New Year’s Wants, with a Nod to William Blake

Hoping for the best at two biennial shows, and will your art critic get to the new Grand Egyptian Museum?

‘I want, I want” is William Blake’s 1793 philosophical cartoon showing a child reaching the moon not via a spaceship but a ladder. T. S. Eliot said Blake’s engraving, the size of a playing card, “exhibits the essential sickness or strength of the human soul” in a way children and adults alike can fathom.

What do I want for 2026? Not a trip to the moon, I guarantee you. And “I want” seems very demanding, the English translation of my cat’s plaintive mews five minutes after her usual dinner time. Gravy trainers of all faiths, colors, creeds, and foreign origins use “gimme, gimme, gimme.” Polite and subtle as I am, I’d prefer “I’d like,” but some things I just want, and I want ’em now.

If I’m going to be on my feet in a museum for half a day, reading a hundred labels, I want to see fresh, edgy art and learn something. I want a 2026 Whitney Biennial that’s less about cant and more about quality. Last week, I read about the Whitney Museum of American Art’s just-announced roster of artists picked for its 82nd Biennial, opening on March 8. The Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey show of American contemporary art. The 2026 show’s theme is “The Strangeness of Our Times,” a tip of the hand to its vacuity. All times are strange. It’s a survey show in that it surveys the blinkered, juiceless concerns of the Manhattan curatorial class.

A third of the artists say they’re queer. Half work either in New York or in California. A hefty, inexcusable 25 percent don’t live full-time in the United States. Isn’t the Biennial an American art show? The Whitney tells us the artists are, collectively, from 25 states. I count twelve, among them Waawiyatanong, once called Detroit, in Michigan; the Navajo Nation; the Caddo Nation; and then there’s Hawaii, New Mexico, and Washington State. Tania Cruz is from New Haven, Connecticut, the city of my birth. Her work redefines black womanhood. No Appalachia, no Texas, no Kansas City, where everything might not be as “strange” as the show’s curators think, but it’s the center of the country, and 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the country.

Artist Ash Arder is “motivated by the potential of empathy, curiosity, wonder, and play to slow the devastating effects of climate change.” Erin Jane Nelson explores the climate crisis “from a feminist perspective.” Two-thirds of the artists are under 45, one problem demographic after another. The matriarchy is so in, the patriarchy so out.

The group selected for the Biennial “examines,” its press statement says, “various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports.” I want jargon banished from the Whitney in 2026 — and everywhere else, in perpetuity, if I’m allowed to be greedy. I’ll start by tweaking the Whitney’s press release for clarity.

Taking the museum’s statement as an inscrutable draft, how about: “Looks at connections, sadly fractured, between lonely, awkward Millennials and their families who’ve discovered their preferred lifetime loves are fur babies or AI sex bots”? Geopolitical entanglements? Too vague. Let’s try: “We’re codependent with Zionists, whom we hate along with anti-Semitic Jews, who are useful idiots but still Jews, and we’re entangled with Palestinians, too, whom we adore — who doesn’t dream of a free Palestine, except the Jews — but might not they toss the third of us who are queer off the tallest building in Gaza? Thankfully, Gaza’s flattened, but still, the angst and complexity!” Two of the Biennial artists are Palestinians, so I’m sure they’ll give us the skinny.

Technological affinities? I’m low-tech. I doubt it means driving a standard shift. I doubt it means craftsmanship, mystery, and elasticity, either. Nothing says “shared mythologies” better than climate psychosis. Infrastructural supports? That’s just painting “Black Lives Matter” on a crosswalk and believing it’s great art.

Drew Sawyer, the Whitney photography curator, and Marcela Guerrero, the Latino art curator, did 300 studio visits, but they knew what they wanted and where they were going. Since this is America 250, I would have picked two or three artists from each of the 50 states chosen to reflect the abundance and breadth of American creativity. Go back to the drawing board, aim for a 50-state roster, ditch the foreigners, and see what you’ll find. And no climate art, please. It’s based on a scam and a fairy tale.

“I want, I want.” I want Benjamin Moore and Pantone to agree on a 2026 Color of the Year, or at least on hue, luminance, and saturation, or at the very least two of the three. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Benjamin Moore’s choice, called Silhouette, a mix of burnt umber and charcoal. It’s moody and has some violet in it, but it isn’t schizophrenic. I think it’s manly and Victorian.

Pantone’s Cloud Dancer “offers a promise of clarity,” the Pantone Color Institute tells us, “a conscious statement of simplification” given today’s polarization and hot tempers. I can’t say they’re wrong, and I respect the study of color. “Pantone’s Color of the Year Sounds About White,” read one art news headline. Cloud Dancer is indeed white, and it’s the first time Pantone’s picked white. It’s easy for nitwits to believe race explains everything, so poor Pantone got tagged as a macro-aggressor and had to insist race actually had nothing to do with its choice. Last year, for example, Pantone picked Mocha Mousse. White’s the color of clean, puffy clouds, wedding dresses, and vanilla ice cream, all good things, but, as far as a setting for art, nothing looks good on a white wall except Jackson Pollock.

I tried “I Want, I Want” against both Silhouette and Cloud Dancer, and neither suited, a bad sign since Blake tends to endure all colors. Our brilliant designer set Blake against Pantone’s Viva Magenta, its 2023 Color of the Year. It’s festive. It’s brave and fearless, too, good for a scene depicting a child reaching for the moon with a ladder.

Benjamin Moore sells paint, so its colors aim at room decoration. Pantone’s colors affect makeup, flower arrangements, fashion, and advertising, as well as what to paint the parlor. Both go for zeitgeists, too. In picking Silhouette and Cloud Dancer, these companies have predicted two very different moods. Alas, mixing the two makes for boring beige.

“I want, I want.” I’m greedier and more demanding than I thought. Even after checking under the sofa cushions, I think I was still only in the one-octillionth range of the £22.9 million a lucky buyer paid for the Fabergé “Winter Egg.” That’s the piece from 1913 carved from rock crystal, packed with 4,500 diamonds, and seasoned with platinum, garnets, gold moss, and moonstone. It got the highest price ever paid for a Fabergé egg. Tsar Nicholas II commissioned it for his mother. I saw it in “Fabergé: From Romance to Revolution” at the Victoria & Albert Museum a few years ago and think about it as often as our dog thinks of food. It’s a little under six inches tall and proves that the best things come in small packages. Of all the hundreds, if not thousands, of things I’ve seen on the art market this year, that’s one I’d sell my grandmother’s rocking chair to buy.

I write about historic art sales like Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer from the mid-teens, which sold at Sotheby’s early this month for $236.4 million, the most ever paid at auction for a work of modern art. It’s a splashy thing, and I tend to like precious, intimate things (in part because we live in a farmhouse in Vermont with lots of bookshelves and limited wall space), though there’s always room for more art. I can dream, can’t I? Félix Bracquemond (1833–1914) exhibited in the first Impressionist salon in 1874 and was a superb printmaker, ceramics designer, and tastemaker and close friend of Whistler and Manet. His 1864 pastel portrait of Manet (1832–1883), which I saw at Agnew’s booth at the European Fine Art Fair, shows the young genius happy, serene, really, a flâneur mensch. I loved it.

I don’t feel I can demand anything from either Alma Allen (b. 1970), the artist representing the U.S. at the Venice Biennale starting in late April, or from the American Arts Conservancy (AAC), the sponsor of the American pavilion at the Venice show. I never heard of either, which is not extraordinary, as there are lots of artists and organizations I don’t know. That said, I’d at least heard of all of them but one going back to the 1960s, when educated Americans had a decent awareness of our mainstream contemporary art. Allen is an abstract sculptor from Utah living now in Mexico.

AAC is a new organization. Its executive director and founder, Tampa-based Jenni Parido, owned a pet food supply business before starting AAC, which was launched just this year. Over the years, the State Department gave whichever group was handling the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale — AAC this year — $350,000. The deeply boring Simone Leigh pavilion in 2022 and Martin Puryear pavilion in 2024 cost, I’m told, more than $4 million. The Biennale artist’s dealer often leads the fundraising charge, but Allen’s dealer canned him after his selection. I don’t know why. I also don’t know anything about AAC’s fundraising model. I don’t know where millions in unspent National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute for Museum and Library Services dollars are going. Is some of it going to the American pavilion? Who’s selling Allen’s work now that he doesn’t have a dealer?

Allen — no relation, though the Mormons adopt us all post-death — seems like a very good artist, but I’m not sure why or how he best represents the country, especially during America 250. I would have preferred a group exhibition showcasing American artists from different parts of the country working in different styles and media. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to seeing Allen’s pavilion. My mind’s open.

“I want, I want” in the worst way to visit the new Grand Egyptian Museum, just opened after 30 years of planning, construction, and delays due to war, terrorism fears, COVID, the Arab Spring, and just being Egyptian. It’s located by the Pyramids of Giza and displays nearly all the art found in King Tut’s tomb. I visited Cairo once, in 1979, as a college graduation present from my parents, but didn’t know much of anything then.

I got to Luxor the day the freshly dethroned Shah did, flying direct as he did from Tehran to meet President Anwar Sadat and former President Gerald Ford, dispatched there by the earnest, naive, hubristic flop Jimmy Carter. All foreigners were evacuated from Luxor. Indiscriminately assigned a seat on the first plane to Cairo, I sat in first class, which was new to me.

I saw the King Tut exhibition at the Met in the mid-1970s and experienced more of Tut in Cairo on my graduation trip, but the Grand Egyptian Museum is the museum project of the decade. I’ve got some nickels, dimes, quarters, and euros — a fake currency, I know — I found under the couch, and thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, my Social Security is mostly tax-free. Grandma’s rocking chair might bring $100. To misquote Scarlett O’Hara, “as God is my eyewitness, I’ll get to see Tut’s treasures again.”