Whitney Biennial of American Art

Every two years the Whitney curates a highly prestigious and well attended review of contemporary American Art. Remy and I went to the show. We were not impressed. Three floors and seemingly a hundred artists: paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, sculptures, installation rooms - variety of type was not the complaint. What was lacking was much more fundamental.

Initially, what was evident was a diminution of craft. This is not only in art, this trend is throughout society. Even in the bottom barrel of television craft is swiftly fleeing. A "hit" show like Queer Eye lacks in its production values exactly that Eye that the show purports to create in your home. These ingredients: space and proportion, time and narrative, these were the elements that were missing. These to me are the key staples of creation. Content and form, political comment: these are temporary attributes of a work, a temporal relationship between the work and the audience. As time passes what is left are the commonalities that remain: beauty, harmony, balance. Don't get me wrong, dissonance, imbalance, and horrific images are not precluded as timeless elements.

The only rationale, the only point the show could have been making, is that this is the end of the world as we know it, that art reflects that worlds failings, and that no one can make good art anymore. None of the art looked new. The videos were ugly, shot without compositional skill. One sculpture of personal objects would have been fine, except a girlfriend of mine was doing exactly the same work in 1987, with better results.

Ultimately, I was able to only really say what was missing in these recent works only came to me when I was visiting the adjacent Hopper and Calder rooms. These pieces, besides the evident craft, transported the viewer. They engaged the viewer to took to a psychic place beyond the artwork. The pieces in the Biennial did not have this quality. They did not engage the audience. They seemed about themselves. They will be judged harshly by time. Most of the pieces in the exhibit would not pass even the lesser test: would someone salvage them from the roadside?

The ability to engage and stimulate the viewer is a critical element, the defining quality of art. It is inclusive of, and supersedes, that awe that we feel and has been posited (Clive Bell, I believe) as the definition of art.

Here, what we saw, only made Remy and I feel good by knowing we were already doing better work ourselves. As to awe, I can only weakly say it was awful.