{B} efore visiting Salt Lake City in December, I knew very little about Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I did know I wanted at some point in my scribbling career to review a tattoo show. My taste is catholic, and I hope I attract a discerning, eclectic readership. Over the years I’ve written about tartan, dog art, presidential assassinations, miniskirts, chocolate, cemeteries, Calvin Coolidge, and Ava Gardner. For me, tattoo art is mainstream.

Tattoos are indeed body art, and, like all art, some of it is good and most of it is kitsch. I look at tattoo art from an aesthetic viewpoint. Artists and patrons, who are also canvases, tend to be serious. I didn’t think my moment would arrive in Salt Lake, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and via Tatau: Marks of Polynesia, the very good, eye-opening exhibition, though it’s rambling and in need of an edit.

The UMFA is both the academic art museum serving the University of Utah and the encyclopedic civic art museum for Salt Lake City, though, in another surprise, Salt Lake also has a distinguished contemporary-art museum steps from Temple Square. More on both, but, first, let’s spill some ink on tattoos.

Tatau displays about 150 photographs, ephemera, tools, and a canoe, all teaching us about the 2,000-year-old tradition affirming communal identity and the passage from childhood to the realm of adults in Samoa. Before I got to Salt Lake, I knew about as much of Samoa as I did of Mormonism. I can sing all the tunes from South Pacific, which isn’t really about Samoa, and like the work of Gauguin, though Tahiti is 1,500 miles east. Every year I buy ten boxes of Samoa cookies from the Girl Scouts. What I’m suggesting is that I knew next to nothing.

One of the joys of Tatau is its educational value. I learned so much about Samoa’s history and culture. The museum found a perfect project to appeal to both students and the general public. The number of young Mormon missionaries heading to Samoa will probably tick upward. Will tattooed young Mormons return?

In America, tattoo art sits in that intersection of caprice, libido, eccentricity, and design, but Samoan tatau, or tattoos, prize a tried-and-true look. Tattoos are about heritage.

Samoans developed a hand-tattooing technique centuries ago. Tools are boar-tusk bone sharpened until it’s a needle that can puncture skin. A helper stretches the skin until it’s taut. The tattoo master, dipping the needle in black ink and tapping it with a mallet, injects the ink pointillist-style under the skin, to which I say “ouch.” A proper tattooing can take weeks, with sittings lasting hours. A ritual blessing by a chief and a presentation of gifts to the tattooist and skin stretcher come at the end.

The core Samoan tattoo design is coded with Samoan history and a list of responsibilities a tattooed man has to his family. The starting point is an abstract representation of a canoe, which, since the earliest Samoans rowed to shore from other islands, signals the start of Samoan society. It’s a thick black band that’s the uppermost part of the tattoo.

The bands below it represent different features in a man’s life, such as his father and mother and their lineage and his responsibility to provide a home for his family, suggested by abstract house rafters. Large triangles affirm his commitment to the ocean. Navels are tattooed with a black box representing the separation of a baby boy from his mother at birth. String-course designs, running in a narrow horizontal or vertical band, include small shapes representing fish, birds, shells, or centipedes.

The look is harmonious. The standard tattoo is black. Designs have a subtle, serpentine beauty and allow for plenty of skin to make the total look. They’re not garrulous. I think about Geometric-era Greek pots from the seventh and eighth centuries b.c. Some designs are universal. Women’s tattoos are different. They usually start at the back of the knee, going all the way around the leg up to the top of the thigh. The tiny designs of stars, nets, and X-shapes represent a woman’s duties as a wife, mother, daughter, and sister.

Over the past fifty years, the basic Samoan look has gone international, but so have traditional tattoo designs from Japan, Hawaii, New Zealand, and the hundreds of islands among them. Samoan tattoos have always been unique to the tattooer, who, after all, is an artist, and the tattooed, who is allowed opinions of his or her own. There’s been lots of style dissemination. I can’t say the sky’s the limit, but lots of motifs have joined the basic Samoan iconography, which hasn’t been displaced but has certainly been augmented. The bodysuit tattoo — a body mostly tattooed from the shoulders south — is recent and an extravaganza.

The tattoo tradition reminds Samoans that they haven’t absorbed Western ways hook, line, and hole-punch plier. Starting in the 1830s, when the Christian missionaries arrived in force, locals faced unprecedented pressures to abandon the ceremony, look, and cultural authority of tattoos. Clerics hated the revelry linked to tattooing, to be sure, but also wanted compliance with Victorian ways. Though Prince Albert’s penis may’ve been pierced, tattoos were a no-no.

Try as the men of God did, and though Samoans are nearly all Christians, tatau won the day. The archipelago we know as Polynesia is too vast, the custom is too entrenched, and the Samoan diaspora is too far-flung. The Samoan look influenced tattooing in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and California. With the advent of tattoo machines, tattoos in Samoa were easier to get. Rituals were streamlined. Though heritage-based tattoos are suppressed in Japan, for instance, they’re much coveted among Samoans.

One of the draws of Samoan tattoos for me is Portrait of Omai, the splendid Reynolds portrait of the Polynesian royal who spent two years in London, from 1774 to 1776. Captain Cook brought him back from one of his Pacific trips and, from all accounts, he was a celebrity as the first Pacific Islander, as far as we know, to visit London. While in London, Savile Row dressed him, but Reynolds portrayed him wearing what was, in Reynolds’s conception, exotic — it looks like a toga. No one, of course, from Polynesia, even the well-born, would wear something so warm. Omai’s tattoos on his hands and upper feet are visible, and they’re Tahitian and similar to Samoan line-and-dot patterns.

The curators of Tatau enlisted the help of the Sulu’ape family, Samoa’s preeminent tattooers over generations. The family gave the curatorial crew of the Japanese American National Museum, which organized Tatau, total access to their work, which is less a nine-to-five job and more a priestly calling. Their guidance was essential not only technically but in the exhibition’s impressive photography of Samoan men and women who sport their tats with élan.

I have only a few quibbles about Tatau, a rich and unexpected treat. The show displays so many photographs of tattoos that the mind boggles. I would have reduced the number of objects by half. The beautiful catalogue produced by the Japanese American National Museum has an essential essay on Samoan tattoo motifs with descriptive design charts. I would have reproduced this in the exhibition.

A map of Polynesia would have helped visitors. I’m a geography ace, or so a fourth-grade certificate with a blue ribbon and gold seal reminds me, but I didn’t know where, precisely, Samoa is. It’s so remote that the Japanese never invaded it. In the 1890s, when the Germans entered the colonial fray, late in the game, Samoa was one of the few specks left. German Samoa lasted about 20 years.

Lots of warm and fuzzy quotes about ethnic pride are set in banner headlines on the walls of the exhibition and in the book. One or two are fine. I take the point but wanted most to learn about history, culture, and design. The first two-thirds of the catalogue seem like a coffee-table book and unserious. After that, it gets down to business with informative, clear essays on design, efforts to kill the tattoo tradition, the advent of tattoo machines, and new motifs.

Am I tempted? My mother’s all-purpose advice — “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do” — lives large in me. On the subject of tattoos, I suspect she’d add, “Submit to the needle in haste, repent to the chorus of chortles forever.” She would have waxed less lyrical.

Since I’d never been to the museum, I spent lots of time in the permanent-collection galleries. The building, designed by Machado and Silvetti, a Boston firm I like, is inviting and spacious, with an exceptional balance of small and large galleries. Floors are a luscious Brazilian cherry. It opened in 2001, though a hodgepodge art museum existed on campus since the 1950s, focused mostly on the needs of the faculty and whatever idiosyncratic art it got from the locals. This is by no means unusual. Now it has a collection of about 20,000 objects covering 5,000 years of human history. It’s organized into galleries of antiquities and American, European, Asian, African, and contemporary art.

Utah’s a new place. Though Latter-day Saints are everywhere and, as a general proposition, do well financially, Salt Lake City isn’t Paris, and collecting art isn’t a natural impulse. Gifts of art from alumni drive the acquisitions of academic art museums. The UMFA is Utah’s main civic museum, so its audience and donor base are broader but, still, it feels like a university or college museum, isn’t big, and is set in a campus that isn’t in the center of Salt Lake City. It’s a good teaching museum. The university’s art and art history department looks comprehensive.

I saw nothing in the permanent collection that was beyond the scope of human emotion, but that’s fine. I loved Dominicus van Wijnen’s grisaille Allegory of Amsterdam, from 1680, a small, dazzling look at gods celebrating Holland’s status as a world power. There’s a Hiram Powers sculpture bust, from 1862, of Eve Disconsolate, as she should be, given the trouble she caused. Theodore Pine’s Doane Family Portrait, from 1871, could have been a tribute to Mormon familyhood, though pater John W. Doane was a Chicago banking magnate and not a Mormon. The near-life-size portrait of his five well-dressed, playful children and their pooch is the zenith of 1870s cult-of-children painting.

Jose Aparicio e Inglada’s grand portrait of the French general Jean-Louis Reynier is an ode to conquest. Reynier assisted Napoleon in conquering Egypt. Aparicio was Jacques-Louis David’s first Spanish student and later became the court painter for Spain’s King Fernando VII. A good Solimena picture, The Death of Saint Joseph is dark, giant, and operatic. For teaching purposes, it explicates the Neapolitan Baroque from around 1700.

The contemporary-art gallery didn’t overwhelm. The Wizard, from 1963, is a quintessential Helen Frankenthaler sponge painting technique-wise, but this wizard looks clumsy when we like our wizards — and Frankenthalers — to be sly and ethereal. Willie Cole’s How Do You Spell America, from 1993, is a trenchant, clever take on the multiplicities of meaning to be found when thinking about our country, the apex in human history.

The museum has made impressive acquisitions in the past couple of years. An impressive group of photographs by the Boston artist Abelardo Morell is now in Salt Lake City. I like his work a lot. I looked at the collection website and spotted a perfect Qing dynasty scroll from around 1800. At 20 feet, made with paint and ink, it’s a landscape that captivates. What a find.

My visit lasted most of an afternoon. I saw lots of good, beautifully presented art. The museum is committed to a project called “Decolonizing the Museum,” which involves “acknowledging that the UMFA and its collection are products of histories that are racist, white-supremacist, classist, imperialist, and discriminatory.” Harsh words. And I don’t think the museum staff understands how self-righteous and naïve such jargon makes them look. The world’s a rough-and-tumble place, and it’s always been thus. What about histories that are egalitarian, innovative, freethinking, freewheeling, and freedom-loving — as are much of America’s histories? Almost all the art on the museum’s walls ranked as luxury goods in the culture that produced it. Were these cultures utopias? Of course not.

Projects like these are a rabbit hole as well as a dead end. They become festivals of finger-wagging and then recrimination and revenge. It’s an art museum, not a barricade, and the UMFA’s primary audience is young people. They’re correctly focused on the future and, insofar as the museum ought to be concerned, on the wonders of visual culture.