Museums were invented in the 1700s to house the stuff that rich people collected over the course of their conquests and adventures, and in pursuit of their personal interests. The collections included cultural artifacts, objects from the natural world and, of course, art. Their cumulative value is derived from the rarity and specific qualities of its artifacts. These "specific qualities," which most of us still think have to do with whether the work is pretty or not, are actually based on long-running debates that only make sense to those with graduate degrees. Though modern art museums have long since abandoned the practice of restricting access to the peers of the collectors themselves, one of the challenges they face is how to make increasingly conceptual work relevant to the general public.

At its most conservative, an art museum is like a secular temple that protects the symbols that justify a society's very existence. In a more radical role, an art museum is a site of dialogue and confrontation between artistic perception and the society itself. Honolulu's Contemporary Museum, relatively fresh at 20 years old, falls squarely into the latter category. With "19 Going On 20," on view through Aug. 12, the museum displays more than 70 recent acquisitions with the theme being the history of the museum itself. Being a "contemporary" museum, it is not concerned with collecting oil paintings by "masters" or armless marble statues from Europe, those "classical" forms that most of us are raised to recognize as art.

"19 Going On 20" is full of surprises that document the long struggle that artists have pursued in an attempt to escape the bindings of classicism. Fortunately the exemplary quality of the works doesn't require you to have an art history degree to grasp their value. Non-specialists will be able to appreciate the radical idea behind Sam Francis' "edge paintings," which feature abstract, aquatic transparencies of color at the peripheries of the canvas. Conceptually, making the frame into the painting sounds like an easy trick, a kind of "I could have thought of that" moment. But you didn't; and there you are, seriously contemplating mostly emptiness. There are many such moments in the show, hiding in a different forms, totally accessible yet obviously coming from some place uncharted. It is the show's immediate "graspability" that engages our present and invites the viewer to consider their relevance.

While marquee names such as Francis, Jennifer Bartlett, Joseph Cornell, Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg are in the show, its true strength comes from the museum's commitment to presenting important works by emerging and lesser-known artists as well.

Ten years later Copley's hives take on a new urgency as the bees are dying and we are threatened by environmental catastrophe.

Vietnamese-American artist Tam Van Tran pushes us further into the complexity of the present with "Vegetarian Summer," a vast painting executed in essence of plantlife: chlorophyl and spirulina. Broad arcing like air traffic trajectories cross circles, drips, patches of green. It is a landscape of foliage that alternates between being a bird's-eye view of a rain forest and a first-person perspective beneath the jungle canopy.

We can leap into the trees and see how two artists tackle wood in radically different ways. Michelle Holzapfel's "Black and White Bowl," which is actually more of a carved net or basket, turns a solid chunk of tree into a sculpture of strips and spirals, scorched to provide texture and contrast. Again, the contemporary is expressed as an engagement with a highly formal play between presence and absence, and what happens between those cycles. This is where Scott Macleod's work dialogues with Holzapfel's. His "Target B+W, 1" is an unwound dart board — who knew they're made of one long strip of paper? His act of unravelling moves toward emptiness, and when he rerolls it into a mandala, the new form is a revelation, and appropriate in an age that demands recycling.

Doublings and echoes like this are everywhere in the show, and part of the fun is finding them. Such leaps are even made between two- and three-dimensional works. This is evidence not so much of a preconceived plan on the part of the museum, as future market value and the mood of donors always play a part in selecting work. "19 Going on 20" demonstrates a keen awareness that isn't seeking to enshrine the past and present us with monumental works that should be worshipped. Even the three "nudes" in the show are radical departures from traditional odalisques. Instead, the museum's curators appear to have been busy thinking about the future. Not just in terms of emerging artists and their dialogues with previous generations, but more importantly in terms of the dialogue that the people of Honolulu are expected to have with contemporary art from the world over.