Beuys was the biggest name to come out of the group (save for Yoko Ono, but that has more to do with a certain ’60s rock band), so Harvard lists his name first in the show’s subtitle. He labeled his work Fluxist for several years, long after Maciunas dismissed his stuff because, as the exhibition makes clear, his ego-driven, allegorical æsthetics were antithetical to Fluxus ideas. Beuys hoped to heal the wounds of his nation’s catastrophic Nazi past — and his own (he was a World War II Luftwaffe radio man) — by creating “social sculpture” to provoke fresh thinking and inspire others to apply their creativity toward a “direct democracy” that would cure the world’s ills. Unfortunately, the result was lots of ritualistic, animal-abusing mumbo-jumbo — like the time he played shaman in a cage with a live coyote.

The Busch-Reisinger show focuses on Beuys’s multiples. Intuition (1968) is an empty box intended to collect the user’s thoughts. The Silence (1973) is a stack of film reels from Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 The Silence galvanized in pretty silver so that they can never be projected. Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee (1969) is a reel of audio tape, encased in an insulating block of felt, of Beuys repeating “Yes” and “No” for more than an hour. (The piece is seen not heard.) Object To Smear and Turn (1972) is a can of orange glop and a screwdriver. For Footwashing (1977) is an enameled metal bowl, a relic from a performance in which Beuys washed audience members’ feet, just as Jesus, according to the Gospels, washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper.

Fluxus artworks are hopeful, generous, subversive jokes; Beuys’s work is pretentious Sturm und Drang. Fluxus invites gleeful anything-goes participation; Beuys insists that you follow his lead. Fluxus objects are games; Beuys’s works are fetishes and “holy” relics authenticated by his official stamp and signature. In the end Beuys’s art is simply bullshit designed to promote the cult of Beuys; it’s epitomized here by his 1972 poster The Revolution Is Us, which, of course, shows just him.

But Beuys rose to fame in the 1960s and ’70s while Fluxus remained little known. It’s the difference between Beuys’s grandiosity and Fluxus’s winks and nudges. Only in the past decade or so has Fluxus begun to sneak into modern art-survey textbooks, its members acknowledged as pioneers of conceptual and performance art. Fluxus’s growing artistic influence is apparent in the work of such local collectives as the Institute for Infinitely Small Things and Harvey Loves Harvey. It’s about time.

‘Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus’ | Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 32 Quincy St, Cambridge | Through June 10