The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

I have no way of knowing yet how accurate was Holland Cotter’s NYT review of the just-opened Whitney Biennial, but, based on his descriptions of the show and what I know of it myself, this assessment sounds about right:

…this year we have a Whitney show that takes lowered expectations — lessness, slowness, ephemerality, failure [emphasis mine] (in the words of its young curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin) — as its theme.

A biennial for a recession-bound time? That’s one impression it gives. With more than 80 artists, this is the smallest edition of the show in a while, and it feels that way, sparsely populated, even as it fills three floors and more of the museum…

Past biennials have had a festive, party-time air. The 2004 show was all bright, pop fizz; the one two years ago exuded a sexy, punk perfume. The 2008 edition is, by contrast, an unglamorous, even prosaic affair. The installation is plain and focused, with many artists given niches of their own. The catalog is modest in design, with a long, idea-filled essay by Ms. Momin, hard-working, but with hardly a stylistic grace note in sight. A lot of the art is like this too: uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories…

…the overall tenor of the show is low-key, with work that seems to be in a transitional, questioning mode, art as conversation rather than as statement, testing this, trying that. Assemblage and collage are popular. Collaboration is common. So are down-market materials — plastic, plywood, plexiglass — and all kinds of found and recycled ingredients, otherwise known as trash.

As a side-note, I have visited the past two Whitney Biennials, and I have reviewed them—usually focusing on the Minnesota angle for a little Minnesota-based web-publication. I find Cotter’s quick take above on the past two Biennials to be pretty spot-on, though I’d probably be a little harsher in my assessment of the 2006 show (and, indeed, I was). So, I have no reason to doubt him about the 2008 version.

I also then must say, “kudos, Whitney!” for recognizing—like CAFA—that failure is the order of the day in art.

As a final note, I do plan, once I can break free long enough to do so, to visit this failure-focused Biennial. In a perfect world, in which I have enough time away from my day job and enough left-over energy, I’d write more regular reviews of local and national art for a hungry local audience. (I say this fully realizing that all the local art criticism venues are rapidly dying off.) Still, I’m hopeful that I can, later this spring/summer, visit the seemingly less dire, more circumspect, more internationally derived Carnegie International, which opens in May, and write a comparative survey of these two major art events.

And heck, if I can’t get the review published somewhere good, then you can be sure it’ll end up just another feature of Failure. Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under What planet are curators from?, Art is the first thing that goes out the window, Holland Cotter, Jumping on the artistic failure bandwagon, Art museums and filthy lucre, The failure of American Art Museums, Commerce and the failure of art, NYT arts articles, Art market decline, My published arts writing, Artistic failure in America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.