HOW AMERICAN IS IT?(Whitney Museum)

Will the Whitney Museum ever get it right? Having devoted itself for seventy-five years to nurturing and celebrating American art, the museum is now willing--or almost willing--to concede that there is no such thing. Belief in a native American aesthetic has steadily eroded over the past three decades, as art has become increasingly globalized. The Whitney Biennial, that often maligned but indispensable exhibition which serves as the closest thing to a national salon, has broadened its focus in recent years to include non-American citizens who work or live in this country, "in recognition of the increasingly borderless nature of American culture," and the 2006 version, which opened last week, includes a short film by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli, who neither lives nor works here. Recently, I asked Adam Weinberg, the third Whitney director since 1991, whether he had any clear sense of what was American in American art. Weinberg, who has a closely cropped brown beard, a resonant voice, and a disarmingly friendly attitude toward the world at large, said, "The more I look, the less I know. I don't think anyone can ever come to a definition of that."

If you assumed that the gradual disappearance of the Whitney's original raison d'etre might be somewhat unsettling to its director and his staff, you would be wrong. They look on it as merely the latest challenge in the life of an institution that has been rethinking itself and weathering one identity crisis after another for as long as anyone can recall. More than other museums, the Whitney has been subject to intemperate attacks on its methods, standards, and goals. It has been called dysfunctional, superfluous, reactionary, market-driven, trendy, and unprofessional. I once heard a critic refer to it as "the Canada of museums"--well-meaning but dull. Weinberg believes that New Yorkers have personal feelings about the Whitney, because it has always focussed primarily on living art and artists, and because, he believes, it has tried to be more open and welcoming than other museums--"They feel like it belongs to them." The Metropolitan Museum is a vast encyclopedia, with an aura of infallibility that cradles and awes the viewer. The Museum of Modern Art, founded two years before the Whitney opened, became an international powerhouse whose present ambience seems more corporate than personal. Alone among the city's major art museums, the much smaller, financially shaky Whitney has tried to hold on to the intimate and informal quality of its beginnings, while evolving into something larger and more grownup. There are reasons to think, in the Whitney's seventy-fifth-anniversary year, that this long-delayed and often thwarted evolution may finally be happening.

When Weinberg took over, in 2003, the Whitney was in one of its periodic funks. The previous director, Maxwell L. Anderson, had resigned after five years on the job, with a push from several members of the board of trustees whom he seemed to consider his natural enemies. (The Whitney board has had a forty-year history of interfering in curatorial affairs.) Anderson's predecessor, David A. Ross, who had put on exhibitions that were heavily criticized as either too avant-garde or too inconsequential, chose to move on, after seven years, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was promised a virtually unlimited acquisition budget to rebuild the collection. Chronically underendowed and seemingly adrift, the Whitney had never really recovered from two traumatic and highly public blunders by the trustees: their inept firing of Thomas N. Armstrong III, the convivial and effective director who had led the museum from 1974 to 1990, and their failure to agree on and push through a long-overdue rebuilding and expansion of the museum's home on Madison Avenue, the inverted ziggurat designed by Marcel Breuer, which opened in 1966.

Weinberg has already done quite a lot to resuscitate the patient. In a little more than two years, he has recruited a young and energetic staff of (mostly female) curators, and imbued them with his own unfashionable optimism about the tasks ahead. He has gained the trustees' approval of a major addition to the Breuer building by Renzo Piano, the Italian-born architect of many greatly admired museums in this country and abroad, and shepherded it successfully through the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose opposition had helped to kill previous expansion plans. Leonard Lauder, the Whitney's chairman and its most influential trustee, thinks the world of Weinberg. "Adam is a real leader," he told me recently. "He's intensely interested in art, his staff adores him, and he's learned a lot of the things he needs to know to be a great director." Weinberg has even moved to heal what had been a painful breach between the museum and the Whitney family. Three generations of Whitney women had served as presidents and board members, but the trustees' dismissal of Tom Armstrong deeply offended Flora Miller Biddle, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's granddaughter; she eventually left the board, and her daughter, Fiona Donovan, who was also a board member, resigned in 2002. Weinberg has brought them back into the fold. Mrs. Biddle, who says she "could never say no to anything Adam asked me," was the honoree at the annual Whitney Gala last fall. "I haven't felt wounded since Adam came," she told me.

Both inside and outside the museum, there is a tendency to think ...