Word: biennials
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...Whitney Biennial, the show critics (and others) love to hate, is here again. Its significance as an event lies in the fact that it is still the only large survey of current American art regularly held by a U.S. museum, namely the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Hence, given the absurdly overcrowded art world of the late '80s, with thousands of artists, dealers and collectors jostling for visibility (the Whitney's curators guess at an American artist population of more than 200,000, but this figure may be low), the show excites much the same passions...
...process, its power as a trend-setter is always overestimated. The 1985 Biennial was laden with East Village, post-graffiti kitsch by Kenny Scharf and others -- gaudy ephemerids who, instead of going on to further heights of success as a result of their inclusion, have shriveled in the hot wind of fashion that blew them into the Whitney in the first place. Undoubtedly, 1985 marked the nadir of the Biennial's reputation; it was the worst in memory...
...boringly generic reflections on photo reproduction, or Bruce Nauman's neon pieces, or Barbara Kruger's snootily virtuous samplers bearing such commonplaces as I SHOP THEREFORE I AM). But no one could accuse it of the air-headedness that marked its immediate predecessor. This is a tighter, more conservative Biennial, attentive to the internal rhymes of current art and to the cross relations between artists. What we have is an Alexandrian fallback -- a sense of the basically academic nature of most "advanced" American art, its recoil from making big parodies of invention, its desire to navigate honorably in a cultural...
...provoke a twinge of concern. Does Sargent signal a retreat from the standards the Whitney has battled for -- the commitment to glitz that gave us the 1985 Biennial, the taste for inflated prettiness set forth in its Alex Katz retrospective, the reluctance to edit that made Eric Fischl's show such a letdown? True, Director Tom Armstrong valiantly tries to establish a link by pointing, in a catalog note, to Sargent's "highly expressive manner and his treatment of subject matter and narrative content, all of which are of great interest to contemporary artists." However, Sargent's "manner...
...previous years, the travails of Stephen Jay Gould and his quest to explain the history of the world--and his role in it--appear under the chapter heading Science B-16. Walter J. Kaiser '54 was supposed to resume his biennial journey through Elizabethan England yesterday accompanied by his ne'er-do-well sidekick Robert Watson, in an adventure entitled Literature and Arts A-40, "Shakespeare." Or so Courses of Instruction led the unwary reader to believe. But Watson was not granted tenure by the University and will henceforth be frolicking in another forest...