Art presented in a traditional gallery is supposed to be superior to art found anywhere else. Why? Because the work is selected by people who specialize in recognizing quality and significance and presenting it to a pre-defined audience.

In this "classic model," the value and function of art is determined by a culture of collectors, scholars and aficionados. In the 21st century, art has become another frequency of the million-channel digital signal enveloping the planet.

At the speed of Wikipedia, eBay auctions and tabloid headlines we teleport, flicker and stumble between being zealots, experts, amateurs and idiots. The "classical model" of presenting and appreciating art has been left to lurch through abandoned malls of culture like a brain-starved zombie, animated only by "art discourse" — like this review. As consumption is standardized, art, like any other commodity, tries to hook one's attention span. Galleries know this. So do museums and schools.

In such a world, the "importance" of art presented outside a gallery is downplayed in favor of how well it fits a lifestyle. This is what the art in "Replay: Recycled Work by 7 Hawaii Artists" does without hesitation. But unlike artwork shown at Neiman Marcus, which represents luxury and wealth, and unlike the weak echoes of 1960s counter-culture that hangs on coffeehouse walls, "Replay" presents commodity art with a hint of satire that is driven by its easily misinterpreted title.

Though some of the work of these successful artists has been shown elsewhere, the show is really about repurposing bits and pieces of our environment: plastic and metal scraps, gadgets, tools, devices, baubles, toys and forgotten elements of connection, measurement and restraint. All set against a commercial backdrop that turns the everyday human practice of cooking into an elite pursuit. Are high-end showrooms the new classical galleries?

Curated by David Belkhe, the show's works descend along a stairwell and fan out like a military unit in rapid deployment. They position and camouflage themselves amid magnetic-induction cooking ranges and modular walnut-paneled refrigerator systems that slide out and unfold like Transformers. The artwork is accompanied by fake food designed to evoke a Sunday brunch in Makiki Heights: crepe batter, hot coffee, fruit, sushi and fresh-baked artisan bread crafted from plastic and resin.

Like the showroom itself, the work falls under the broad category of assemblage. Some is constructed with the precision of a mandala, as with Ira Ono's series of wall-mounted, thematically driven boxes. Among them, "Beginner's Luck" is a standout: a tin (lucky) star centers the eye, while a swirl of chance operations embodied by plastic dragon flies, bingo sheets, Scrabble tiles and dice radiate outward. Ono orders the chaotic distribution of found objects with two vertical strips of copper and crowns the piece with a golf trophy flanked by two wooden "darts" from some forgotten game, and animal totems.

Other assemblages are more organic. Mark Maresca's "Shimmer" looks like something that varying levels of surf might leave behind. But instead of depositing sand and shells, the industrialized oceans of the future will deposit geological layers of reflective plastic that fall from the dangling, flashing extremities of our lives. Beads, shards and nests of metallic wire coexist beautifully because Maresca has a knack for emulating nature's ability to sort and unify diversity.

Alan Leitner's abstract canvasses radically oppose the 1950s dream of a kitchen as sanitary and functional as a surgical theater. In pieces like "Infinite Duration," his milky, heavily layered and semi-luminescent surfaces are scratched, eroded, almost crumbling and evoke the opposite of the freshly-designed kitchen. This radical conflict grants Leitner's work an additional power that might not be tapped in a traditional gallery.

Lori Uyehara joins Leitner with her fabrications that combine auto parts, lacquered boards made of Christmas-tree wood chips, and small-scale painted vignettes of nature. Her works successfully marry environmental politics (how energy efficient are these luxury kitchens anyway?) to the same aesthetic appreciation for machinery that is applied to cabinet handles or faucet fixtures.

Actual references to food or cooking are almost exclusively reserved for Rebecca Horne's hilarious family portraits composed of kitchen implements. Her "Sarah Jane's Wedding Portrait (She married beneath her)" pairs a battered spatula and antique soup spoon mounted against a floral pattern. The metal spatula's black plastic handle is worse for wear, having been left on the edge of a hot pan more than once, and probably banged about at the bottom of a drawer. Horne doesn't need photographs to evoke personalities, and it is difficult to not feel a class-based sympathy for the spoon. Delicious irony: Someday these fine Wolf stoves will be junked and stripped for parts that will find their way into some artist's mixed-media expression.

In "Replay," the expensive, shiny, effortless and new is juxtaposed with improvisations of the reclaimed and the reworked. It's mass production versus the singular, and one is expected to engage both. If this dialogue is no accident, then this show may be a prototype approach for art to confront issues of class and consumerism while offering the means for artists to get their work seen and collected via non-traditional routes. The context is the catalyst.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in art, art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.