Whitney Biennale -- my "professional" opinion

The curators of this year's Whitney Biennale have strained for political relevance...for this, the show has been praised and criticized. Richard Serra's image "Stop Bush" (left), which he released into the public domain (during the 2004 election season) is one of the most succinct expressions of a sense of outrage -- and included in this year's Biennale. But art, as Hegel pointed out years ago -- I know it's unpopular to quote him, but Andrew McNamara reminded us of this -- art falls short of the mark.

(Years ago, I worked as an art critic, but found that without being independently wealthy, it was difficult to make ends meet without being an art ho' which is a fine profession, just one that I was not really prepared to embrace).

Another way of saying this is that art's formal tensions and contradications as well as its highly mediated status as both aesthetic and empirical object make it difficult for it to address "the event" head on -- as many of the artists in the Biennale attempt to do in our iniquitous times. So in fact, the more direclty head on a work tries to meet its "target," the more it falls tragically short of its mark.

There is something more pernicious going on at work in this year's Biennale however. The "Peace Tower" at the entrance of the museum, for instance looked like an all inclusive, hippie era bricolage of artists' collaborating to make a Woodstock like woven tower of protest under which meals were occasionally served as a part of Rikrit's contribution. The "collaboration" betrayed the scenester content of its international jet set contributors, making an intervention that seemed -- well all too facile in its well-heeled demands for Peace Now.

The work was incredibly varied in quality and effect: my favorite piece, full disclosure here -- Liz is my friend of many years was Liz Larner's "Red White and Blue" and sculpture that refers to explosion and the hand made at the same time -- in the context of a color scheme that has indicates war-mongering as much as patriotism.

I've been critical elsewhere of one of the curators, Phillipe Vergne's attempts to pander to mass culture and neo-pragmatism at the same time. In this show, one finds certain traces of a desperate attempt to "be relevant" -- which is reminiscent of other projects of his that celebrated Debord's spectacle as what he thought of as an edgy act of provocation.