I wish to share some feedback concerning the Whitney Biennial. “If the Whitney was so intent on mounting a present that confronted social and political points, why didn’t it current a survey of political cartoons?” stated the evaluate in The New York Instances. In keeping with Time journal, the exhibition is “a saturnalia of political correctness, a long-winded immersion course in marginality—the one cultural situation, so far as its reborn curators are involved, that issues…”. In Harper’s journal, a critic wrote: “On the Whitney this yr, artwork’s socially acutely aware flip tried to assert each gesture as a form of resistance or critique.”
All three appear to agree that, to paraphrase the standfirst of the Harper’s article, politics is destroying up to date artwork. Besides that whereas that essay, “The Painted Protest” by Dean Kissick, addressed 2024’s biennial, the primary two, by Michael Kimmelman for The New York Instances and Robert Hughes for Time, are opinions of the Whitney Biennial in 1993. A cycle repeats itself.
Kissick opines that the latest dominance of identification politics in up to date artwork is accompanied by formal conservatism and a craving for the previous. But his criticism, in echoing established custom, falls into the traps he detects in artwork. He’s not alone. In The Spectator journal in November, J.J. Charlesworth urged that Tate’s monetary issues, with fewer guests to its London galleries post-pandemic, are attributable to its obsession with “progressive ideological fashions” and, at Tate Britain, a historic narrative privileging social justice. In that imaginative and prescient, he claims, “mediocre” work reflecting the place of individuals of color in historic British society are displayed on the expense of works like Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-27), which reinforces stereotypes in its depictions of Black individuals.
Glossing over the information
Each Kissick and Charlesworth by no means let information impede a great polemic. “The Painted Protest” is filled with arbitrary timelines and turning factors. Kissick describes a nebulous halcyon period for up to date artwork that coincides along with his 20s, a interval to which he attributes a selected “urgency”. He nods to sure admired tendencies (notably relational aesthetics) however makes no sustained argument for particular works that exemplify precisely what has been misplaced amid the higher prominence of artists from extra various backgrounds. He ignores exhibitions that counter his assertion of the blanket obsession with identification politics, the 2019 and 2022 Venice Biennales most notably.
Charlesworth, in the meantime, contorts his beef about Tate’s programming round doubtful statistics. He attaches false significance to Tate’s figures, which had been per most different UK artwork museums. He attributes the dominance of social histories at Tate Britain to its second director, Penelope Curtis, when its first, Stephen Deuchar, additionally met resistance to social and political mental framing from critics but oversaw an increase in figures within the late 2000s. The Spencer, for instance, has been by activates view and in retailer for many years, relying on Tate’s evolving assortment shows.
Within the present local weather, I might argue there are few extra pressing topics for artwork than identification and up to date politics, simply as was the case when the Whitney staged its groundbreaking biennial in 1993. Crucially, extra equitable and various up to date programming is just not solely simply, however has offered a number of the most profound artwork experiences of my lifetime, together with at Tate Britain and Tate Fashionable. Unhealthy artwork abounds, some curators overstretch themes, wall texts are sometimes clunky—it was ever thus. And Tate undoubtedly has issues to resolve. However the concept now we have reached an existential second for up to date artwork and museums tells us extra about Kissick and Charlesworth’s peculiar biases than anything.
