From the ER to the Whitney Biennale

what do we want from art? what can we expect from art? Part 1

I am unexpectedly in New York because of a family emergency that had me 12 hours in the Mt. Sinai ER.

The naked face of human biological suffering strips a lot of things away from you, from both victims and witnesses. The workers, nurses, EMTs, doctors are like buoys in the great sea of pain and fear. Their controlled compassion, roughness and expertise moored me to reality: their overwork was obvious. Hospitals in New York are understaffed: one nurse told me that they were seeings unprecedented waves of illness after the pandemic. Everyone knows that the ER is the doctors’ office for the unhoused, the mentally ill and the destitute.

I’m finally at my computer after days of vigilance and cooking and family meetings. The laptop feels like home. Opening files and tabs feels like opening the doors of familiar rooms I haven’t visited in a long time. I never thought an interface could embrace me digitally, but there it is.

Before I can dig into what I was able to see at the Whitney Biennale, I just wanted to comment on the intentional vagueness and flagrant trend seeking of art world language. Somehow this show was supposed to be about “Artificial Intelligence” as simulation because somewhere in the subtitle there was something about “better than the real thing.”

Still rehashing Baudrillard? Deleuze?

Curators and donors love nothing more than half baked ideas these days. The half baked idea and the self important art work with too much wall text seems to reassure the art world that what its betrayal of aesthetic autonomy was worth some return in narcissism.

The function of art these days seems further and further removed from aesthetic experience. The few pieces in the Biennale that provided the consolation of visual immersion rather than identity posturing were worth seeing — I guess.

I left the Whitney in a rage, but that rage soon faded because I was exhausted. Finding my way this morning back to writing, I realized that bad art talk can be contained in a way that suffering cannot, but bad art talk is still bad. I feel sorry for the art world workers who have to learn to distort their minds and their eyes and their ability to think and writer in order to produce something acceptable to collectors and donors. There is a denigration of thinking and seeing that has been happening to art workers as it has been happening to everyone else in the US and this deterioration in our ability to communicate about art itself is most evident in the incoherence of curatorial language itself.

The wood paneling installation on the third floor looked like the paneling in Chinese restaurants and the pencil drawings by an artist from CA looked familiar enough to make you think you occupied the same world as the artist who made this work. And yet is that recognition enough, a kind of signpost, a place of grace?