Whitney Biennial Review: A New Perspective on Art History

• Published in: New York (1968) 2019-05
• Main Author: Saltz, Jerry
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Artists; Levine, Sherrie; Museums
• ISSN: 0028-7369

[...]sometimes a whole room fizzles. [...]all the formal echoes of Rauschenberg and the dematerializing of the art object of post-minimalist sculpture; Jessica Stockholder and Cady Noland’s notions of object-based installation; and numerous references to Pictures artists like Gretchen Bender, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman. The culminating point and metaphorical backdrop of the whole show is the Forensic Architecture collective’s devastating video incrimination of Warren B. Kanders, the Whitney’s own vice-chairman and the owner of Defense Technology — a huge company that manufactures combat direction systems, chemical munitions, open-tip bullets, and tear gas (the last of which was fired at immigrants crossing the California border at Tijuana on November 25, 2018). [...]you need look only at the Museum of Modern Art’s board to find it filled with corporate raiders, billionaires, a stock big shot whom the U.S. government found guilty of insider trading and fined $1.8 billion, a Sotheby’s senior vice-president (hello, conflict of interest), another investor guilty of selling more than $600 million in stock before the company went bankrupt, a real-estate titan who has continually sold the museum short on building deals, and others who extract fortunes from fossil fuels, oil and gas fields, pharmaceuticals, gentrifying real-estate developers, and investment and wealth-management firms, mutual funds, and hedge funds (including Lehman Brothers) that led directly to the worldwide financial collapse of 2008.