"The never-fail appliance for glamorizing malaise"

Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvass

Peter Schjeldahl has a wonderful write up of the Whitney Biennial over in the pages of the current New Yorker. (Or, at least I assume he does, as I haven't yet perused my print edition; look, I'm all for access, but isn't being able to read each complete issue of The New Yorker for free on the internet a slap in the face to us paying subscribers? Ultimately I'm shelling out for the Table of Contents, ads for things I generally can't afford, and the cartoons. And I just renewed. Goddamn it. Anyway:)

Up front, my knowledge of the fine arts is sorely deficient; I, like most cavemen, assess objets d'art on a purely visual basis, without much regard for, or foreknowledge of, their larger historical context. So my interest here isn't in the art (which I haven't yet had an opportunity to see), but how Schjeldahl writes about it, which I am simply suggesting, in a rather roundabout fashion, you read. Behold:

...this Biennial is remarkably free of forced ideas, despite an occasional appeal to ecological virtue. It is full of busy ingenuities that smack of art school—but of art-school studios, not seminars. Two decades of academic postmodernizing have trailed off into embarrassed silence...

There isn’t a lot in the show to like very much, but the over-all tenor puts me in mind of the “aridity” that, according to another exigent author, John of the Cross, is a key stage in the “dark night of the soul,” preceding redemption. Even if little comes of it, the drama of this state—a sort of exasperated modesty—will etch the 2008 Biennial in memory...

Sharply surprising is the inclusion of taciturn paintings of benumbingly ordinary suburban streets by the finest of the first-generation photo-realists, Robert Bechtle, whose style has hardly varied in more than forty years. But take their philosophical measure: a stony refusal to believe that we ever know what we see, put to a test of things—dull houses, parked cars—that seem too obvious to merit even passing attention. Like a struck tuning fork, Bechtle’s skepticism finds harmonic vibrations in works by young artists of otherwise unrelated sorts....

And so forth. How can you not want to see this thing? And how could it possibly live up, in your mind, to these lush descriptions and insights?

The Whitney Biennial runs from March 6 through June 1 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue. Admission is $15, with pay-what-you-wish admission from 6-9pm on Fridays. (From March 6 to March 23, the Biennial will extend to the Park Avenue Armory [at 67th Street] with further installations; admission free.) The Biennial's website is here; and the Whitney's, uh, Facebook page is here.