The curators position the works, all made in the last 10 years, as descendants of “conceptual and post-conceptual” practices, which often used text to turn otherwise obscure objects into commentaries or polemics on a variety of issues. At the Hammer, I was struck by the degree to which so much post-post-conceptual art has become a reductio ad absurdum of conceptualism’s original impulse, with contemporary artists one-upping each other in how much they can negate any attempt at communication with the viewer and pass on the inconvenient responsibility of generating some coherent meaning to the curators.

Conceptualism, as practiced in the post-war period, set before itself the task of making the invisible visible, of demystifying art as a process and a product of social relations. One might think of the direct connection of art to economics and politics, as explored by Hans Haacke; the desire to make their own artistic process transparent, as explored by John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha; or how discourse inevitably shapes our perception of visual art, as explored by Joseph Kossuth or Lawrence Weiner, to give just a handful of canonical examples. Today, the goal seems to be to adopt conceptualism’s formal language (a deeply ironic turn of events) in order to turn flotsam picked from a vast sea of material culture into vague gesturing at cultural theory or obscure references to “research.” Artists will allude to earlier radical gestures to legitimize this enterprise. In his “printed image” (n.d.), Darren Bader prints as his own work one of Louise Lawler’s graphic “tracings” of her earlier photographs. Haris Epaminonda’s framed empty page, “Untitled #0/4 p/g (V)” (2012), evokes Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 “Erased de Kooning Drawing.” The problem here is not that the concerns the artists raise aren’t new — reflections on the crisis of originality should hardly be expected to be original. But if the work seeks to expose the language games that make “art” possible, it shouldbe articulate in its own right.

A generous interpretation might say that this piece urges us to pay attention to the important stories that surround us but often remain invisible in daily life. Yet the compelling story the piece attempts to narrate remains strangely separate from the mute object that in the white cube looks like a misplaced geological curiosity.

Whatever the artists’ intentions, the curators’ approach to the show accentuates, rather than mitigates, such muteness through dry and minimally informative texts, a misguided commission of a short story in lieu of an audio guide, and a lack of any effort to reconstruct the original context of the works’ creation and presentation.

The exhibition, we are told, “questions whether objects can reliably narrate their own stories and histories.” The answer to this question has long been, for art historians, a resounding no — objects are entangled in vast networks of stories and histories that no single object can narrate reliably or exhaustively. In this day and age, an effort to demystify the “aura” of the autonomous art object is an exercise in battering down an open door. That said, there is plenty of contemporary art that eloquently conveys the stories and histories that led to its creation. But those works are not, by and large, found in Stories of Almost Everyone. Instead, the show raises an important question: Why do so many artists and curators no longer care about actually engaging audiences with stories they only nominally acknowledge?

Stories of Almost Everyone continues at the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles) through May 6.