Populating the large wall of the entrance to “Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is Peter Kogler’s “Untitled” (1992), a kinetic swarm of giant black ants marching in a labyrinthine circuit-board formation. As much interior design as a work of art, this fun, digitally printed modular wallpaper not only upends the comfortable relationship between insect and human, but lets the viewer know unequivocally that this show is not a survey of traditional modes of printmaking. The focus here is the work of artists intent on radically subverting mediums and distorting genres in order to rethink the entire function of printmaking and editions.

There is a massive, exhausting amount of visual information — more than 350 prints, artist’s books, posters, multiples, wallpapers, and pieces of ephemera. It’s all arranged according to the loose thematic divisions of “mass mediums,” “language,” “confrontations,” “Expressionist impulse,” and “recent projects.” Another section, British Focus, is essentially a mini-exhibition within “Eye on Europe” showcasing the proliferation of interest in printed matter by British artists since the 1990s. Most of the work on view comes from MoMA’s extensive permanent collection — including new acquisitions made during the process of researching and mounting the exhibition — and finds conceptual roots in Duchamp, Dada, early avant-garde publications such as Pan, Broom, and Verve, as well as the tradition of the Parisian livres d’artiste.

By mixing a roster of the usual suspects with artists virtually unknown in America, co-curators Deborah Wye and Wendy Weitman show how Europe’s second postwar generation of avant-garde artists — desiring to rebuild a more open, decentralized culture — looked to replace long-standing hierarchies of painting and sculpture with the democratic mobility inherent in printed matter. These artists wanted to make works that were more accessible, more communicative to a larger audience, and more connected to what was happening out in society instead of inside the studio. They were excited by the ability of these new forms to bypass the gallery system, allowing them to take art straight to the people.

As “Eye on Europe” tells it, the decades after the 1960s found printmaking, bookmaking, editions, and printed ephemera of all types acquiring broader ranges of meaning, mainly because artists began to question the context in which these forms were presented and viewed. This investigation resulted in a slew of engaging individual pieces, such as Daniel Burren’s double-sided poster/exhibition announcements, “Untitled” (1969–1972); Eduardo Paolozzi’s jarringly bright silkscreen book, “Moonstrips Empire News” (1967); and Marcel Broodthaers’s ghostly, reductive “Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (1969). But what clearly emerges is the belief that the very mode in which an idea is communicated to the public ultimately determines the way the public interprets that idea. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The medium is the message.” This singular idea distinguishes the work by artists in “Eye on Europe” from the work made by other contemporaneous European printmakers like Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose innovative work nonetheless resided within more traditional parameters of printmaking.

In the 1980s, German artists Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Keifer, and Arnulf Rainer revisited traditional printmaking techniques, like wood and linoleum cuts. Though heralded as romantic neo-expressionists, these artists were primarily interested in using the direct, immediate, violent markmaking capabilities produced by gouging and cutting to create analogues for the psychology of a nation coming to terms with its nefarious past. The handmade, rough-and-tumble look of their art could more appropriately address ideas of guilt, anxiety and existential crisis than could a mass-produced, Pop-inspired silkscreen. Mr. Rainer’s “Blaues Nest (Blue Nest)” (1997), made entirely from obsessive hatch marks scratched into a copperplate, is a mania of tension-filled lines intent on simultaneously erasing and building form — and history — until what remains is a deep, serene void of blue.

Likewise, the anonymous French poster squad Atelier Populaire subverted the use of silkscreen, using the medium to quickly and easily mass-produce protest posters. Plastering the streets of Paris during the May 1968 riots, posters like “CRS” (1968) and “La Lutte continue (The Fight Continues)” (1968) were brash, to-the-point graphic propaganda perfectly transmitting messages of outrage. They are pure conduits of information rather than complete aesthetic statements.

Richard Long’s reinterpretation of the artist’s book, “A Walk Past Standing Stones” (1980) beautifully transforms an ephemeral moment into a physical object.This small, accordion-fold booklet — made in an edition of 500–700 — contains nine black-and-white photographs of stones jutting vertically out of the ground. Unfolded, the stones appear to pirouette across the pages. Because it documents Mr. Long’s solitary, unseen act of walking past stones, this booklet assumes the role of the artwork itself, while the event documented becomes secondary, even irrelevant.

Though recent developments involving digitally formatted editions are absent, “Eye on Europe” does include some fresh, contemporary interpretations of wallpaper designs by Paul Noble, Sarah Lucas, Simon Patterson, Damien Hirst, and Claude Closky. The idea of fine artists turning to wallpaper is not new –– throughout the early part of the 20th century, Raul Dufy designed wallpaper patterns for Bianchini-Ferrier. These wallpaper installations –– all with highly pitched graphic snap and visual wit –– combine the various lessons of modularity, mass-production, and subversion of medium learned from the pioneering work of artists since the 1960s with a decorative arts tradition. This mix of art and design –– mirrored in the ascendancy of fashion as art –– is what makes these wallpaper designs really exciting. Here, art no longer exists outside our day-to-day lives, because the art is the wall, and the wall is inescapable. It is a beautiful, streamlined expression of the utopian dream of taking art directly to the people.

Until January 1 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9431).