Ms. Conceptual

It’s all sassier and smarter than I’m making it sound. It’s also brilliantly presented: Full marks to the exhibition designers at the DeCordova. But the sense of recognition — “Ah, yes, so this is what a conceptual artist does! I remember now!’’ — is depressing, the overall effect like déjà vu.

Welty’s themes are more than legitimate. They’re profound; they speak to all of us. She addresses our culture of distraction and disposability; the anxieties inherent in mindless accumulation; commodification, reification, white noise, and, in the midst of all this, the feeble, funny, and poignant reckonings of the self.

But there’s something about the way she tackles these themes that’s toothless. You sense in her work a combination of idle curiosity, ironic relish, and crafty can-do, but no real punch.

Take an installation like “Deaccession Project,’’ the vast wall of more than 2,000 inkjet prints copied from photographs Welty keeps in scrapbooks. The photographs show items that Welty has discarded — one per day, systematically, since Oct. 5, 2005 — with a brief note at the bottom of each explaining the decision, and the item’s intended destination (“Trash,’’ for instance; or “Goodwill’’).

“Deaccessioning’’ is the museum term for the removal of objects from a permanent collection, so the title might trigger the kinds of questions raised elsewhere in Welty’s work: What separates an everyday object from an art object? Are our homes like museums? What do we hoard; what do we no longer have uses for; why?

For each day of the exhibition Welty plans to add one more photograph of a discarded item to the display. The end result, we’re informed, will be 78 feet long.