Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Piano Player

The issue in discussing the Whitney Biennial is that its position has become so generic that to lodge a critique against it would be to catch countless other institutional shows in its crosshairs. Which of course doesn't prevent criticism from pouring in. The Whitney Biennial being the most visible of these exhibitions in the US makes it a kind of sacrificial effigy around which we gather for a ritualized burning.

The curatorial initiative: a tendency among works expressing a latent anxiety about Artificial Intelligence? I think. And also—globalism, queerness, postcolonialism, ecological collapse, geopolitics, et al. The Biennal's strongest fidelity to the official curatorial conceit of Artificial Intelligence seems to be that the aforementioned inventory of sub-interests could have easily been the output of an AI model trained on the keywords from the last few years of institutional curation worldwide.

Despite the Whitney being a regionally-focused institution, if you squint you can pretend you're in Kassel, Venice, Gwangju. The vast majority of the works here speak a kind of Biennialese: streamlined for digestibility with a brazen certainty of its intention and its effects. This is the medium par excellence for what has become—despite these works' relentless insistence on identitarian localism—a thoroughly individual yet pervasively global mode of art production.

It goes a little like this: if you fancy a sculpture, avoid materials that could be read as incidental. Your sculpture should read like an html alt-text: If the image doesn't load, we'll still know what it's about. Mud, yarn, straw, bullet-casings. Got it—geopolitics. Vaseline and medicine cabinets. I'll take disability politics for $1,000, Alex. Regarding the sculpture itself: we've confused scale for mastery at this point, so your only obligation is to make it sprawl.

What is so discouraging about all of this, is that interesting work is being produced in the Americas. It is not this minor key institutional Muzak. There are new aesthetic constituencies that are sparring it out as they always have. There is art being made that seeks a representation of politics without conceding to patronizing communicative paradigms. The presence of these artists is sorely missed.