WHAT'S NEW.

The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better--more serious, more pleasurable--than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and incoherence of the past decade and a half in art. Essays in the show's catalogue impose the usual theories and exhortations, but the artists largely elude them. All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals are in their brains. The operative word is "plainly."

Painting and drawing are back. That's the big news of this Biennial. It's not that the handmade pictures in the show are so numerous, though they are, or so good, though many of them are very good indeed. It's that painting and drawing--the visual mediums in which the creative cooperation of hand, eye, and imagination attains peak efficiency--exercise a gravitational tug on practically everything in the show, including sculptures, installations, videos, photographs, films, and digital animations. Framing and the delineation of vision reign. Tactility counts. Aesthetics trump politics, without suggesting withdrawal from the world.

Though huge and dense, the show exhilarates. (Its superb arrangement, in smallish rooms that often juxtapose works by two or three artists with some particular affinity, helps avert viewer fatigue.) Festivalism--the mode of processional theatricality that has long marked institutional group shows of contemporary art--barely applies. You will want to revisit works in this Biennial. Here's my short list of highlights: paintings and drawings by David Hockney, Elizabeth Peyton, Laura Owens, Cecily Brown, Amy Sillman, James Siena, Lecia Dole-Recio, Raymond Pettibon, Robyn O'Neil, Robert Mangold, Chloe Piene, and Laylah Ali; video installations by Catherine Sullivan, Craigie Horsfield, Eve Sussman, and Slater Bradley; a photographic-conceptual work by Roni Horn; and exactly one mixed-media installation, by a group called assume vivid astro focus.

Hockney, the veteran showoff, is prepossessing again, in an instructive way. His glamorous portraits and large views of California, all in watercolor, hang in a room that is dominated, in spirit, by Elizabeth Peyton's small, fiercely adoring paintings and drawings of androgynous young people, including herself. It's as if Peyton had recalled Hockney to order, after his questionable forays into neocubism and clever theories of optics, reminding him that his innate gift for decorative charm is what we crave from him, unadulterated by great-artist longueurs. The art world must be in good shape when a fashion-sensitive fellow like Hockney confidently lets fly with what he does best. As for Peyton, the distilled allure of her little pictures makes them, for me, the moral center of the Biennial. Her romantic aestheticism charges her swift line and intense color with a sense of the sacred.

It's interesting to register the collapse of conviction in current installational work. Gone are the heydays of Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Cady Noland, and other masters (none present in this Biennial) who exploded tropes of painting and sculpture into aggressively themed social space. The better installations here are nervously seductive, featuring lights, glitzy materials, and precious bric-a-brac. The neo-psychedelic disco provided by assume vivid astro focus takes crowd-pleasing to giddy heights with a tall, round-cornered room whose wallpaper and painted floor of overlaid Pop images reacts sensationally to shifting colored light, as a d.j. atop a spiral staircase manages catchy house music. The work is pure fun.

Most installations in the show palpably fall back on pictorial and sculptural conventions. I had an epiphany, in this regard, while looking at a large painting by Laura Owens, a Los Angeles artist with an avant-gardist background; it is a fantasy tableau of a tree (rendered in runny paint), cute animals, a cartoon seascape with ships, and dollops of thick paint that may represent falling leaves. It struck me as an installational piece pulled flat. Why go to the trouble of deploying things in ...