Whitney Biennial: An Unbroken 25 Year Record of the Fairly Okay But Not that Great

I post here the NYT review of the Whitney Biennial.

Reading the Times' Whitney Biennial review is probably the easiest way to get a sense of exactly how contemporary art is going a bit off, and hints of where it's going right (usually by not being included in the Biennial).

It's a strange show, important, influential, invariably disappointing; everyone sees it, but I have yet to hear of a Biennial that people were really impressed by. What I suspect is that the curators picked to choose the artworks are representative of the precise middle state of mainstream contemporary criticism, making the show the world's largest art magazine illustration.

The result is always predictably easy to write about, and only occassionally good to look at. I'm having trouble, for example, thinking of anything great in the 2002 show other than Robert Lazzarini's spatially transformed phone booth. I usually find myself siding with the Times' fairly stuffy critics, who are, after all these years, pretty consistently exasperated by most of the right problems: too many art stars, too many abstruse paragraphs, not enough art worth spending time with.

I may have a chance to see this one. Will report. Don't fret.