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Aqueduct Racetrack is no one’s idea of an art gallery. But Paul Kelleher, a corporate development executive at the New York Racing Association, which operates the track, was keen to broaden his customer base and he saw potential. The place is big. It has lots of walls. Why not unleash a few street artists and let them do what they do best: spray-paint?

He enlisted a friend, Joe Iurato, a street artist from New Jersey, who rounded up a crew of 13 fellow artists, some from as far off as Sweden and South Africa, and handed them a loose mandate. “All we told them was to do something that was in the spirit of the place,” Mr. Kelleher said.

No problem. In a three-night frenzy, working after the last race of the day, the artists went at it. By Nov. 23, a Saturday, the quixotic project, “The Aqueduct Murals,” was completed and ready for first post.

Churchill Downs might have had a better card that day. But Aqueduct, blue-collar cousin to Belmont and Saratoga, had the art.

On a large cinderblock wall, Logan Hicks and Mr. Iurato had laid down, in 13 layers of stenciling, a three-horse dash to the wire in black and white. Near a bank of self-service terminals that cheeped manically as bettors input their exactas and trifectas, James Reka, an Australian artist who lives in Berlin, had painted two stylized horses in swirling black and white arabesques.

Over a line of betting windows, Skewville, a fictional art team created by Ad Deville, an artist whose name is also an invention, installed a cryptic, Barbara Krugerish exhortation in large letters: Update Your Status.

“I went to the track one day and looked around at the type of people who are there,” Mr. Deville said by way of explanation. “Everybody wants to be big-time, everybody wants to be rich, everybody wants to be better, including me.”

The mural project is part inspiration, part desperation. New ideas are at a premium in an industry that has been declining for decades, crowded out by myriad other forms of legal gambling and unable to attract new customers to replenish its aging fan base.

At the Jockey Club’s annual meeting in 2012, members listened glumly as an executive from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company informed them that racetrack attendance had declined 30 percent in the last decade and that the handle — the total number of dollars bet — was down 37 percent.

Like drive-in movie theaters, many tracks are more valuable for the land they sit on than for the racing they offer. Bay Meadows, near San Francisco, closed in 2008. Hollywood Park, which opened for business in 1938, will run its last race at the end of this month.

In the struggle to survive, racetracks have innovated frantically, offering theme nights, free concerts and bizarre promotions. The owners of Gulfstream Park, near Miami, have announced plans to erect a giant bronze and steel statue of Pegasus trampling a dragon on the track’s parking lots. The sculpture, 11 stories tall, is envisioned as the centerpiece of Pegasus Park, an entertainment attraction with hotels, apartments and, perhaps, water slides and Ferris wheels.

More seriously, many tracks, including Aqueduct, have embraced the “racino” concept, joining forces with casino operators to combine horse racing and slot machines in a single package. It is a shotgun wedding with an eager bride, since a percentage of slot revenues goes toward improving the racing product, primarily by raising the money for purses.

Two years ago, the Malaysian-based Genting Group opened Resorts World New York City on the Aqueduct grounds, taking over half the old racetrack building in the process. By law, 44 percent of the casino’s revenues go to a New York State education fund.

The New York Racing Association gets 4 percent of revenues for capital improvements at its three tracks. (The $30,000 budget for Aqueduct Murals came out of the capital-improvements money.) Over all, the deal with Genting has generated about $200 million for the racing association so far.

Critics of the concept argue that racetracks have crawled into bed with the enemy. “Any notion that this might be a mechanism for increasing interest in, or exposure to, the track has disappeared into a contentious relationship where the two entities do nothing to help each other,” Steven Crist, the publisher of The Daily Racing Form, wrote in a column in June. “Genting has removed any signs indicating that there is a racetrack on the premises and won’t even show the track simulcast feed at its casino bars.”

Racetracks are well aware that slot machines do nothing to solve their underlying problems. Eager to attract new patrons, they are willing to try just about anything. Even art. Mr. Kelleher said that “The Aqueduct Murals” would stay indefinitely, and that there might be more to come.

Whether the horseplayers care is an open question. They tend to be a highly focused group, intent on analyzing the next race, formulating a bet and, in many cases, cursing the jockey aboard the horse they just lost money on.

On a recent race day, three bettors did look up long enough to notice a three-wall mural by Chris Stain.

It was intriguing. Based on one of the archival photographs that the track gave to all the artists, it showed a mud-spattered jockey at Jamaica Race Course on a rainy spring day in 1941.

Jim Riccio, from Bayonne, N.J., said, offhandedly, “I think it’s nice, something different for this place, which is mostly just bare walls.”

His interest in the mural picked up visibly when one of his friends suggested that the jockey might be Jimmy Winkfield, the last African-American jockey to win the Kentucky Derby.

“I won money on the Jimmy Winkfield Stakes” at Aqueduct, Mr. Riccio recalled. “What was that horse?” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “King and Crusader.” The horse, the winner of 2012’s edition of the race, paid $9.90 to win.

Over by the walking ring, Bob Allensworth, from Miller Place, N.Y., looked up from his program long enough to offer an assessment of David Flores’s large mural of a jockey in protective winter gear holding the bridle of a blinkered Secretariat.

“There is a little bit of a modern feel to it, as opposed to traditional,” he said. “I think there’s a slight three-dimensional effect with the color contrast, the black and the red. But the jockey looks like he could be a motorcycle rider.”

The first horse entered the walking ring, a signal that the next race was fast approaching. Art appreciation time was over.