WHY ATTEMPT TO SAY WHAT OTHER AND GREATER MINDS HAVE SO ELOQUENTLY STATED?

From Roberta Smith in The New York Times:

 

"...bleak, pious, naive, monotonous, isollated and isolating. Dip into the texts accompanying each artwork, and the show becomes irritatingly patronizing...It includes little in the way of painting and photography, and not much color anywhere.

In fact, this show often defines art so broadly, and so laxly, that thge art all but disappears. It's the diffusion biennial... and so, painting houses in Puerto Rico is art instead of community activism. pretending to be a guru is art instead of fraud. Holding seances to contact the ghost of Joseph Cornell is atr instead of theater. Of course, it's possible to define these activities as art, but it sets the bar conspicuously low. The result is an exhibition that is largely devoid of visual excitement and that says little of note about the state of contemporary art...

The biennial underscoreshow much of this art tends toward exhaustion and extreme derivativeness. And it suggests, as do the crowds lined up in front of the museum, the degree to which conceptual-type art defines the popular notion of contemporary art, because it reduces so easily to a catchy or pretentious sound bite, demanding little active engagement or thought... You move from cell to cell, get the point and shuffle off to the next label.

The biennial signals the possibility that museums could become unrecognizable to people who wahnt to uise their eyes and therefore their brains, in ways that go beyond the visual inundations of daily life... it reflects...the ffear of form that is rife in contempoprary art today... There is no room for the imagination, nothing to project into, no place for reverie or dreams.

The biennial suggests that the concentrated visual activity required to make art and also to look at it is losing its allure. If you can't hear it, if it doesn't involve moving images, a mouse or a dark room, if it doesn't come with clearly displayed operating instructions that state its intention and desired effect, then it might not be art.

Today, museum boards are just another way to enter high society rather than a chance to escape from it. They are largely the purview of wealthy socialites and captains of industry with little imagination or vision who, nonetheless, and usually for not a lot of money, have a big say in a museum's affairs."

* * *

"It's all part of the avalanche of sub-intellectual trash that nowadays passes for art in the museums under the banner of Conceptual Art, which, by its very nature, is wholly devoid of aesthetic interest."

TRACK RECORD -

Hilton Kramer on past Whitney Biennials:

"As everyone knows, there have been some really bad biennials in the past, and there has never been a really good one. But even by the dismal standards of the past, this 2000 Biennial is rather special: It is the first in which there is not to be found a single objecty, installation or home video worth seeing."

"At the Whitney these days, art is an idea whose time has passed. The Whitney is now entrenched in its post-art period... They have produced the perfect kunstfrei exhibition, an exhibition so totally free of art that you are hardly aware of being in an art exhibition as you make your way through it."

"You have to feel kind of sorry for artists who have nothing better to do than produce parodies of work that in the original is already self-parody, but not so sorry that you would ever want to see their work again."

"...it should be said straightaway that this year's Biennial is distinguishable from its immediate predecessors in only one respect: The move toward total tedium has been completed."

"Call it functional disability - or,, if you prefer, a déformation professionelle. ...It is an affliction of the mind that museum curators specializing in contemporary art are currently suffering from on an epidemic scale. It mmanifests itself ... as a paralysis of the critical faculty. Its victims then lapse into a total loss of esthetic intelligence. This leads to a terminal condition ... called Esthetic Deficit Syndrome, or EDS. ...you certainly can't begin to comprehend the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum without some grasp of this woeful affliction."

 

CARAMEL AWARD