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COPYRIGHT 2000 Texas Monthly, Inc.
With Fort Worth's Michael Auping as a curator and nine of the state's artists participating, this year's Whitney Biennial puts a New York spotlight on the art of Texas.
"THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL IS THE EXHIBITION THAT EVERYBODY loves to hate," says Michael Auping, the chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. "You will hear virtually thousands of artists, critics, and dealers complain about it. You will not find a single artist in this country who doesn't want to be in it. That's an interesting irony. And it has to do with the fact that there is no other exhibition in this country, maybe anywhere, in which every two years an institution decides to take the temperature of what's going on in America."
Since 1932 New York's Whitney Museum of American Art has showcased (biannually since the early seventies) what its curators consider the most salient cutting-edge art of the moment, an often riotous ritual that has become one of the most eagerly anticipated surveys of our nation's cultural climate--and a predictable target of outraged sensibilities inside the art world and outraged punditry from without. The 2000 Whitney Biennial, delayed from its usual odd-year scheduling to make a millennial splash, is an exception only in that the public sniping began a year before the show's March 23 opening. Within days of the announcement that, for the first time in the Biennial's history, a team of six outside curators, none of them from New York, would canvass the nation and choose the artists to be represented in the show, New York Times critic Roberta Smith pointedly wondered if the...
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