Do it yourself; biennial follies at the Whitney.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 25-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Lawrence R. Rinder, the chief curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum, introduces the busy but extraordinarily bland Whitney Biennial by invoking the events of September 11th. "There is a profound sense of being at the most portentous crossroad in history," he writes in the show's catalogue. Artists are a "profound resource for a society that has both been robbed of a potent symbol and is casting about for new images and metaphors." Rinder says that an important criterion for his selection of the Biennial's artists was a "powerful sense of conviction." And yet the show, in my view, conveys neither sense nor conviction, let alone power. A reason for the shortfall lurks in another introductory remark by Rinder: "Perhaps beauty and irony are luxuries of peacetime, something to cherish as much as unrestricted travel and life without gas masks." If this assessment of our embattled state seems exaggerated (gas masks?), it may be because grave times are never grave enough for someone who is in the grip of the sort of moral excitement that feeds on scares and abnegations. War or no war, Rinder has a predilection...

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