A rare consensus of critics has greeted the Museum of Modern Art’s show “Björk,” which is centered in a two-floor pavilion, in the museum’s atrium, packed with audio and visual exhibits tracking the Icelander’s career. Weighing in early, Ben Davis of ArtNet News predicted “an immense Eyjafjallajökull-sized ash-plume of critical bile to appear over midtown any second now.” And sure enough: tick tock, boom. New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz adjudged the show “a discombobulated mess,” and Jason Farago, in the Guardian, called it a “fiasco” and, not to waffle, a “disaster.” Roberta Smith, in the Times, zeroed in the “ludicrously infantilizing and tedious” audio narration, by the Icelandic poet Sjón, that accompanies a viewer’s pavilion tour with treacly sentiments about the progress in life of “a girl.” “Insure that you experience this journey as thoroughly as possible,” the unctuous voice urges at the start. What follows confirms the general rule that whenever anything artistic is described as a “journey,” you can be pretty certain of going nowhere.

And yet Björk is unscathed. All the critics (now including me) hasten to acknowledge her musical genius and personal charisma. No detour into lousy taste—even at times her own, as in her partnership, lately ended, with the mercilessly pretentious Matthew Barney—can dent her authenticity. Her music videos (an oasis at the show, in a screening room) typically bring out the best in collaborating directors, musicians, designers, costumers (notably the late Alexander McQueen), and technicians. But if she chances to bring out the worst in star-struck curators, so what? Björk is a restlessly experimental (and therefore fallible) tremendous creative force, not a tarnishable brand.

The same can’t be said for MOMA, which in recent years—with pandering shows of Tim Burton, Marina Abramović, and William Kentridge; Tilda Swinton asleep in a box; the “Rain Room;” and get ready for Yoko Ono, upcoming—has seemed bent on “reorganizing itself as something like a hipster lifestyle brand,” in the words of Davis, and incidentally conveyed “disdain for its core audience,” per Smith. That Björk is both so good and so widely esteemed makes this occasion the worst so far. Presuming to do her a favor, MOMA comes off ridiculous in the way of a wannabe groupie. Björk’s dignity endures. That of the museum disappears.

Are we critics being élitist here? And how! We want MOMA to behave itself as the combined Fort Knox and Vatican of modern art that it has been—and that, around the edges, it remains, with such recent offerings as a splendid show of Matisse cut-outs and a gamely argumentative survey of new painting. The trouble is a willful confusion of, yes, the self-selected élite of the museum’s proper constituency with that of commerce and celebrity, which have their own manners of discernment and are doing fine without imprimaturs from West Fifty-third Street. The monotonous spectacle of MOMA sinking or, in the case of Björk, rising to new levels of incompetence insults everybody’s intelligence.