, off-kilter compositions, but not in imitation of any one style. They are pick-and-mix paintings, taking a little from this tradition and a little from that one, a little self-expression here, a little meaningless gesture there, with no particular place to go.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy Sillman’s Still Life 2 (2014). Photograph: John Berens/Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York

Hoptman isn’t saying that these paintings are anachronistic, or derivative, or parodies. Those words imply a conscious effort to showcase some earlier style or element, and then to call it into question. “Atemporal”, by contrast, means reckoning with these paintings as paintings, rather than as commentary or critique. The artists here aren’t nostalgic. They know their history but don’t feel imprisoned by it. They know it so well, in fact, that they don’t even bother to strive for novelty, which looks more and more like a fraud or a nonstarter. Kerstin Brätsch, the best of the younger artists in this show, has said that any abstract gesture she could make would be “not empty anymore but loaded with historical reference”. Instead she uses well-known techniques, from wavy colored lines to Richteresque blurs, with no built-in significance and for whatever purposes she needs: a painting, a poster, a clothing design.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kerstin Brätsch’s Blocked Radiant D (for Ioana) (2011). Photograph: Filippo Armellin/Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Hoptman, rather recklessly, claims that this atemporality is a “wholly unique phenomenon in western culture”. Yet for most of European art history, art expressed to viewers nothing about its time at all. Art was, by and large, a religious enterprise, and therefore – as the art historian Hans Belting has shown – occupied a divine, atemporal realm removed from human cycles of life and history. Painters of the Renaissance thought of their art as approaching eternal greatness, not speaking for their age. Artworks were often repainted, or sometimes substituted wholesale centuries later. Time didn’t march forward, but folded in on itself. Maybe we are now back in such a condition, with Winehouse’s Rehab playing on repeat while we scribble the same old scribbles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kerstin Brätsch’s paintings, which are displayed propped against the wall rather than hung. Photograph: John Wronn/Moma

From other angles, though, forever-now painting looks like a front. In a religious age atemporal art might have removed itself from history to reach the divine. In a secular one, “atemporal” can feel like a synonym for “dead”. You can wonder about that with a whole lot of painting in this show, starting with those of Rashid Johnson, an otherwise talented artist showing some of the worst works of his career: large blocks of black soap and wax, aimlessly and exhaustingly scored with squiggles. The self-important paintings of Joe Bradley, consisting of little more than a stick figure or a Superman S symbol on untreated canvas, can be aggrandized as much as you want with psychological jaw-jaw, but they don’t come close to earning wall space here.

And what on earth is Julie Mehretu doing in this show? The Ethiopian-born American is one of the best painters of her generation, yet her timely art is obsessed with contemporary capital flows and geographic disorientation. They’re not forever-now, but grandly historical and resolutely present-tense. I was delighted to see her new work here, but their inclusion makes you wonder how seriously this show takes its own positions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julie Mehretu’s Heavier Than Air (Written Form) (2014). Photograph: Tom Powel/Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, and carlier | gebauer, Berlin

One wants to give Hoptman the benefit of the doubt, but it begins to look as if the forever-now framework – which, with different names like “postproduction” or “heterochronia,” has been doing the rounds of the art world since at least the late 1990s – lies somewhere between an insight and a ruse. It certainly does plug in rather perfectly to the insane contemporary art market, which now has a fancy buzzword to gin up even the most cliched, regurgitative paintings by the most cynical of artists. (It’s not dull, it’s atemporal!)

Above all, it imputes hope and optimism to a situation that might deserve a more honest and dour reckoning. Hoptman sees atemporal painting as “a hopeful, invigorating quest”, and conceives of the end of avant-gardism as a chance to explore infinite possibilities. Might it not more decently be conceived as a desperate flailing, an irresistible but impossible effort to find a way out of a situation where art’s only value is economic? Instead of recoding a lack of progress in art as the new progress, maybe we should take a hard cold look at where we are, accept the fact that we’re stuck, and ask how we got here and why. Being stuck is no vice. If art seems not to have a very bright future, at least that means it’s of our time.