The Polycrisis Sublime of the Whitney Biennial

As my friend Anthony Elms pointed out to me recently, the Whitney Biennial is a kind of neither-here-nor-there entity: too big for a tight thesis to be legible, too small to provide a true scope of what’s happening in the United States art world. (He should know: He curated a floor of the 2014 edition.) The two most recent editions — 2024’s Even Better Than the Real Thing and 2022’s Quiet as It’s Kept — opted for a strong theme to guide curatorial choices. This time, we have a show, curated by in-house curators Drew Sawyer and Marcela Guerrero, that wants to revert to an older model of taking the temperature of the art world, come what may.

And what is that temperature? In the few days since art critics got their first peek, one descriptor seems to have bobbed to the surface: Weird. And why not? It’s the perfect word for our time; even football dad Tim Walz embraced it to describe the unimaginability of Trump and his obsessions. Everything around us is weird: AI and its hallucinations; our deer-in-headlights paralysis in the face of environmental devastation and fascism and a new world war; having to live life and pay rent despite all this. Weird.

...

Works by Kamrooz Aram — a solo show within the show — take on histories of Western modernism. His painting has always (under)mined the modernist grid, taking it back to one of its origin points in Islamic painting, but here, he also interrogates how certain forms (the folding screen, the objet d’art) subordinated non-Western art in Western art history.