What can art do for you? Brighten your wall. Return your investment. Snag you a pass to a V.I.P. lounge. That’s about it in the art fair age. And if those are your criteria of aesthetic value, I can’t think what you’d make of “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a survey of scrappy, ephemeral work so high on politics, drugs and crazy love as to seem to be from some other planet, which it is: Planet 1960s/’70s, as occupied by one sometimes-transplanted Brazilian artist for 42 brief years.

Hélio Oiticica (pronounced Oy-ti-SEEK-a) was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937 into a family of scholarly leftists. His grandfather, a philologist, published an anarchist newspaper; his father was a photographer and a scientist focused on butterflies. Oiticica inherited their broadband curiosity. He was a live-wire gay kid: a talker, a reader, a looker, a dancer. He entered art school at 16 and quickly became the baby member of the Neo-Concretists, one of Brazil’s leading avant-garde groups.

His art, like theirs, was abstract: A 1955 Oiticica painting — a bright checkerboard of mango-yellow and red — opens the show. But the thinking behind their work and his was, in its way, practical. Color and form, purposefully orchestrated, could change the way people feel, think and behave, and thus change the world. Oiticica later disavowed his early pictures as standard, derivative modernism, and he wasn’t wrong. But he held on to their originating idea: Art is potent to the degree it merges with life.