Museum of Modern Art, Queens
45-20 33rd Street
Long Island City, Queens
Through Monday

The sidewalks of New York are never too crowded for my taste. I like being caught up in crowds of tourists or shoppers, hearing languages from German and Hindi to New Jerseyese. A traveler's enthusiasm can refresh a spirit of place. I end up wanting to share my own be-sure-to-see list of esoteric attractions.

Something like this interchange is the basis for Lee Mingwei's project ''The Tourist.'' Mr. Lee, who was born in Taiwan and lives in the United States, is a conceptual performance artist whose medium is hospitality. He cooks for strangers, engages them in conversation, invites them to gallery sleep-overs, making them collaborators in a private, personal art.

For his project at the Modern, he issued an open call for New Yorkers to give him tours of favorite parts of their multiethnic city. The responses took him on insider rambles to Coney Island, the Apollo Theater in Harlem and various parts of the Bronx, with Mr. Lee and his guides taking pictures and recording their conversation. The installation is made up of mementos of the trips: pictures, audiotapes and objects from Saddam Hussein playing cards, to a Black Panther Film Festival brochure, to a fold-up umbrella.

If you are after highly wrought visual matter, you won't find it here. You will find cosmopolitan ideas, delineated in an excellent brochure by Roxana Marcoci, an assistant curator at the Modern. As a social conceptualist -- or conceptual socialist -- Mr. Lee has many precursors, from Daniel Spoerri to Rirkrit Tiravanija. To their work he adds one-on-one intimacy, which is, after all, an ideal condition for an art experience. May he have many successors.