BEIRUT: The Sursock Museum’s 31st annual Salon d’Automne opened a season late last weekend, in the depths of a dank and rain-drenched winter. The appeal of this year’s invitational exhibition lies primarily in its capacious embrace of photography, a medium that jury members have been historically slow to adopt.

From Joe Kesrouani’s prize-winning panorama of Beirut sprawled out below a spooky, melodramatic sky, to Yves Atalla’s gorgeously toned and disheveled “Sale Arbre,” Jessica Kalache’s mischievous glimpse of a manicured green lawn between piled up construction sites in Clemenceau, and Karen Kalou’s ruminative shot of a young woman hunched over a railing and staring out to sea, photography may represent only 20 percent of the exhibition, but it gives the show a strong spine and nice set of lungs.

Fresh air isn’t exactly a self-evident characteristic of the event. This year’s selection of 120 works by 98 artists is highly judicious compared to past editions, but the quality varies to such a staggering degree that it boggles the mind to imagine that nearly three times as many works by double the number of artists were cut from the show completely. One dearly hopes the rest were downright awful.

There is a certain charm, however, in the mad jumble of styles and generations. Some of the elder statesmen – and women – of Lebanese art are sharing wall space here with upstarts and unknowns, interspersed with Sunday painters and a few unfortunate retreads of Jackson Pollock (too obvious), Georges Seurat (too saccharine) and Salvador Dali (seriously?).

An otherwise intriguing, quasi-cubist installation of paintings and dismembered mannequins carries the none-too-subtle title “Genocide I [diptyque].” The propensity for slapping huge signatures onto the bottom corners of paintings and photographs deflates the potential of works that are solid on their own, including an impressive pair of photographs by Jamal Saidi of a lone skier and young men dodging sea spray on the Corniche. Wall tags convey authorship efficiently enough. It’s an exhibition, not a market stall for tourist trinkets.

So what harm would have come from naming the current exhibition the Salon d’Hiver instead? After all, the few works that acknowledge the advent of the Arab Spring – Mohammad Rawas’ “Downfall of the Regime,” Jamil Molaeb’s “Hommage à Alia el Mahdi” and Fayçal Sultan’s “Le Printemps Arabe” – do so with a shiver of bitterness, lamentation or regret.

Landing on the wrong side of the solstice, however, is nothing new for Salon d’Automne, which began in the 1960s, soon after Nicolas Sursock bequeathed his 19th century villa to the municipality of Beirut, on the condition that it be maintained as a museum.

Despite long stretches of inactivity during the civil war, the annual exhibition has become, by sheer force of organizational will, one of the single most consistent events in the history of Lebanese modern art. It has also proven stubbornly resistant to change, as the centerpiece social gathering for a museum, which, to this day, has neither a website nor an email address, to say nothing of maximizing its social media potential.

The Sursock Salon is still firmly rooted in a long-defunct model of exhibition-making that suited French academic painting 150 years ago. Every year, local artists are expected to trot their works over to the museum, where a jury reviews and selects the pieces for the ultimate exhibition. No proposals, no curatorial conceits, no plucked out themes or threads, and no chance of including projects whose ambitions lie somewhere further afield of convention forms.

This makes it fiendishly difficult to distinguish the latest Salon d’Automne from the last, or to use the exhibition as a reliable indicator of experimentation – tracking the development of contemporary art practices that are performative, interventionist or ephemeral, or that have arisen in response to rapid changes in the life of the city itself. In the 19th century, artists in Paris who were rejected from the official salons made history by creating their own shows in defiance. Artists in Beirut, it seems, haven’t been compelled to do so, in part because the Sursock Museum is so far from being the only game in town.

In fact, the museum is not only out of touch, it is also closed. Pass by today, and you will find its quaint, Italianate, white wedding cake of a building blocked off by scaffolding, shadowed by construction cranes and dwarfed by a new brutalist apartment complex towering some 20-odd stories higher than its decorative cupola. Due to a $12 million renovation and expansion plan that has, not surprisingly, taken rather longer than expected, the museum has been shuttered since 2008.

As such, the salon is homeless. For four years running, it has taken up temporary residence in Solidere’s primary exhibition space – first, in the high-end aluminum hut that housed a children’s science museum near the Starco Center (until that structure was torn down), and now, in the Beirut Exhibition Center, another temporary project, located on reclaimed land at the mouth of the entrance to BIEL.

If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, then at least the itinerant status of the salon has induced a few improvements. The exhibition looks good; the installation is capable and thoughtfully done. For all the thin abstractions and flimsy symbolisms, there are plenty of knockouts, such as Mhamad Saad’s prize-winning, hilariously crude “Alleluia,” a last supper of sorts depicting the members of Lebanon’s political class – Sleiman, Jumblatt, Berri, Franjieh, Geagea, Aoun, Mikati, Hariri et al – celebrating around a conference table as if some meaningful or useless accord has just been brokered. Fun? Yes. Cynical? For sure. An apt expression of seasonal discontent? Most definitely.

The Sursock Museum’s 31st Salon d’Automne runs through Feb. 17 at the Beirut Exhibition Center. For more information, please see www.beirutexhibitioncenter.com.