HELL IS... OTHER AMERICANS

Lots and lots of reasons not to visit the Whitney Biennial in New York. Although the Telegraph critic, Richard Dorment found it all quite stimulating - "a tightly curated exhibition of works that reflect the social, economic, political and religious polarities of contemporary American society."

If you're curious, here's a sampling....

Post-Katrina Mississippi: "More than any television report the piece speaks of the trauma Katrina represented to Americans, who could see for themselves a country falling apart, a moral centre that wasn't there."

The Bible Belt:  "If anything, the world she documents is more frightening than the scenes from Biloxi, for in photos of a young father parting his seven-year-old son's hair before church, or the artist's grandmother in her coffin prettily dressed in a pink jacket, she reveals a Stepford family insulated from reality by the cotton wool of religious certainty."

And, a roll of drums, please: "America's greatest living artist, Richard Serra, shows only one work - a drawing of a hooded Ku Klux Klan figure, with the words Stop Bush'."

In case you missed the moral of the story... "Hypnotic and sad, this biennial is full of art about the breaking up and polarisation of society. Its message is that there is nothing we can do about it apart from wait for the end of Life As We Know It and console ourselves with sex or consumer products."

Or we could perhaps go and look for a more interesting collection of artists.

James Panero, writing in the New Criterion, is understandably depressed:

Will you ever see a great painter here? A pro-American political artist? Something that may just be overwhelming and, indeed, actually unexpected? Maybe. But it won’t be this year, when all you get is bad Duchamp. In other years it has been bad Mondrian. The derivations change, but what remains consistent is the badness the curators are always able to pull together.

Comments

[Fausta]

It has to be an improvement over the time the Biennial turned the ENTIRE museum into graffiti heaven, which, since it was in pre-Giuliani time, made the place look like so many dirty subway cars!

I'll go check it out anyway.

[Sissy Willis]

As I wrote a couple of weeks back in my own critique, "Reduced by its ignorance into regurgitating regurgitations":

"Richard Serra is right when he 'refuses to call his picture a work of art.' It is a party-line tantrum in paint with nothing original or intelligent to feed a viewer's mind or heart."

http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2006/03/even_serra_as_w.html

[Fausta]

Following up on last week's comment: Panero was too kind.
The whole "thing" was both ugly and boring.
Yes, you can see it all in 1 hr.

Truffaut must have spun in his grave.