TARGET AMERICA.("The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY)

"The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003," a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art of recent works by fifty mostly little-known artists, filmmakers, and collaborative groups from thirty or so countries, purports to explore foreign views of the U.S.A. The art in it is the typical fare of international exhibitions these days: heavy on mildly diverting installations, videos, and photography and given to easy conceptual japes, which curatorial wall texts carefully explain. With a few sharp exceptions, the works are second-rate or, really, no-rate: hybrid in form and forced in content, belonging to no vital tradition, responding to no one's need. They don't so much advance the show's theme as huddle under it. The oddly poignant effect brought to my mind J. Alfred Prufrock's self-assessment: "not Prince Hamlet" but "an attendant lord . . . Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse." Public-minded contemporary art today is ever more Prufrockian: parched and riddled with compunction. Most of the artists at the Whitney are young, but many seem in a hurry to be careworn with age.

Here are examples of what I mean by no-rate art: a big installation by the Frenchman Gilles Barbier in which veristic sculptures of geriatric superheroes (Superman, et al.) slump in the television room of a nursing home; photographs by Danwen Xing of masses of parts from junked computers, which, we are told, are exported from America to be picked over for salvage by poor Chinese; photographs by Yongsuk Kang of a South Korean island that is used by American forces for bombing practice; photographic self-portraits of Fiona Foley, an Australian Aborigine, posing as a Seminole Indian; and a cowboy image rendered in cutout coca leaves by the Colombian Miguel Angel Rojas. All these works are derivative of established artists--Edward Kienholz in the case of Barbier and Richard Misrach in that of Kang--but "influence" is too strong a word for what's afoot here. The artists neither develop nor challenge received artistic ideas but churn them.

In tone, "The American Effect" is vaguely reproachful of America while anxious to mollify thin-skinned viewers. It is like a lavishly illustrated op-ed piece of the virtuously worried sort, which takes up some current discontent and, after sufficient on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-othering, sets it back down in the same place. The show and its attractive catalogue emit whiffs of the anti-Americanism that is common today among the world's intelligentsias (parts of our own included), but is "balanced" with tokens of affection. At the show, I heard a middle-aged man remark with palpable relief, "Well, it could have been worse!" It just couldn't have been very enjoyable. Determinedly political art is generally depressing. It forfeits creativity's inclination to praise life. An overriding sense of worldly emergency can vindicate the sacrifice, but I feel little such urgency in this show. There is mainly a conventional righteousness. Artists naturally strive to please their patrons. The marching order at the Whitney is soft-core critique.

The catalogue introduction, by Lawrence Rinder, the Whitney's curator of contemporary art, quotes Crevecoeur and Tocqueville on the way to suggesting that we Americans should be more attentive to how others see us. This leaves out the difficulty of specifying an "us" in a wildly heterogeneous, essentially fictive nation; but let that go. Essays range from a witty meditation on American-style hyperabundance by Luc Sante to a shot of straight polemical sulfur by the Pakistani Tariq Ali: "What we are witnessing today is not a 'war against terror,' but the first shots in a new struggle for hegemony over former allies." Best is a contribution by Ian Buruma, "Sweet Violence," which addresses the thrill of Schadenfreude that many well-off, educated people around the world felt on September 11th. Buruma argues that America's ideals and promises guarantee resentment precisely among people abroad who are most excited by them. There are grounds other than personal bitterness for opposing American power and influence, of course, but a ...