"This is faaabulous!"
"It's all garbage."
I heard both of these comments, just minutes apart, while standing on the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum. And that pretty much sums up the 2006 Whitney Biennial. I walked slowly through every floor and dutifully tagged along on a tour of the third floor. The docent did an excellent job, but I lost count of the number of times she said "This raises all kinds of questions about... [insert vague postmodern conceit - more often than not it was authenticity and authority]."
(Short digression: This reminded me of my short stint as a docent at the Walker Art Center and a nightmarishly large crowd at a Duchamp-related exhibition. Everything was going fine until some geezer in the back yelled out "But why is this art?!?" To which I think I replied "Duuuuuh..." Now if only they had trained us to dodge.)
I'll tell you what I did like today. Angela Strassheim's carefully composed photographs; Adam McEwen's obituaries for living figures; Lisa Lapinski's enormous walnut Nightstand, with drawer-like parts that jut out at you; and Paul Chan's animated projection 1st Light, which was beautiful and moving.
But I managed to miss Pierre Huyghe's film, which I was most looking forward to, so I will have to return for another look around.
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