The Whitney Biennial of 2019 is an institutional and curatorial failure. Four museum floors of it. The effect isn't new but the scale and audacity of exhibition is. Its managed to weaponize political correctness on an institutional scale.
The show is largely a rarely interrupted, mind-numbing procession of aesthetic victimization screeds.
As a patron of Fine Art, I found myself groping for something/anything that could quench a thirst for aesthetic satisfaction. Instead, one installation of woe-is-me-and-mine art after another. And how could it be any other way. When shows are curated like a house of cards relying on satisfying the long tail of identity political affiliated groups of patrons, what can we expect but *this*?
The tropes employed by each artist are nothing new. The attempts to shock any sophisticated viewer are unshockingly unsuccessful. We've seen this all before. So much so that this show may signify many tipping points in the institutional evolutionary calendar.
The first tipping point is that Fine Art in as much as "Art for Art's Sake" has any contemporary meaning is no longer welcome in museum spaces that are now held hostage to generations of academically programmed curators whose myopic marching orders involve curating shows based on identity politic bingo cards.
The result is that this show represents a regressive transformation of artistic merit for the work that's accepted. Its *intent* was never "art". Its intent is politics and its creation is CRAFT. With few exceptions this biennial promotes cottage industry, political arts and crafts as Fine Art. It fools no one. This stuff saturates and intellectually lobotomizes any one who cares about art.
The result is that the exhibition exposes the large body of work as well-made craft. And it exposes each political interest as being ignorant of the fact each victim, in turn, victimizes all the other neighboring victims - a cacophony of mutual indifference. Like highway drivers with me first attitudes, these artists - thanks to a curation from hell - desensitize the patron from giving a shit about any of them.
As an artist, I attend shows to inform my own practice. Where is my work in relation to *this*. And is there a thinking worth applying to my practice. I left uninspired and in many cases disheartened.
I'll leave it at that for the moment. I'm working on a study of the idea of *language* being used to describe art and artworks and a few artists in this exhibition caught my eye because "I don't think it means what you think it means". But that's better written about as a separate piece.